Dexter is a show I’ve watched extremely sporadically over the years, in part because I have a relatively low bar for being frightened and upset by horror tropes, in part because my experiences with it have suggested that the supporting players are much weaker than the main characters, and in part because it’s often carried an unmistakable whiff of cheese about it. But I’m tuning in this season, both as a spur to myself to get completely caught up, and because I think the show is doing something interesting in the larger context of prestige television. When Deb (Jennifer Carpenter) discovered her adoptive brother Dexter (Michael C. Hall) sticking a rather large knife in an extremely bad man last season, the show put her in the position of a television viewer who suddenly has the panel of glass the separates us from the anti-heroes we’ve consumed so avidly and has to reckon directly with both the consequences of the denial and exercises and moral flexibility that let us like these very bad men from afar.

I’ve written frequently before that anti-hero shows have been able to establish such a powerful foothold in American popular culture because, in a more rigorous way than we normally mean it, they are a guilty pleasure, a harmless way to allow us to experiment with moral flexibility and a sense of amoral sophistication. The term anti-hero’s been stretched beyond meaningfulness, as Salon’s Willa Paskin pointed out in our Bloggingheads episode, but it’s to its strict definition that I want to apply this argument: an anti-hero is someone we root for even though we shouldn’t, often who does bad things with such elan that we mistake the former for virtue, competence outweighing evil. In Walter White, at least for a time (and some viewers think this way), we can toy with admiring genius for its technical perfection rather than its awful ends. Omar Little’s shotgun, cheerful whistle, and way with a courtroom bon mot are an argument in favor of outlawry rather than, as the case with many other characters in The Wire, a sense of waste that the man isn’t turning his talent to other ends. Tony Soprano lets us turn the sport of judging our neighbors and NIMBYism into melodrama: would we begrudge the man his criminality if he kept the lawn trim, his children in school, a local restaurant alive, and kept the blood far away from our property lines? There’s no denying that these thought experiments are hugely engaging, but part of why they’re fun comes from a sense of transgression, a curiousness about whether the show will resolve these questions in a morally satisfying way and bring us along with them.

In Dexter, both his technical genius and the things about him we fight so disturbing are heightened even beyond these examples: in last season’s finale, Dexter managed to do right by threatened undocumented immigrants, rescue his young son, and dispatch Travis, his nemesis of the season. And Dexter is, of all the prominent anti-hero characters, probably the one it would be most unnerving for us to actually have to confront. Omar doesn’t turn his gun on civilians, and shares some of our moral disgust at both criminals and the infrastructure that supports them. Tony Soprano is genuinely invested in certain aspects of American family life. Walter White may be far down the road to monstrosity, but he was once a recognizable figure, and he remains capable of trying for kindness and generosity with the people whose affection he genuinely wants to possess. Dexter is, on a fundamental level, not like us. And while none of us watching at home have to directly confront Omar Little, Walter White, or Tony Soprano and live with the consequences of their disregard for our rights, Deb has to do that directly with Dexter, and I think it’s going to be fascinating to watch.

Unlike Carmela Soprano, who married Tony Soprano knowing who he was, or Skyler White, who came to terms with who her husband was in bits and pieces, Deb has her confrontation with Dexter mid-murder, in total contravention to who she understood Dexter to be. Deb acted like most of us would behave if we were confronted with the reality of someone like Dexter: horror, evasion, and ultimately, clarity. The question will be how she does something none of us at home are burdened with having to consider: taking action, reckoning with her own blindness and her own deep love. That’s a surprisingly old-fashioned moral direction for the show to take, and it’s a surprisingly exciting one.

For more on Dexter, Homeland, Lost Resort and more, here’s the latest edition of A Movie and An Argument With Alyssa and Swin, my podcast with Mother Jones’ critic Asawin Suebsaeng.

Salon’s TV critic Willa Paskin is one of my favorite people to read, and one of the people I turn to whenever I need to make an idea sharper. We got together to discuss the new television season in a conversation that spiraled from how depressed we are by the new fall comedies, to what Homeland, Gone Girl, and We Need To Talk About Kevin have to do with each other:

There are two parts of the conversation that I think are going to be particularly important to my work going forward. First, is a conversation we had about the relationship of story structure to comedy and drama, which has really reshaped a lot of my thinking about how television works. Then, in the latter half of the conversation, Willa offers what I think is a brilliant riff on how our understanding of anti-heroes has gone off the rails that clarified what I want to I write about gender and difficult women on television. In any case, I was grateful to have had this conversation and I hope y’all enjoy it.

This post contains spoilers for Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

I read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a novel about a woman in a troubled marriage who goes missing, in a single sitting on Monday, and while I raced compulsively through the book, I was left with a rather empty feeling at the end. I hunger for stories about difficult women, sometimes even dangerous ones, and so I felt I should have loved Gone Girl‘s central twist, that Amy was not, in fact, a victim, but a psychopath who framed her husband for her disappearance. But instead, I was annoyed by the expectation that the twist itself was enough for me, that we’re still at a point where suggesting that a woman is a psychopath, or a killer, or even a bad wife or mother was supposed to be surprising and daring. Just as the anti-heroes of the last decade of great television tell us something about suburban denial, the difficulty of being a self-made man in the drug trade, or the costs of toxic masculinity, I wanted Gone Girl to tell me something else about marriage, or the Midwest, or being a woman than I felt like it actually did.

In Gone Girl, the revelation that Amy is not the Cool Girl she pretended to be, but rather, dangerously amoral and manipulative, is what brings Amy and Nick back together. “I couldn’t return to an average life,” Nick concedes to himself. “I’d known it before she’d said a word. I’d already pictured myself with a regular woman— a sweet, normal girl next door— and I’d already pictured telling this regular woman the story of Amy, the lengths she had gone to— to punish me and to return to me. I already pictured this sweet and mediocre girl saying something uninteresting like Oh, nooooo, oh my God, and I already knew part of me would be looking at her and thinking: You’ve never murdered for me. You’ve never framed me.” For Amy, it’s realizing that Nick is her perfect victim, someone who has truly wronged her, but also, who is too afraid of becoming his father to be much of a person at all. “I am a little too much, and he is a little too little,” she thinks. “I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.”

Her psychopathy is the point. It doesn’t reveal anything else. The novel doesn’t really explore whether Rand and Marybeth, her parents, actually raised or exploited Amy in a way that contributed to her mental state. It’s not an expression of contempt for the world, as is Kevin’s boredom and suspicion of anyone who shows passion for an idea or activity in We Need to Talk about Kevin. And it’s not really an attempt to elicit a reaction from someone, the reason way Jo Gage (an incredibly scary Martha Plimpton), the daughter of a criminal profiler, becomes a serial killer in Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Whether you find the uses of psychopathy—to compel the attention of an absent father, or to provide a situation so extreme that a mother who failed to bond with her son finally experiences maternal instincts—in either of those works compelling, the revelation of psychopathy isn’t where either story ends.

“Blind Spot,” the Criminal Intent episode that features Jo Gage, functions in much the same way as Gone Girl. In both the novel and the television episode, the assumption through much of each is that the person who kidnapped Amy or who is torturing and murdering women must be a man. In Gone Girl, the question is whether Nick kidnapped or murdered his wife, and if he didn’t, whether an ex-boyfriend Amy accused of rape, a high school ex who was obsessed with her, or an impulsive girl who Amy accused of stalking her is guilty. And in “Blind Spot,” for much of the episode, Robert Goren assumes that the person torturing and murdering women is either an old serial killer who has resurfaced, or a male copycat killer, despite the fact that the new victims have been sexually violated but don’t have semen on their bodies, like the old victims did. And in both cases, the dynamic of the narrative radically changes when it becomes clear that the narrative of Amy’s that we’ve been reading is a fabrication, that Jo, initially treated as if she’s a victim (she was the roommate of one of the women killed), is, in fact, the killer the police have been seeking all along.
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I always feel a bit stifled by Boardwalk Empire, though the show can achieve moments of emotional transcendence, like Richard Harrow’s attempted suicide last season, or Jimmy Darmody’s march to his execution. But this trailer gets at something intriguing that I’ve been thinking about in the context of anti-hero shows:

Much of the time, shows like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad experiment with how far characters can transgress while we still like them, or before the universe that they operate in demands that they be punished. But it’s another thing to ask how violent someone can get and still retain the humanity and respect for other people’s rights necessary to function on a day-to-day basis. Tony could kill someone and go on with Meadow’s college tour, but Walter White’s murder of Gus Fring seems to have broken down some of the things that moored him in his place. Of course, Tony was raised to integrate violence into his life along with other social norms and into his conception of being a man, while for Walter, it’s a rather new, and more volatile, discovery. In Nucky’s case, the question will also become how much violence a political system, as well as a home, can handle before the person who commits it can no longer be accommodated in polite company.

This post contains spoilers through the August 19 episode of Breaking Bad.

It says a lot about how frightening Breaking Bad can be that as Walt, Mike and Todd prepared to dispose of the dirt bike of the child Todd murdered at the end of last week’s episode, I became increasingly anxious to not see Jesse among their number. As the minutes ticked by, I found myself typing “Where’s Jesse?” and then more urgently, “Where the fuck is Jesse?” My anxiety had a happier answer than D’Angelo Barksdale’s queries. But as Breaking Bad nears its conclusion, it was an emotional reminder that anyone seems to be fair game in this fascinating, terrifying television show.

It was a fitting key in which to begin an episode that helped me pinpoint part of what I find so heartbreaking about Jesse. I have a weakness for characters who are trying hard to abide by social norms to be decent to people, but who end up failing or embarrassing themselves. When Herc asks out Beadie in the second season of The Wire, the worst part isn’t even her rejection of him—it’s Carver cracking on him for trying to be polite and classy. Last night it was agonizing to watch Jesse, stuck acting as a buffer between Mrs. and Mrs. White, try to turn a miserable situation into decent conversation, fail utterly both because the Whites are at war with each other, and because he lacks the resources to draw Skyler in.

“I like how you’ve got the slivered almonds going,” he tells her, the phrasing and the contents of the complement fitting awkwardly together. When she tells him that “They are from the deli at Albertsons,” her refusal to cook a gesture of contempt for Walt, Jesse keeps trying, insisting, “Well good work on your shopping then, because these are choice.” As he stumbles forward, the gap between his conversational aspirations and the emotional vocabulary he’s acquired becomes even more obvious, even as Jesse ends up articulating a painful truth about the confines of the life he’s cobbled together for himself. “I eat a lot of frozen stuff. It’s usually pretty bad,” he tells Skyler, who has no intention of engaging with him. “But the pictures are so awesome. it’s like, hell yeah, I’m starved for this lasagna. And then you nuke it, and the cheese gets all scabby on top, and it’s like you’re eating a scab. And seriously, what’s that about. It’s like, yo, whatever happened to truth in advertising? Yeah, it’s bad.”
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If we hadn’t already heard that Joss Whedon will be writing and directing The Avengers and returning to television with a Marvel series, this would be by far the most exciting pop culture news of the week: BBC America is apparently considering a spin-off show that would feature Alice Morgan:

There’s a school of thought that says crazy-quirky supporting characters aren’t as appealing when they’re thrust into the center of the action, but I’m willing to bet against conventional wisdom if BBC America greenlights a Luther spinoff centered around brilliant sociopath Alice Morgan (played to delectable perfection by Ruth Wilson). “The BBC is very interested in the project,” Luther creator and exec producer Neil Cross told Variety. “The only real question would be how many and how often we would do it — whether it would be a one-off miniseries or a returning miniseries, a co-production or not.” “Even if I didn’t sell this thing, I would still end up writing the miniseries,” Cross went on to say. “It’s something peculiar, but she’s far more clever than me, far more witty than me, far more everything than me.”

That’s a fantastic idea, and not only for those of us who are anticipating the withdrawal when Cross finishes his last miniseries installment about troubled detective John Luther (Idris Elba). Morgan, as portrayed by Ruth Wilson (who resembles an evil Emma Stone), is a powerful, original television character, a genius who killed her parents and when Luther figured her out, made him her moral lodestar, the only person she felt any emotional attachment to, and the only person who she recognized as having valid desires and needs other than her own.

As I’ve written before, in the great anti-hero shows of our era women, often wives, serve the audience-alienating role of reminding both us and the anti-heroes themselves that their anti-social behavior is less awe-inspiring and badass than it is a gross violation of community norms and often, other people’s rights. Even a female anti-hero like Patty Hewes does grotesquely awful things to other people does so in the name of a clearly-articulated greater good, and sometimes feels bad about it, as in that repeated scene of her shaking violent in the chair at her beach house in the first season. And while Aspergerian nerd Sheldon Cooper is one of the biggest characters on television, on Bones, Temperance Brennan’s confusion about social cues has been muted over the years. We like, or television thinks we like, to like our female characters uncomplicatedly, rather than transgressively.

Alice Morgan fits none of those models. It’s not that she doesn’t understand other people’s values and feelings—she just doesn’t particularly care about them. She’s ingeniously violent in service of her own interest, unlike Brennan’s use of her abilities to solve crimes and ease the pain of the bereaved, or Patty’s manipulativeness in service of her clients. And her sexual heat with Luther is unapologetically freighted, manipulative even as it stems from perhaps the only sincere affection Alice’s ever felt in her life.

TVLine suggested that a show build around Alice might follow a Dexter-like format, where Alice struggles to maintain a code that helps her pass as a decent person, while channeling the impulses she’s unable to repress. That makes sense, although I think there’s an important inverse. In that show, Dexter learned that some of the impulses and behaviors he’d been faking actually had meaning to him. A show built around Alice that intersected with a thoughtful consideration of gender could let her have some of those experiences, and also expose some of the uglier motivations behind the expectations that women be nice, and primarily oriented towards the needs of others. Anti-heroes have primarily been used to expose the flexibility of our own morality, our ability to attach to a corrupt cop or a family mobster. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be used to reveal the rot in what we cling to, as well as what we’re eager to let go.

I’ve written in the past about the challenges in putting female anti-heroes on television: if they behave decisively and malignantly, they don’t get the credit male anti-heroes do for conforming to gender norms, and if they are weak, or indecisive, or self-obsessed, they’re treated as if they’re distasteful rather than admirable. But another challenge in getting more female anti-heroes on screen is getting networks to try to make them, rather than simply the cable channels that have made their reputations on male anti-heroes.

I think the creators of The Mob Doctor, a drama which stars Jordana Spiro as a surgeon who does medical favors for the Chicago mob to pay the debt she incurred to get her brother out of trouble, are setting up impossible expectations when they suggest that the show will be “ER meets the Sopranos,” as Rob Wright did on Monday. But I think Josh Berman, Wright’s co-creator is on to something, when he talks about the long arc it takes to build a female anti-hero on a network, where viewers will have to build a long investment in Dr. Grace Devlin before they begin following her through the development process that will turn her from a woman stuck doing bad things in difficult circumstances to a genuine anti-hero who embraces stepping over a carefully calibrated moral line.

“We’ve really mapped out her character, and we want it to feel very organic,” Berman said. “And we want to take a woman who never thought this was going to be her life and slowly watch her transform into someone she maybe didn’t think she would become, but is quite confident and happy with who she is. And we’re going to do that slowly. You know, we have milestones over the first season…So hopefully we can deliver on that.”

This strikes me as an astute insight. Viewers of cable shows have become conditioned to come to new programming ready to identify with or root for someone who behaves badly or aberrantly. Within the first episode, we expect to see the contradictions of Tony Soprano as a mobster and family man, Al Swearengen as a tyrant and a man of sympathy to sex workers, Walter White as chemistry teacher and meth genius, Lena Dunham as vain, lazy striver and as cuttingly observant friend. On networks, viewers expect to be introduced to characters who are, with slight variations, straightforwardly worthy of a rooting interest without serious moral complication. Even when a character like Dr. House arrives as a cantankerous jerk, it took a while for House to make him uncomfortably transgressive—his wounds were always obvious enough to provide a psychological backgrounder on his orneriness.

I’m not sure The Mob Doctor is going to be the show that executes this premise successfully, based on the pilot. I like star Jordana Spiro, especially from her tenure on My Boys, where she played a Chicago sports reporter, but there’s a fair bit of melodrama and silliness going on around her. But I think Berman is laying out an important formula, one that if we want richer, more complex women on television, it would be wise to keep in mind that we have to strap in for the long haul.

I’ve written many, many posts about what it means that we’re obsessed with television’s anti-heroes, the archetype that’s dominated and defined the medium’s decade-long rise to serious critical acceptance and analysis. Whether it’s a demonstration—and test—of our moral flexibility, as in The Sopranos, an exploration of what our obsession with an archetype means when taken to its logical conclusion like The Shield, or a tool for illustrating what our political preconceptions blind us to, as in The Wire, there are good reasons to be fascinated with men from Tony Soprano to Walter White. But those good reasons also mean that women have been locked out of the rise of television, whether because we’re uncomfortable seeing women behave as pathologically and methodically as men, as with Patty Hewes on Damages, or because while we find active male anti-heroism fascinated, we’re repulsed by the feminized version of inactive, self-undermining indecisiveness, as some viewers were with Girls.

So yesterday in Slate, I wrote about a lesser-explored figure in the anti-hero universe: the anti-hero’s wife. Specifically Breaking Bad‘s Skyler White, and why people hate her so much:

I think Skyler sees Walt as we’re meant to see him: a self-deluding, pathetic man, but a dangerous one. She punctures the fantasy that there’s anything admirable left about Walter White, that we should still root for the man who fought back against illness and emasculation with a pork pie hat and chemistry. But even if Skyler has a moral clarity that those of us who want to identify with Walt as a badass would like to deny, she can’t easily act on it. She has an infant daughter and an ill son to protect, and her husband is a man who boasts of killing legends, who’s used physical force to establish his dominance over her before. It’s hard enough for women who aren’t married to evil geniuses to leave abusive relationships. Skyler is attempting to negotiate a livable existence for herself in highly unusual circumstances. And her steel is hardening every day.

Women in anti-hero shows may be voices of morality, but they’re also cast, to a certain extent, as spoil-sports. It’s Claudette Wyms who’s a constant reminder that there’s nothing cute or charming about Vic Mackey’s behavior, even as he makes busts and acts as catnip for an endless string of babe. In Sons of Anarchy, part of the tragedy of Tara’s experience is the capture of her independent voice by SAMCRO—in smashing her repaired hand and giving up her career as a surgeon, she’s also relinquishing her chance to act as a reminder to Jax of the other life he could be having. This is a critically important role, but it’s one that makes some people itchy and irritated because it’s not fun, it’s a reminder that you’re indulging, maybe even falling prey to something ugly and unpleasant that you wish you could just enjoy.

Deadwood‘s one of the few prestige shows where the women get to be at least as fun as the men, and where male brutality is presented as ugly rather than witty. Watching Cy bully Joanie is never fun—her depression is more sympathetic than his violent need for control. Francis Wolcott’s compulsions aren’t some Dexter-ian fascination: they’re vicious and pathetic. When he’s confronted, Hearst doesn’t marvel at Wolcott’s evil, he’s disgusted. The show doesn’t pull us into a romance with a bad person and then make a woman do the work of puncturing our fascination with him.

“For the first time in my life, when confronted with a horrible, insensitive person, I knew exactly what I wanted to say and I said it,” bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly exults in You’ve Got Mail, when she finally delivers the perfect zinger to Joe Fox, the chain store mogul who is putting her out of business. In Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Evelyn, the unhappy housewife who’s kept silent her entire life, finally finds her words after an obnoxious teenager steals her parking space and tells her “Let’s face it, lady, I’m younger and faster than you are,” totaling the younger woman’s car, and declaring “Let’s face it, honey, I’m older than you are and have more insurance than you do.” It’s a very specifically female dream, I think, to be able to deliver an cutting line, to express yourself and your anger perfectly, without censoring yourself in the name of politeness, or fear. And it’s a dream that Political Animals, the USA Network’s new miniseries, which started last night running against Breaking Bad, expresses perfectly.

As I explained in The Atlantic, Elaine Barrish, the show’s stand-in for Hillary Clinton as a former First Lady turned Secretary of State:

Is brilliant and competent, and one of the pleasures of the show comes from seeing her as a version of Hillary Clinton who is tougher on her Bill (here called Bud, and played with a thick coat of oil by Ciaran Hinds) than in real life. “I know, given your epic levels of narcissism, that it’s impossible for you to fathom this loss has nothing to do with you, but imagine for a moment that it doesn’t,” Elaine tells the husband she’s about to kick to the curb in the pilot episode, after she concedes her run for the presidency. “The country loves you, Bud. They will always love you. It’s me they have mixed feelings about.”

Greg Berlanti, who created the series, gives Weaver lots of juicy lines with which to zing the powerful, entitled men who make her life more difficult—it’s a terrific fantasy of having exactly the right words precisely in the moment that you need them. After Victor, the Russian ambassador, cops a feel while she’s giving a speech, Elaine remains composed. But in the hallway afterwards, she confronts him. “Did you enjoy the ass-grab, Victor? Good, because the next time you touch me, I’m going to rip off your tiny shriveled balls and serve them to you in a cold borscht soup,” she tells him, before switching into Russian to inform him “I will fuck your shit up. Do you hear me?”

A lot of the time, fantasies about strong women turn strong into invulnerable. As much as it can be fun to see Angelina Jolie kick ass, her lipstick perfect even as she rappels down a building, that requirement that female heroes have no flaws or weaknesses except those that can provide a few brooding, Bond-like shots per movie or television season, creates problems for how we talk about strong women on television. On The Newsroom, MacKenzie McHale isn’t grating because she has vulnerabilities, but because she seems to lack capabilities: we see only hysteria, not her ability to work through it, to procure a source, to effectively fire Will up. By contrast, Elaine has a deep attachment to the man she was married to for thirty years, but she works through those feelings as opposed to being ruled by them.

The requirement to be perfect, impregnably principled, unswayed by those who’ve done you wrong, is exhausting. And it’s narratively uninteresting. As I wrote in Slate:

In the second episode, there’s a flashback to Elaine and Bud’s time in the White House that acts as the corrollary to the questions Susan asks of Elain. Bud says to his wife, “You should leave me. I’ll cheat again. And I’ll lie again. And I’ll break your heart again. Retain Stacy Phillips. You have to come out of this looking good. You get no flack from me, Elaine.” But she stays until the moment, impossible to explain or justify to anyone, where she’s finally had enough.

As much as I wish I could save myself some heartache, there is no clear answer as to how Hillary and Elaine ended up with Bill and Bud, why Hillary stayed, and why in Political Animals, Elaine left. Hillary and Elaine are reminders that strength and brilliance won’t save us from complexity, confusion, error and pain. Instead, they’re tools to use to work through the most difficult decisions of our lives.

I don’t want to pretend it’s easy or clear to walk away from a man you were married to for thirty years no matter how he hurt you, or that work-life balance is simple. I don’t want my heroines, my strong women, to be without weakness and vulnerabilities. I want to see them possessed of the self-awareness to recognize those points in themselves, and the capacities to grapple with them. If men are allowed to fall into error around power and violence and remain fascinating anti-heroes, women should have room to do the same about love and family as well. It’s not the site of your weakness that makes you a rich and serious character. It’s how you deal with the dark places in your heart.

In our age of anti-heroes and fabulous villains, niceness has often fallen along the wayside as an embodiment of dull virtue, evidence of a distasteful unwillingness to commit to strong emotion or decisive action. It’s no mistake that Steve Carrell’s emerged as a surprisingly significant movie star during this past decade. He’s the one person who can get away with making nice interesting, the end goal of hard-fought battles for control in a world that often takes advantage of or mocks decency. And Carell’s rarely used his core strength to better effect than in Seeking a Friend For the End of the World, a lovely, emotionally precise apocalypse romantic comedy that seems at unfortunate risk of being drowned out by this summer’s louder, cruder entertainments.

Seeking a Friend begins with a news announcement that immediately sets it apart from other movies about the potential end times: “The final mission to save mankind has failed.” Upon hearing that awful pronouncement, Dodge’s (Carell) wife Linda bolts from the car they’ve pulled over to the side of the road to hear the radio report on a last-ditch effort to divert an asteriod that’s headed towards earth with cataclysmic consequences. She, as it turns out with, wants to spend her final month on earth with someone other than her husband.

But Dodge wasn’t harboring a secret yearning—unlike the other guests at a dinner party thrown by his unhappily married friends, a very funny Connie Britton and Rob Corddry, he doesn’t want to have an orgy or try heroin—or an alternate plan. So he goes about his job as an insurance adjustor at an increasingly-depleted office, telling callers “Sorry, sir, I’m afraid that’s not covered under your current policy. Yes, the Armageddon package is extra,” and attending meetings where is boss lets the dwindling staff “know of a few positions in upper management that have become available. Anyone want to be Chief Financial Officer?”

It seems Dodge will continue to wind down the end of his life and everyone else’s with these small acts of decency—he adopts an abandoned dog as his sole act of adventure, and tries, unsuccessfully, to convince his housekeeper to spend more time with her family—until a neighbor he’s never spoken with breaks up with her boyfriend and ends up crying on his fire escape. The real source of her heartache, it turns out, is that she isn’t going to be able to spend her last days with her family. “I missed two planes,” Penny sobs. “I missed them all. The end of the world and I’m still fifteen minutes late.” Along with her woes, Penny brings Dodge’s undelivered mail, which includes a letter from a woman he loved and lost years ago, giving him sudden forward momentum. Penny has a car, and Dodge knows someone with a plane, and they strike a bargain: Penny will help Dodge find his old girlfriend, and he will help her make one last attempt to cross the Atlantic home to England.

What’s striking about their roadtrip is its warmth. When they’re arrested for speeding, another cop lets them out of jail in the morning with an apology and a plea for understanding: his colleague is reacting badly to the end times and trying to restore as much order to his universe as he can. Dodge and Penny stop by a Friendsy’s restaurant where the employees are hilariously, cultishly high and reveling, determined to satisfy as many customers as possible before they close forever. “Everyone’s welcome!” the host tells them. ” A dude brought in a wolf last week.” And they’re brought closer, and Dodge comes entirely out of his shell in an almost worldless sequence when he and Penny run across what appears to be a mass baptism on a gorgeous beach. The scene could have been played for sneers or rank sentiment, but instead, it’s a quiet testament to the power of connection. Who wouldn’t want to spend one last perfect day at the beach with someone they love before the world ends, surrounded by people who are eager to share the small bounties in their possession?

The fact that the end is inevitable liberates Seeking a Friend from the cliched, last-minute heroics that consume so many apocalypse movies. There’s nothing wrong with wanting the world to keep on turning, but those stories are in service of future love and kindness, rather than appreciating what you have. The movie gently pokes fun at that kind of planning when Dodge and Penny stop by to see one of Penny’s old boyfriends, a hyper-prepared survivalist who asks Dodge to convince Penny to stay in his bunker because “Can we restart society without her? Sure, but she deserves to be one of the top-quality females in contention.” Seeking a Friend is a movie about the people who aren’t really in contention, and about the fact that whether you can save the world or not, it’s possible to be the hero of your own life.