I was talking to a friend last week about director Nick Cassavetes’ defense of his new movie Yellow, which is about a brother and sister who have a love affair, at the Toronto Film Festival. “I’m not saying this is an absolute but in a way, if you’re not having kids – who gives a damn?” he told The Wrap. “Love who you want. Isn’t that what we say? Gay marriage – love who you want? If it’s your brother or sister it’s super-weird, but if you look at it, you’re not hurting anybody except every single person who freaks out because you’re in love with one another.” It’s not quite the attitude of the many, many other artists who have turned to incest recently to juice their television shows, seeking shock instead of Cassavetes’ plea for compassion. But it may be impossible for him to escape being lumped in with a larger trend: in Hollywood, incest is suddenly so wide-spread that it’s practically the new vampirism.

Over the last season of Dexter, the titular serial killer’s adoptive sister Debra Morgan (Jennifer Morgan) came to realize that she loved her brother—and not merely in a fraternal way. Her rush of romantic feeling for Dexter (Michael C. Hall) was rudely interrupted when, on her way to confess it to him, Deb found Dexter in the midst of killing his latest victim. In the season premiere of Dexter this Sunday, Dexter will try to manage Deb’s understanding of what she’s just seen. But I have to imagine that the possibility of being accepted and loved for who he really is, as opposed to for his ability to pretend to be a family man, as Dexter did with his wife Rita, could be powerfully appealing to Dexter. The breach of the incest taboo here may not be formally, because Dexter and Deb are not related by blood. But flirting with it is a way for Dexter, a show that’s made a serial killer its main character and hero, to contemplate leveling up to a new level of deviance.

Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones, by contrast, barreled right past playing with the idea of incest to show it happening. Last season on Boardwalk Empire, we learned that Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) and his mother Gillian (Gretchen Mol) had slept together, an incident that left lingering wounds in Jimmy’s psyche. This year, Gillian’s moved in on Jimmy’s son, claiming him as her own child rather than as her gradson. Her “I’m your mother now, remember?” has poison in its sickly sweetness, its reminder that Gillian has been constrained by the roles assigned to her by biology and societal expectation. Herself the victim of a boundary-crossing sexual assault that left her pregnant at 13, Gillian’s responded not by reinforcing rules and boundaries, but by becoming a predator herself.

Incest acts as a way to communicate Gillian’s monstrousness in Boardwalk Empire, and it begins that way in Game of Thrones, when Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) pushes a child out of a tower with the intent of killing him when that child discovers him having sex with his sister Cersei (Lena Headey), who also happens to be queen of Westeros. But substantial plot mechanics of the show and the books on which they’re based depend on that incestuous relationship. And in the novels, which are ahead of the books at this point, our perspectives on both of those characters shift such that we understand their incestuous relationship is at least in part a product of the substantial damage that’s been done to Jamie and Cersei by their rigid father, and by Cersei’s abusive husband. The incest story is shocking, but it’s to a purpose other than to produce a series of ephemeral, horrified gasps.

The L.A. Complex did something similar in its two-part season finale this year. This season, Connor Lake (Jonathan Patrick Moore), a troubled television star, got involved with the Church of Scienetics, a thinly-veiled version of the Church of Scientology, on the advice of his long-lost sister, a member of the faith. As they bonded, Connor told his sister that he loved her and felt close to her. And she responded by planting a not-so-sisterly kiss on him. When Connor panicked, so did she, and so did the Church, which shipped her off to a remote facility. The point was less to titillate us with the prospect of an incestuous relationship but to provide an event shocking enough that it could trigger the darkest practices of Scienetics.

There’s no question that incest storylines can be powerful and meaningful, but when this many shows are turning towards incest to juice their storytelling, it feels more like they’re piling on a trend that moving on the strength of their own speed. An obsession with incest comes at times when a lot of television shows don’t seem to know how to gin up sexual chemistry between their characters who are legal, consenting adults who aren’t related to each other. If you’re dipping into a well of deviance not because you have something to say about the trope you’re adopting, but because it’s simply a means to heighten an already tense environment, it’s time to reevaluate your storytelling values. Shock, disgust, and titillation aren’t the only ways to produce dramatic tension or release.

I’ve mentioned this on Twitter, though perhaps not on the blog: Asawin Suebsaeng, Mother Jones’ movie guy and I, are now doing a weekly podcast. Fittingly, because we spend a lot of time violently disagreeing, it’s called A Movie And An Argument With Alyssa and Swin. This week, because I was off Rosh Hashanah-ing rather than going to the critics’ screening of The Master, I’m offering up Swin’s disappointment as a placeholder for my feelings, which I will attempt to ascertain, along with my feelings about Dredd, this weekend. Also, for those of you who have been wondering how I feel about this season of Boardwalk Empire, details therein:

While watching the new fall television pilots and revisiting some old shows that are back this fall, I was struck by a worrisome conclusion. There are a lot of shows that have picked the wrong person to place at the center of their storytelling at the expense of much better characters, or that are treating people other than their true main characters as if they’re the main attraction for purpose of advertising. A bad offender on the latter score this fall is Last Resort, which is running print ads that make it appear as if Scott Speedman is the show’s star, rather than Andre Braugher, who dominates the pilot, for reasons you can probably do the math about. But while it’s one thing to start a show with the assumption that one character is the hook and to have others emerge, it’s a shame to watch a show spend seasons focused on the wrong people.

1. Boardwalk Empire: Now in its third season, Boardwalk Empire remains convinced that the best thing it has going for it is Nucky Thompson, who isn’t much more than a chance for Steve Buschemi to show off and wear great suits. But its strongest assets lie elsewhere. How fantastic would a version of Boardwalk Empire that focused on Chalky White and the rise of an East Coast black middle class and aristocracy be? What about Kelly Macdonald’s fantastic Margaret Schroeder, a woman who transformed her lot in life and now is determined to pay it forward through philanthropy, even if it means challenging a powerful head doctor at a hospital over the cause of maternal health? And then there’s Richard Harrow, mutilated in war, grieving the loss of Angela Darmody, one of the few people who ever understood him, and now raising her child with Gillian Darmody as a monstrous replacement mommy. But any chance the show had to be about soldiers returning from World War I appears to have died with Jimmy Darmody last season, replaced by the increasing presence of showy mobsters, and Boardwalk Empire is poorer for all its lost possibility.

2. How I Met Your Mother: I get it. This show is the story of how Ted met the mother of his children. But it’s also an illustration of the weaknesses of selling sitcoms, which are designed to go on forever, on premises that really only feel viable for a short time. Marshall and Lily’s split, reunion, and road to parenthood, experiment with suburbanization, and return to the city is the true big arc story of How I Met Your Mother. And I’m as sick of waiting for Ted to grow up as Ted is as waiting for the love of his life to show up.

3. Revolution: NBC’s new post-apocalyptic drama wants to capture the cachet of The Hunger Games so badly that it turned its main character, Charlie, into a person I refuse to call anything but Fake Katniss. She’s got a leather jacket, a bow, a penchant for woodsiness, but entirely lacks a personality. And Revolution has the same problem that The Hunger Games does: the world it’s set in and the events it explores means that what the knowing adults are up to is vastly more interesting as story material than watching kids run around. At least The Hunger Games‘ kids were relatively well-developed. Revolution doesn’t even have that going for it, and it’s particularly painful to see it focus on its CW-quality leads when Zack Orth’s former Google executive character’s been relegated to the wings, and assigned the task of providing Hurley-style quips.

4. New Girl: Watching the premiere episode of the second season of New Girl, I was struck by two things. First, Jess isn’t even close to the new girl in the apartment she shares with her male roommates anymore. And second, the show found its legs last year when it turned into an exploration of masculinity, rather than a celebration of Jess’s Manic Pixie grade school teacher. Jess isn’t a terrible character, and the show’s pokes fun at some of the whimsy-cures-everything attitude that was so gratingly front and center early in the show’s first season. But still, if it weren’t for all the branding that went into making New Girl a Zooey Deschanel vehicle that’s probably impossible to undo at this point, it would be nice to see the show recenter on the ensemble that makes it so strong.

5. Modern Family: ABC’s smash hit made waves in the offseason when production was delayed on new episodes because of a nasty contract dispute between the producers and the show’s adult stars. It’s too bad, because increasingly, they’re the least interesting part of the show. Mitch and Cam are a TV-sterilized sexless gay couple. Gloria’s a bombshell stereotype. Claire gets stuck with periods-make-ladies-crazy storylines. But the kids remain the most winning part of Modern Family. If the families involved had some more children, you could build an entire show about the dynamics of the siblings and cousins. And in a television environment where kids get to be props more than actual people, a program from the perspective of young people would be fascinating.

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.

President Obama, in his continuing quest to be both perfect parent and semi-hipster in his pop culture consumption habits, told People Magazine that his favorite television shows are Modern Family, Homeland, and Boardwalk Empire. Two of those three are about government (or the people who live in opposition to it), but all of these shows offer lessons for the man who holds the World’s Hardest job.

1. Drama never gets you anywhere (Modern Family): No Drama Obama’s alternately been praised for rising above Washington nonsense and pilloried for supposedly failing to fire up his base. But if there’s one thing ABC’s hit comedy preaches, it’s that getting all fired up generally isn’t worth it. Whether you’re freaking out on a bird in your living room, your overly-sexy, age-inappropriate step-mother, or letting Eric Cantor bait you, keeping your focus on your desired outcome rather than a perceived slight is the quickest route to getting what you want while expending minimal energy.

2. Listen to Women (Homeland): Earlier this fall, Obama took heat when Ron Suskind’s most recent book on the administration suggested that the Commander in Chief and his closest male advisers blew off the counsel of high-ranking female staffers. Now, I assume no one quite as mentally unhealthy as Carrie Mathison is working in the Obama White House. But the show’s a reminder that if we can overlook Rahm Emanuel’s temper tantrums, we should try to look past charges that women are “emotional,” too. Insights come from all sorts of places.

3. Sad but true: minority constituencies will be pretty patient (Boardwalk Empire): Boardwalk Empire started its second season with Nucky Thompson playing Atlantic City’s white and black communities off against each other. He supports Chalky White’s strike, but only when the black community tells Chalky they’re done being patient with him — and when stirring up the city coincides with Nucky’s own interests. And the season ended (in part) with Jimmy Darmody delivering more compensation money — and three Klansmen — to Chalky for judgment and distribution to the victims’ families. But he could have bought himself a meeting with Nucky with less. Leadership like that is what gets us the administration’s decision Plan B.

4. Diversity is strength (Modern Family): The show’s having a bit of a shaky season. But it’s at its best when devoted to storylines that show us people who thought they were different bridged by common interest, whether Cam and Jay bond over football or Gloria peps Claire up to run for local office. The message isn’t just that our differences are bridgeable — it’s that we’re stronger when we can make common cause on those shared interests and convictions.

5. National security and foreign affairs involve huge shifts — but individual actions matter too (Homeland): Just because the home-grown terrorists who periodically make headlines generally don’t seem to be all they’ve cracked up to be doesn’t mean that individuals can’t change the course of foreign policy and international affairs. Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia helped set off the Arab Spring. On the season finale of Homeland, Tom Walker and Nicholas Brody may make terrible history, as did the September 11 hijackers. We can try to make ourselves safer and our institutions stronger. But we probably can’t reduce the complex motivations that lead people to protest or to terror to predictable algorithms.

The bridge is yours.

-Linda Holmes on the people you meet in year-end list comments sections.

-An analysis of credits sequences inspired by Homeland.

-Apocalypse planning as reality television show. Nelson Van Alden, I imagine, would have words for Glenn Beck.

-The FCC is going to try to make your television ads less ear-destroying.

-Barack and Hillary are going to take out Sacha Baron Cohen:

This post contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of Boardwalk Empire.

I have mixed feelings about Jimmy Darmody’s death on Boardwalk Empire last night. To a certain extent it feels inevitable, a form of Suicide By Nucky after the traumas of Angela’s death and his murder of the Commodore that he can commit after destroying the Commodore’s will and ensuring his son’s financial future. Certainly, Jimmy’s inability to live up to either of his fathers has weighed on him heavily this season. And in this giant cast, there’s something efficient about taking out a whole web of connections and subplots in a single, emotionally resonant blow. But to a certain extent, this also feels like a way of using Jimmy to wrap up Richard’s storyline, the former telling the latter, “Time to come home, Richard…promise me you’re gonna try,” before Jimmy tells Nucky “I died in a trench years back. I thought you knew that.” And it also forecloses a promising storyline, the personalization of the rise of heroin through Jimmy’s potential addiction, and bringing us back down to conversations between Arnold Rothstein and his henchmen about color and supply.

I do appreciate seeing the darkness and the light in Nucky, though, brought out in a way that nothing else could by the need for the love of a good woman and the betrayal of a son. His acid reconciliation with Eli was a reminder of why he can keep his murderous brother alive: he is insecure and manipulatable. “Shakespeare. Julius Caesar,” Nucky tries to explain after Eli doesn’t understand his “Et tu?” “There’s a character named Eli?” Eli misunderstands him and arrives at an unknowing understanding. He doesn’t even really rate as a character. He’s muscle, temporarily risen above his station where he committed transgressions that seem to have returned him securely to it. And while Nucky’s merely annoyed by Eli’s lack of understanding, he’s wounded and raging by Jimmy’s failure to do the same. After Jimmy lectures Nucky on the cost of killing, Nucky declares, teeth gritted, that “You never knew me, James, and you never did. I am not seeking forgiveness.” What defines him is his ability to handle a range of problems and emotions at once, to kill his adoptive son and to celebrate a potential windfall over champagne.
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This post contains spoilers through the Dec. 4 episode of Boardwalk Empire. And are there ever spoilers!

As Benjamin Freed said on the Twitters at the conclusion of last night’s episode of Boardwalk Empire, “so much for the all-Darmody spinoff.”

It’s actually fascinating to compare the approach that Boardwalk Empire and Shame take to incest narratives. While the latter shows us a brother and sister between whom the appropriate behavioral boundaries clearly and disastrously were shattered long ago, it never confirms the means of their destruction, or shows us the immediate aftermath of the breach. By contrast, Boardwalk Empire has been building up to the revelation that, while he was at Princeton, Jimmy had sex with his mother at her initiation, telling him, “There’s nothing wrong, baby. There’s nothing wrong with any of it.” Whether she’s been telling Angela that she used to kiss Jimmy’s penis when he was an infant; or her smooth slotting of him into the Commodore’s role; building his sympathy for her by discussing her sexual abuse at the Commodore’s hands; or in flashbacks tonight showing us Gillian trying to simultaneously destroy Angela’s budding relationship with Jimmy while forcing him to transfer his affections from his lover to his mother by telling him “Oh, baby. I’m just the loneliest person on earth. Do you love that skinny girl?” Boardwalk Empire isn’t really showing us the day-to-day routine between two people who have violated sexual norms. It’s been telling us that it’s going to tell us something even more shocking than what we’re seeing on screen so far. And so it’s not particularly shocking when we see the inevitable happen, when we learn the real reason Jimmy ran off to join the Army. Oversignaling is a problem in this show generally, and this isn’t the only plotline where that’s a problem tonight. The only genuinely shocking moment in this plotline was the implication that Gillian might target Jimmy’s son next, telling Jimmy that “One day soon, he won’t be a little boy anymore. It happens, just like that. I’ll put him to bed. And I’ll be upstairs.”

I’m actually much more interested in the prospect of Jimmy falling into heroin addiction. He’s always been a weak personality, shaped by Nucky, manipulated by his mother, eager for the Commodore’s affections when the old man reemerges to offer them. But this would be a weakness of his own choosing, to a certain extent. And if this is a story less about Prohibition than about the transition from alcohol to drugs in the role of public menace, it would be interesting to see Jimmy personify it. Certainly, had his confrontation with Gillian and the Commodore not fallen short of double murder, it would have had the flair of a crime of the century — the beautiful young mother, the spear, the old man, the blood on the brocaded wallpaper.
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This post contains spoilers for the Nov. 20 and Nov. 27 episodes of Boardwalk Empire.

I apologize for the delay in writing last week’s recap, but in a sense I’m glad I get to consider both of these episodes, in their predictability and very strong moments together. I also appreciate a chance to highlight Matt Zoller Seitz’s excellent essay on Boardwalk Empire‘s misplaced priorities when it comes to gender, privileging fairly conventional if convoluted gangster stories over the richer domestic dramas that the show mostly uses as pretty window dressing.

Working backwards, I agree with him that Angela’s death at the hands of Manny Horvitz, who has arrived in Atlantic City intending to kill Jimmy and shoots Louise, stealing a clandestine night with Angela, instead, was emotionally striking. Manny’s shock, and his recovery via the intensely cold like, “Your husband did this to you,” was one of the more precisely-executed emotional moments of the season. And yet, I’m disgruntled by the decision on two levels. First, it’s the equivalent of J.K. Rowling killing Remus and Tonks in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, a moment when a piece of art needs some deaths to winnow the cast and illustrate emotional costs, but its creators don’t have the guts to lower a truly devastating blow on the audience by killing a main character. Second, there’s something really distasteful about the show’s regression to the norms of the past, where gay relationships inevitably end in death. It’s of a piece, I suppose, with the show’s generally punitive attitude towards sex. But I resent both the specific decision to kill off Angela and with her, one of the show’s legitimately interesting avenues of social exploration, and the general decision to default to killing the depressed lesbian.

The decision to have one of Margaret’s daughters struck down by polio seems to come from a similarly vengeful place. Whether she needs to confess that she’s sheltering with the man who murdered the father of her children, or that she’s betraying Nucky, Margaret clearly believes her sin is responsible for her misfortune. But at least that plotline gives rise to a more interesting speculation: in living with Nucky, has Margaret lost not just the health of one child, but the moral direction of another? Teddy plays a cruel joke on her when he pretends he’s stricken, too, and earns himself a slapping for it, while a weeping Margaret tells Nucky, “God help me, but he has his father’s cruelty,” only to have Nucky insist that he just wants attention, and knowing that his sister’s hospitalized “isn’t the same as understanding” the true magnitude of what’s befallen his family. But on their father-son trip to New York, Nucky realizes that something deeper than genetics or the loneliness of a little boy may be at play when Teddy reveals that he witnessed Nucky burn his own father’s house down, a poisonous revelation that ends with a deceptively sweet, “Don’t worry, Dad. I won’t tell.” Maybe Teddy’s just a child. But maybe in Nucky’s house, he’s learned that secrets are powerful, that there is something to be earned by keeping them.
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This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 13 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

In a decidedly dour season, Louise’s arrival, via an altercation with an Atlantic City matrons and a pack of “beach lizards,” is something of a delight. Angela’s been looking for an actual kindred spirit all season long, and while Richard’s too melancholic and too damaged to truly lift her up, Louise, who uses the fake names of one of the characters in her novels as an alias, and hollers, “Let ‘em gawk. They’re called knees, fellows!” at her pack of admirers on the beach, appears to be exactly who Angela is looking for. It’s nice to see Angela lit up a bit, galvanized both by overhearing Jimmy’s inept scheming, and by the kiss she shares with Louise at a joyfully bohemian party. And her conversation with Jimmy is bruising. When he asks her why she married him (after evading a question about whether he really loves her), she’s blunt: “Because we have a child together. It’s what society expected from me. Because you kept pushing it.”

And that’s sort of the key to Jimmy’s problems, isn’t it? He’s not a complicated man, and he’s not very good at seeing complexity in other people, or in assessing what people expect of him, particularly his mother. He’ll toss a fellow off a balcony for upsetting his party, incapable of thinking through what it might mean for a long game. In fact, Jimmy doesn’t particularly seem capable of seeing that there is a long game, that his moment of triumph is really Nucky’s victory. Inspired by a lecture from Arnold Rothstein, who tells him that “Some days I make 20 bets. Some days, I make none…so I wait, plan, marshal my resources. And when I finally see an opportunity and there is a bet to make, I bet it all,” Nucky rolls big. He quits his treasurer’s job, retires to private life, and prepares to unleash absolute hell on Atlantic City. “You sure this what you want?” Chalky asks when Nucky tells him to call a general strike and that Nucky will back him. “In about 30 minutes, it won’t be my problem,” Nucky says, relishing the thought of complicating everyone else’s life for a change — and planning a trip to Ireland to enlist Sinn Fein in his campaign.
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