Last week, inspired by former White House speechwriter and 1600 Penn creator Jon Lovett’s commencement address at Pitzer College, I wrote a piece for Slate about a strange consensus we seem to have reached with regard to tone in popular culture. Darkness, whether in the form of violence or unhappiness, seems to be considered more authentic than happiness, and worthier of cultural prestige. Now, there’s no question that, say, the execution of the drug war in Baltimore has a greater impact on the happiness of a larger number of humans than the romantic travails of a Manhattan advice columnist, but Leslie Knope arguably improves the lives of more people on a regular basis than Tony Soprano makes miserable. This isn’t a question of social seriousness or worth. It just appears to be a conclusion we’ve reached, and it’s something I’ve struggled with.

So I was gratified when someone who’s made a conscious decision to make art about happiness, How I Met Your Mother star Josh Radnor, who’s directed Happythankyoumoreplease and Liberal Arts, jumped in with some thoughts about why it is that we’ve made that choice, and why he’s pursuing a different one. I Storifyed our conversation:

I really do think there’s something to the idea that marginalizing or debunking happiness is a way to manage envy. Walter White is both more badass in a competent sense, and much, much more miserable than both of us will ever be. It’s a relief not to have his life, even if it means possessing genius. And if you’re angry at Hannah Horvath for stealing the maid’s money and presuming to be the voice of her generation, none of us would probably want her ruptured eardrum, her haircut, or Adam as boyfriend-cum-savior.

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.

Alan Sepinwall, following up on his post about the glut of strong television (about which I wrote here), notes that AMC, in an effort to jumpstart a new night of scheduled watching, has moved its Western drama Hell On Wheels to Saturday. Time slots and viewing days are something I’ve been thinking a great deal about recently. As one example FX, which has a string of great dramas, tends to air them during the week, often at 10 PM, and a (very) informal poll of my Twitter followers suggests that The Americans—the one of those dramas airing now and which has been making tremendous viewership gains once DVR usage is factored in— is something a lot of you are triaging to other nights, whether because it’s airing late on a work night, it competes with Nashville, or simply because week nights are full of other committments. And I’ve also been considering the fact that cable’s seemed much more capable than network of building a must-see night of television in recent years—but it’s only been able to do so on a single night, Sunday.

The problem with teaching viewers to make appointments to watch television on nights other than Sunday means that you have to have strong content to put there. Sunday night’s become crowded with good cable television precisely because it’s acquired the reputation as the prestige evening, and putting a show there is effectively entering it for consideration as serious and worthy programming. Seeding another night and expecting viewers to follow it would require one of two things. First, a single network could move an established must-see show out of its timeslot to a new time and using it to launch a new show. But that’s been difficult in the past in part because cable networks simply haven’t had enough original programming in development to build blocks out of it. For AMC to stack up, say, Breaking Bad and Mad Men in a single two-hour timeslot, would leave its schedule without a prestige player during much fo the rest of the year. That could change as cable networks go through a boom in ordering new programming, but it’s likely to take some time. And Sunday nights are an areas where the networks seem to follow cable rather than the other way around: scheduling The Good Wife on Sunday nights, for example, is an attempt to argue that the show is as good as a cable drama.

The other way to establish a night other than Sunday as an evening of must-see TV would be for a number of networks to separately arrive at the idea that it’s good to give another night a shot. For Hell On Wheels‘ move to work out—and Saturday nights aren’t an inherently terrible idea, if your goal is to get people to make an event out of watching TV that can be paired with dinner, wine, friends, etc.—another network will probably have to offer up some content such that it will be worth it to make an entire evening of sitting in front the television. The most coherent programming block on television at this particular moment is probably the team-up of Game of Thrones and Mad Men, both sophisticated ensemble dramas about grown-ups with real problems that air as an effective team-up because HBO and AMC don’t want to compete with each other. And based on simple thematic and narrative coherence, it works better than the block HBO tried to build last year with Game of Thrones, Veep, and Girls.

Maybe, as FX dramatically expands its programming orders as it splits its brand into FX and the comedy-centric FXX network, or if HBO gets some of the many, many projects it has in development into production, individual cable networks could start putting down beachheads on nights other than Sunday. But until they do, the next night of must-see programming is likely to be much more a matter of luck than of deliberate planning.

The Writers Guild of America West 2013 TV Staffing Brief, the organization’s analysis of who was hired to write American television shows during the 2011-2012 season, is out, and as usual, the results for women and people of color are not encouraging. Of 1722 writers who wrote for 190 shows, 519 or 30.5 percent of them were women, and 269 of them were people of color. For women, those numbers are up 5 percent from the 1999-2000 television season—as the report put it, “At this rate of increase, it would be another 42 years before women —roughly half of the U.S. population – reach proportionate representation in television staff employment.” And for people of color, the rate of increase is more mixed: the percentage of Asian and Latino writers has risen 2.9 percent since 1999-2000, but the number of African-American television writers has grown much more slowly in the same time period, rising from 5.8 percent to 6.5 percent of overall writers. If the percentage of African-American writers is going to rise just .063 percent, it will take 87 years for black television writers to reach proportional representation in their industry relative to their current presence in the U.S. population.

Part of the reason these numbers are so frustrating to see again and again is that it only takes a few shows to make a difference. As the report points out, “until the recent rise of multicultural dramas like ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal,”—both shows created by Shonda Rhimes— “there had been no successful television dramas that featured a critical mass of minority leading roles or writers.” If all of the 55 shows that hired no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season hired just one person of color to write for them, the representation of writers of color in television would rise three percent. And the examples of a few networks show that it’s not impossible to find women and people of color to hire for all kinds of positions. 50 percent of MTV’s executive producers, 43.5 of the CW’s executive producers, and 38.5 percent of ABC Family’s executive producers are women. 13.3 percent of the executive producers on ABC are people of color, a number likely significantly driven, again, by Shonda Rhimes. 55 percent of BET’s writers are women, and 95 percent of them are people of color. Clearly, there are women and people of color available and eager to work in television, if only someone would think to ask.

Or, as Marlo Thomas put it when I asked her how she found female writers for That Girl, back at a time when television was even more male and white, “Well, you looked for them. You called agents and said ‘What comedy writers do you have that are women? We’re looking for women to write for That Girl’ We’d go to the writers’ agents. Someone would see a name on somebody else’s show and say this stuff’s really good. But when you put out a call like that to agents, agents can’t wait to get jobs for their writers.”

It’s an instruction that the 19 shows that hired no women writers in the 2011-2012 season, and the 55 shows that hired no writers of color during that same time period might take to heart. It’s worth noting that these shows’ lack of diversity doesn’t define all of them. Mike White, who wrote all of the episodes of the first season of Enlightened himself, turned in one of the most complex, sympathetic portrayals of a woman anywhere on television. And Breaking Bad, which employed no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season, produced one of the most nuanced roles for a man of color to appear on screen in the last decade. But just because white men can get it right about women and people of color doesn’t render women and people of color irrelevant—it just means that the standards for white men who are writing female characters or characters of color should be higher. The list of shows that didn’t hire women writers or writers of color in the 2011-2012 season should provide a pretty clear guide to which writers are rising above their own life experiences—and which ones are badly in need of new perspectives in their writers’ rooms:

Television Shows That Hired No Women Writers During The 2011-2012 Season

America’s Funniest Home Videos
Big Time Rush
Californication
Comedy Bang! Bang!
Dancing With The Stars
Eagleheart
Enlightened (Creator Mike White wrote all the episodes)
Futurama
Geniuses
Gurland On Gurland
The Insider
Kickin’ It
Locke & Key
Magic City
Psych
Teen Wolf
Veep
Workaholics I
Workaholics II
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When the Motion Picture Association of America on December 20 came out in support of President Obama’s efforts on gun control in the wake of the Newtown, the organization simultaneously aligned itself with the productive side of a national conversation and set up a strategic trap that the National Rifle Association walked into the very next day. In a shocking and incoherent press conference that attempted to shift the conversation away from regulation of gun and ammunition purchasing and ownership, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre blamed pop culture that was, in some cases, decades old, for America’s mass gun killings.

“There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people. Through vicious, violent video games with names like ‘Bullet Storm,’ ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ ‘Mortal Combat,’ and ‘Splatterhouse,’” he said. “I mean we have blood-soaked films out there, like ‘American Psycho,’ ‘Natural Born Killers.’ They’re aired like propaganda loops on Splatterdays and every single day.”

The absence of any evidence that Adam Lanza, the alleged Sandy Hook shooter, had consumed any of the cultural artifacts LaPierre brought up would have been enough to render LaPierre’s assertions ludicrous and diversionary. And that’s without taking into account in the question of what impact media consumption does and doesn’t have on the general public’s actions and social attitudes, rather than on people who are mentally ill or who might be predisposed to violence, a subject nicely and soberly summed-up by the media scholar Jason Mittell. But there’s a difference between suggesting that it makes more sense to regulate mass culture than to regulate our access to the weapons that make it possible to translate violent plans into mass killings, and talking about what it would take to shift our mass culture away from violence as a major subject and as a primary way of demonstrating competence and heroism. But the people who try to hide behind the former argument are almost uniformly uninterested in the policies and shifts in the market it would take to accomplish the latter without regulation or abridgment of freedom of speech.

1. Increase funding for public broadcasting: If you want to see more non-violent television on the airwaves, it makes more sense to treat it like an emerging product, like solar energy, that needs to be significantly subsidized until it can build the market that allows it to be self-sustaining. I imagine the NRA and other conservatives who spring to blame violent popular culture for American violence would never get behind massively expanding funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but that, rather than trying to regulate Sons of Anarchy and Game of Thrones, is probably the quickest way to make non-violent popular culture more competitive in the overall marketplace. What about funding levels that would allow PBS to start an HBO-like movie channel, buying the rights to buzzy, relevant films like Margin Call and producing features like Too Big To Fail? How about funding that would support the purchase of more British shows like Downton Abbey, letting PBS take on BBC America, or a foreign language network that would broadcast subtitled shows from Israel, like Hatufim, or Scandinavian noir shows that have become part of the competitive advantage for services like Hulu or networks like Link TV? Or simply funding that would let PBS advertise more of its programming more heavily, building the kinds of audiences that networks can with in-company ad slots? This will never, ever happen. But that it won’t shows how unserious conservative media critics are about building credible, mass-market alternatives to successful, and violent, commercial programming.
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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.

Watching this year’s crop of fall pilots, I was struck by something: it’s an awfully good time to be a kid on television. If you’re a child or a teenager, you get to be the voice of reason on a show full of insane adults! Confidant to a terrorist who you know as your dad! The clandestine prize in a battle between your father and your uncle about what counts as heroism and successful masculinity! Or a whole new archetype of teenage nerd. Even the adorable moppets cast for sitcoms these days have some edge, from Joey King in the tragically-cancelled Bent, to Shania on The New Normal. One note: these roles remain overwhelmingly white—when you slot characters of color in peripherally, we don’t get much chance to meet their families. Interestingly, a lot of these great, smart, intriguing characters are girls. In honor of the the rise of great kids on television, and with hope for more, here are six of my favorites:

1. Dana Brody, Homeland: Dana started out Homeland‘s run as one of the sulkiest teenagers anywhere on television, but her father-daughter bond with her former prisoner of war father has turned into one of the most touching depictions of parent-child closeness on television. Dana is her father’s confidant on issues like his conversion to Islam and his troubles returning home, and he, in turn, is her champion when Dana and her mother Jessica, turned rigid and controlling by Brody’s years in exile, come into conflict. And at the end of the last year, that love helped prevent a devastating terrorist attack. This year, Dana gets to flirt with boys, stand-up for her father yet again, and continue to be one of the most crankily real teenagers on TV. I dread to think what would happen if she ever learns the truth about her dad.

2. Shania, The New Normal: I remain unenamored of Ryan Murphy’s portrait of a gay couple having a baby with a surrogate. But I cannot resist Shania (Bebe Wood), the first daughter of surrogate Goldie. As Shania, Wood is a rare thing on television, a child with opinions and interests that are decidedly her own. She calls her grandmother a bigot. She gets obsessed with Grey Gardens as a way of communicating how alone she feels in California. She kisses boys in the cloakroom. And unlike her mother, she pulls the lever for Obama in her school mock election. More than almost another other child on television, Shania feels like an actual person rather than a moppet. I would watch a spinoff in which she and Joey King’s character from Bent are bitter enemies, or who solve crime together, for ten seasons.

3. Walter Junior, Breaking Bad: I was initially annoyed by Walter Junior, AKA Flynn, but over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the sensitive son Albuquerque’s resident super-villain has never really appreciated. Walter Junior began the series loving a father who is somewhat disgusted by him, whether Walt’s resentful of Walter Junior’s efforts to built a website to raise money for his care, or Walt encouraging Walter Junior to drink until it makes his son ill. Since then, Walt’s courted his son with cars, but something interesting has happened: Walter Junior’s seized on the idea that his Uncle Hank is a hero instead of his father. Walt may have convinced himself that he’s a meth-cooking ubermensch, but the New Walt can’t even convince his own son to admire him. He has to buy him instead. Poor Flynn. If Hank busts Walt and Carrie busts Nicholas Brody, he and Dana should sneak some beers out of the house and try to figure out what went wrong.

4. Alex Dunphy, Modern Family: Alex Dunphy’s a new kind of girl on television: a nerd who’s relatively confidently superior to the popular kids, embodied by her gorgeous but academically-struggling older sister, Haley. As a result, she’s put social studies low on her list of academic challenges, but like a popular kid learning to enjoy hitting the books, Alex is starting to realize that her older sister’s approach to life has some assets, too. Rumor is, she’ll have her first boyfriend this season on Modern Family. Hopefully the show finds our favorite girl geek a fellow as iconic as Haley’s on-again-off-again sweetie, musician Dylan.

5. Simon, The L.A. Complex: Simon, more so than some of the other precocious creations on this list, feels like an actual child, a kid who gets super-excited about bubble machines, runs away from home when he’s angry at his big sister, and isn’t sure if he wants to be a child actor, or to grow up to be a scientist. But he’s sweet, winning, and tough, willing to act through a scary scene on a crime show that frightens Beth, his caretaker, warm enough to make friends with the grown-ups at the long-term occupancy hotel where they’re staying. I’m sorry Simon’s leaving the show, but it’s nice to see a kid have actual relationships with adults who recognize that he has something to offer on his own terms.

6. Arya and Sansa Stark, Game of Thrones: Given that their older brothers are off being King In the North and fighting with the Night’s Watch, I’m not counting the Stark boys as children. But even if I factored them, I’d have to give the edge to Arya and Sansa Stark, two sides of the tomboy-girly-girl coin played to perfection by the actresses who embody them. Both Sansa and Arya have found different kinds of power in their gender. As a hostage in King’s Landing, Sansa’s burgeoning sexuality makes her vulnerable to the sadism of King Joffrey, but sympathetic to men and women alike whose sympathy may be her greatest asset. And on the road, Arya has disguised herself as a boy to survive among warlords and brigands, her skills with a pointy sword and willingness to make unusual allies keeping her alive. Taken together, Arya and Sansa are a reminder that neither masculinity nor femininity is superior: it’s all what the situation calls for.

Emily Nussbaum, the television critic at the New Yorker, writes in an even-handed review of David Simon’s HBO series about New Orleans, Treme, which was just renewed for a shortened fourth season, than an episode of the show “made me wonder if, rather than a novel or a movie, a TV show could be a poem.” It’s a perfect way of encapsulating why Treme is both important and sometimes infuriating: it’s a show that challenges our conception of what a television show can be, but that may end up reaffirming our basic demands of the form.

In another television show, if I wished the dialogue would stop so I could listen to a musician finish out a song, watch an artist stitch beads into a badge, or a cook plate a dish, that would be a grave sign of trouble for that show. Given the relative pedestrian nature of much television cinematography and music,Treme stands out for its the quality of its musical performances, its attention to the kinds of details of craft that don’t always drive plots, but that can give an audience profound and vicarious sensual pleasure. I could hang out in LaDonna’s (Khandi Alexander) bar for an entire afternoon watching Albert’s Mardi Gras Indians practice their routines, as they do this season, or at a music showcase watching Annie try out new songs as she prepares to record a studio album. In an episode in the middle of this season, Toni (Melissa Leo) and her daughter Sofia (India Ennenga) go to a performance of Waiting for Godot at the point where the levees were breached. As moving as it was to watch a man in the audience declare Godot isn’t coming, to see Toni tear up at his anger and pain, I almost would have rather been there with them in the audience, experiencing the play for myself. The art Treme puts on screen is almost enough for me to not need the plots and characterization that surround it.

Treme isn’t alone in playing with the potential of television. Breaking Bad, in particular, plays with cinematography much more aggressively than Treme. But that show’s dramatic color saturation, shot composition, and unnerving images are in service of the show’s clear moral throughlines. And Breaking Bad has always paired its striking cinematography with sleek, efficient storytelling. If Breaking Bad‘s A, B, and C storylines are hanks of hair being plaited together into a smooth braid, Treme‘s much larger cast are threads on a loom, showing occasional flashes of jewel color, but often just providing the supporting warp and weft to get us to one performance to the next.

That’s not to say that there aren’t engaging characters or moving moments in Treme outside of the musical performances. There’s joy to be had in watching Antoine Baptiste grousing about a cab fare he believes resulted from an inefficient route, telling the driver “It’s basic geometry, bro…You need to get with the hypotenuse. Don’t believe me, believe Pythagoras. He invented the sides of this shit,” or Ladonna seeking affirmation from a customer, asking him “What do you think about this here? This bar. My bar,” only to get back: “It’s here. And so am I.”

And the Treme is dense and smart on its core theme, how New Orleans alternately neglects and mythologizes itself, and how its most creative tendencies sometimes undermine its chances for success. In this week’s season three premiere, as Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) takes a group of tourists to what he’s trying to tell them are important sites in New Orleans musical history, they become progressively more disgusted with the disarray of the stops along the way. “You mean they can’t manage to clean up a park after two years?” one asks him. “Did you people ever actually preserve anything of note?” another wants to know. They’re not wrong. Meanwhile, Delmond Lambreaux (Rob Brown), who recorded a well-received album that combines jazz with his father’s Indian tribe, gets asked “Where in your imagination did all that come from?” by a purported fan who’s totally unfamiliar with the history of the music he’s enjoying. Next week, Antoine, now teaching music, tells a student “Jennifer, you sound good, girl. You got that real New Orleans riff.” But regretfully, he tells her to get back in synch with the other members of his marching band. “This here is about playing in unison,” he tells her. “When the time comes, you can let that rip.”

And that’s sort of Treme‘s problem. The show isn’t willing to shrug off narrative conventions entirely and spin off into sensory experience. But on the ground, it’s pulled in too many directions, and as a result characters have to tell what they don’t have time to show. Television may have dramatically expanded the emotional and moral weight it’s able to convey in the last decade and a half, and thanks to the widespread availability of cheap flatscreen televisions and prestige cable budgets, television productions are more visually ambitious than they’ve ever been. But Treme is a reminder that for all of these advances, television remains primarily a narrative medium, and we’re a long way from the show that’s really ready to let it rip and step out of line.

Awards are always a terribly flawed way of determining what makes for good popular culture. Limits on the number of nominees lock deserving contenders out of their categories. Differences between the people who watch television shows or movies and the people in the pool assigned to judge them can produce some truly baffling biases and decisions. And winning doesn’t automatically transform a show’s prospects of staying on the air or an actor’s chance of getting good work in the future. But all of those caveats aside, it can be hugely satisfying to see a small show get the recognition you assume it’ll be denied, or an actor break barriers. And if you want better television, here are the shows and performances you should root for get whatever boost it’s possible to wring out of the Emmys on Sunday.

COMEDY SERIES
Who’s Nominated:
The Big Bang Theory
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Girls
Modern Family
30 Rock
Veep

Who Should Win: Girls

Why: There are a lot of legacy shows on this list, and some very notable omissions, particularly Parks and Recreation, which had a much stronger season than its network counterpart 30 Rock. Given that, I have to root for Girls, one of the few comedies to arrive on television knowing exactly what it was and what its strengths were, even if during its run, creator Lena Dunham had to confront some of its more notable weaknesses and absences, particularly when it came to race. Flawed though it may be, those of us rooting for more personal, low-budget shows—and who would like to see folks of color get the opportunities Dunham and Louis C.K. have—should hope for Girls to take home the statuette over more commercial favorites like The Big Bang Theory.

COMEDY ACTOR
Who’s Nominated:
Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory
Larry David as Himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm
Don Cheadle as Marty Kaan in House of Lies
Louis C.K. as Louie in Louie
Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock
Jon Cryer as Alan Harper in Two and a Half Men

Who Should Win: Louis C.K. or Don Cheadle

Why: It’s impossible to compare C.K.’s exploration of wounded and uncertain middle-aged masculinity and Cheadle’s turn as a hyped-up management consultant struggling to raise his potentially transgender son with tenderness and consideration. House of Lies is an inconsistent mess in comparison to the jewel-like Louie. But C.K. isn’t exactly lacking in recognition. And Cheadle’s playing a character who’s more distant from his real self than C.K. Plus, a black actor hasn’t won the Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Emmy since Robert Guillaume for Benson in 1985.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the season finale of Breaking Bad over the past week, and in a way, I’m glad the episode aired while I was on vacation so I had time to consider it. I think I’ve liked a lot of this season more than some viewers have, in part because it’s borne out some of my theories about Walter White’s core personality. But there’s a major question that this episode of Breaking Bad didn’t answer for me, and I think it’s a problem for this season as a whole: why does Walt decide to stop cooking meth?

There are a number of possibilities here: that he’s bowed to Skyler’s reasoning, that in that pile of money, he’s finally found satisfaction, that having gotten the meth business running smoothly and efficiently, he’s no longer attracted to or challenged by the prospect of perfecting his operation. That, or it’s possible that he’s lying, and he intends to continue cooking.

But that decision, which comes at the end of yet another jaunty cooking-and-distributing montage (though the first that really moves time forward significantly) invalidates much of the emotional heft that the season had been building prior to this point. If he’s able to stop cooking so easily, was Walt lying to Jesse when he invoked his dream of a well-run meth empire, to Mike’s connections when he invoked himself as Classic Coke? If Walt is willing to take Skyler’s judgement of a situation seriously, and to take it on the subject around which he’s build his identity, what happened to change the dynamic between them? It’s true that up until the montage, Breaking Bad had essentially covered a year in time, and that it’s possible many things in the White household could have changed during the period of time represented by the montage. But simply jumping forward and giving us a very new set of conditions in the White household was a decision that both forfeited substantial dramatic tension, and left unresolved the question of where Walt’s identity currently truly lies.

It’s just a shame to me to give Skyler her shattering confrontation with Walt, to see her tell him “I don’t have any of your magic, Walt, I’m a coward. I can’t go to the police, I can’t stop laundering your money. I can’t keep you out of the house, I can’t even keep you out of my bed. All I can do is wait. It’s the only good option…For the cancer to come back”–and then to restore tranquility to the White household so easily, without exploring whether she embraced a kind of moral compromise and showed steel that gave her credibility in Walter’s eyes, or whether something happened to make him want his family back badly enough to return to himself. I want to know what’s happened to Walt himself in this time, to know if success has calmed and healed the scars left behind by Grey Matter, if he’s found his way back to an identity that isn’t based primarily in dominance and manipulation.

I agree with what seems to be the consensus view, that Breaking Bad needs for Hank to figure out Walt, for the good, dogged, unbrilliant, crude man to crack the sophisticated, clever, arrogant genius. But while that basic structure for the show’s finale season is important, it also matters what condition Walt’s soul is in when Hank cracks him. If he’s Heisenberg, still confident and arrogant, Walt’s moral reckoning will involve the utter dismantling of his identity. But if Walt’s grappling towards decency, his reaping of the whirlwind will involve different kinds of pain, shame, and disbelief. If it’s to be the former, we need to know how Skyler came to be able to live with him, to laugh through dinner with Hank and Marie, to enjoy watching her children play together. If it’s the latter, we need to know how Walt found his way to a third self, neither the emasculated Mr. White nor the dominating Heisenberg. I hope the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad answer those questions. I’d hate to think that “Crystal Blue Persuasion” is supposed to cover both three months and these critical bits of character development.