On Friday, Showtime announced that it had picked up a new show called The Affair, which would tell the stories of a relationship that interrupts two marriages, splitting up the episodes to explore the perspectives of the men and women involved separately. It was a decision that, along with the forthcoming Masters of Sex, a historical drama bout the sex researchers Masters and Johnson, and Ray Donovan, which follows a Los Angeles fixer who is also dealing with the consequences of childhood sexual abuse in his family, that furthered a brand that underlies a great deal of Showtime’s work, and that makes the network unusual among its peers. Showtime increasingly as interested in exploring sex as it is violence.

This isn’t to say that all of Showtime’s programming is solely preoccupied with sex, but three of its foundational shows, The L Word, about affluent lesbians, Queer As Folk, an adaptation of the British drama, and Soul Food, an adaptation of the movie, were all substantially concerned with how adults approach sex, sometimes in the context of their families. It’s a theme that continues in the shows that are airing on it presently. Shameless is substantially about the sexual relationships of multiple generations of the Gallagher family. House of Lies examines both the sex lives of successful consultants and the sexual and gender identity of the main character’s son. Californication‘s focus is announced in its title. Dexter is a serial killer show that’s frequently explored the sexual components of violence. And Homeland started out as a show about national security and has morphed into an epic romance grounded in a striking sexual connection between its two main characters, a dogged CIA agent and the undercover terrorist she is pursuing.

I asked Showtime president David Nevins about that trend at the Television Critics Association press tour in January, and about how intentional the network’s focus on sex was.

“We have the ability to be adults, try to use the lack of restrictions that we have because we don’t sell to advertisers, use it to most interesting effect. And there are
taboo subjects that we can explore that other people don’t have — other programmers don’t have the same freedom and ability,” he said. “Masters of Sex feels like a show that only we could get away with, that only pay cable could get away with…Sex is one of the places where we can distinguish ourselves. But it’s really important to me also that we be interesting and provocative in a deeper way, not just salacious.”

That’s an ambitious goal to set, and one I’m particularly curious to measure The Affair, Masters of Sex, and Ray Donovan against. And it’s hard precisely because fewer people have worked at it. Mainstream movies and television have done an enormous amount of work to explore what makes for stylish violence, and what about the employment of violence we find alternately exciting and revolting. Some of the reason that’s happened is because of incentives set up in the television and movie ratings systems, which make it easier to make violent content reach a mass audience than to do the same with considerations of sex that are comparatively grown-up and intense. Some of it’s happened because there’s an alternative to mainstream entertainment that’s making sexual content that mainstream entertainment can’t and wouldn’t want to replicate.

And some of it is simply because the practice we’ve had at making entertainment intelligently or entertainingly violent isn’t matched by an equal set of established conventions around sex. It’s pretty easy to figure out what will make an audience either gasp in admiration at violent prowess—James Bond’s ability to take as good as he gets, and to dole out violence with precision is a good rule of thumb—or recoil in disgust from the damage done to a body. It’s much harder to figure out how to do a sex scene that will make a mass audience have the same unified reaction, and some of that’s because what we feel about sex isn’t close to standardized. In The New Republic, Sam Lipsyte, writing about how to write about sex, suggests that aspiring novelists “Trust in the modern gods who guide your hand: Sad and Funny. Like it or not, these are the twin poles for most of our tiny thoughts and doings. Sad and Funny are both the world and how we withstand it.” But poles aren’t the entirety of experience, and joy deserves some recognition in there as well.

I understand the many reasons that a network would choose to go with violence as its primal stakes and subject for exploration: it’s exciting, our reactions to a lot of it are easy to predict, and it is, in a lot of ways, easier to get on screen and easier to sell once it’s there. But even if violence isn’t an exhaustible subject, it’s far from the only one that matters, or the only stakes that any of us experience—for many of us, we’re deeply fortunate to avoid it. Going after sex and romance, and doing it with the same level of sophistication and style as many of the great cable dramas is a harder thing to do, and it’s why sex is an equal or close to equal subject maybe only in Deadwood and Mad Men.

“I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure,” Bikini Kill sang in 1995. Television still hasn’t even begun to tap that potential, but I do wish they’d start getting around to it. If Showtime is digging in on questions of what sex means to us, how we study it, and how we survive trauma around it, I’m excited to see what arguments those shows are going to make—and how viewers will react to them.

Lawless, John Hillcoat’s new flick about Prohibition-era bootleggers and the government officials seeking to leech off their profitable flouting of the ban on alcohol, has all the elements of a good American crime story. It’s got two distinct criminal syndicates, one reclusive, taciturn, and reluctant to use violence, and the other deliberately transgressive. It’s got a suitably disgusting officialdom more interested in self-enrichment and control than in the law. It’s got a pair of female characters wriggling out of patriarchy. But unfortunately, somebody — maybe Hillcoat, or screenwriter Nick Cave (yes, that Nick Cave), or whoever decided Shia LaBeouf should have more lines than Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman combined — slapped those ingredients together in a sloppy, unambitious way. The souffle never rises.

The basic conflict of the movie isn’t between Hardy’s clan of bootlegging Bondurants and Guy Pearce’s vicious, greedy Chicago lawman. It’s between de facto leader Forrest Bondurant (Hardy) and his little brother Jack (LaBeouf). Where Forrest uses his local-legend status and massive bulk as quiet guarantors of stability, Jack is ambitious, image-obsessed, and self-deceived about his criminal successes. (Think of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, with more hair and less brains.)

There are lots of little problems: Pearce’s hardboiled lawman probably wouldn’t cringe and close his eyes when he shoots his pistol, and violent scenes rely as much on sound effects as any kung fu movie you’ve ever seen. But the big problem with Lawless is that the rural bootlegger protagonists feel every bit as synthetic and unoriginal as the baddies. Nearly every character is a cardboard cutout who blunders in predictable ways at the right moments to move the story through obvious beats. None of them ever feel like real people (despite good work from Pearce, Jessica Chastain, and Hardy). Some characters simply disappear from the story. There’s not a surprising moment in the whole two hours, but plenty of implausible ones.

These failures are all the more frustrating because the movie’s setup implies some interesting themes: organizational coercion, the contrasts between internal and external motivations for criminals, the difference between violence and power and the consequences of conflating the two. In its messy failure to say anything about those ideas, Lawless got me thinking about two crime stories that take a more deft touch to similar stuff.

2000’s Way of the Gun centers on two kidnappers willing to do violence to innocents in pursuit of their goals, but far more interested in the pot of gold than the rainbow they paint getting to it. The movie’s best scene has kidnapper Benicio del Toro and bagman James Caan talking shop in a bar. They deride the self-important jargon of corporate security and law enforcement types, before the subject turns to their own side of the lawbreaking street: “These days they wanna be criminals more than they wanna commit crime,” del Toro says. “That’s not just crime, that’s the way of the world,” Caan retorts. del Toro and his partner may be unconscionably quick to violence, but they are also businesslike, professional criminals. Like Caan, they are who they are because they’re good at it and it’s a living, not because of status symbols or adrenaline.

When HBO pulled the plug on David Milch’s Deadwood, TV lost one of its most thoughtful shows about violence. The titular goldmining camp’s uncertain future in the expanding United States drives the show’s plot, but the lack of law does not mean there’s a power vacuum. Saloon boss Al Swearengen is the camp’s capo at the show’s outset, and has his control tested first by a new saloon/brothel, and later by the organized might of George Hearst (implicitly backed by the legal forces that previously ignored the camp). Over the course of the show’s three seasons, Swearengen metes out violence in increasingly calculated ways. But even at the outset, when he uses his fists and Dan Dority’s knife to consolidate his holdings, the show makes clear that he understands violence is not power. Violence becomes necessary only in response to erosions of Swearengen’s power; its use is evidence of weakness, not strength. His minimally violent chess match with Hearst in the final season shows he’s internalized that lesson.

Deadwood’s other main character, reluctant sheriff Seth Bullock, follows a similar learning curve with regard to violence. But Bullock’s motivation is never power, and his violence is born of temper rather than calculation. Swearengen’s long game for the camp’s survival and his own enrichment stands in contrast to Bullock’s situational, morally-driven choices about violence. His abortive first-season friendship with Wild Bill Hickock seemed to reinvigorate his sense of righteousness, without imparting any of Bill’s weariness from a lifetime of killing. As the show goes on Bullock works to control his temper, but his desire to imprint rightness on every situation he encounters never flags. Swearengen becomes deliberate with his violence because that’s what his machinations require, but Bullock restrains himself (or tries to) out of a more internal conflict over what kind of person he wants to be.

Before it ever made the New Cult Canon, Way of the Gun lost $8 million at the box office. Deadwood pulled a couple million viewers a night but was always more beloved of critics than seen by non-critic humans. It shouldn’t be hard for Lawless to prove a greater success in business terms, but if it does Hollywood will continue to learn the wrong lessons about how to make violence interesting.

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.

I’ve been watching this season of True Blood, not out of any particular affection for the show, but because I need something to do on Mondays when I’m cleaning out my Google Reader. And while I think overall the show remains not very good (though it is marginally less racist than last season), I found myself unexpectedly struck by two stories in this most recent episode: Salome’s remembrance of being pimped out by her family as a young girl, and Pam’s reflections on how she came to know Eric while working as a prostitute shortly after the turn of the century. True Blood‘s always been a show deeply concerned with sex, but this episode was one of the first times it’s considered the issues that were threaded into Game of Thrones all season, and that reoccured in Deadwood: what happens when women either don’t have control of their own sexuality, and what risks do they face when they turn their sexuality into a commodity.

“We die alone, in the dark,” Pam, still human, told Eric. The pair met after Pam, the mistress of an upscale brothel, discovered that one of the women who worked for her had been murdered by a serial killer. Eric saved her from the same man, and intervened again when he found Bill Compton and his maker Loretta glamoring another woman who works for Pam so she’ll give them consent to drain her dry. Eric’s protective, but even as he develops a tentative relationship with Pam, who, though human is surprisingly accepting of Eric’s unusual abilities, he still holds her at a distance. When she asks him to turn her into a vampire to save her from the fate that awaits both working prostitutes and the women who have ascended to supervise them, Eric tells her that the bonds between maker and made vampire are too sacred to be entered into lightly. Pam remains a disposable to him. Eric may respect her and enjoy her company, but he’s still treating her like a prostitute, a woman who falls into a separate category from women he might actually consider forging a long-term relationship with. Pam forces his hand by slashing her wrists, forcing Eric to turn her if he wants to spend more time with her.

Joanie Stubbs, the prostitute who plays a similar role first in the Bella Union and then in her own establishment in Deadwood, has no such promise of a magical escape, and fewer emotional resources than Pam. When Joanie considers suicide by gunshot, crying out “What am I Lord, that I’m so helpless,” she means it. She’s alone in the room with that pistol. There’s no one to persuade, or frighten into transporting her into a new life. Pam, when she turns into a vampire, is able to reclaim her sexuality for herself, and ends up working with Eric to run a bar where people can meet on equal terms, rather than as client and prostitute, with all the inequalities and vulnerabilities that implies. It may take a while for Joanie to make good on what she tells Cy Tolliver, the owner of the Bella Union, and her former boss, that “I don’t want to run women no more,” but she eventually does. But she doesn’t have the luxury of living from one era into the next, from sexual constraint into sexual liberation.
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I’m almost done with Season 4 of Sons of Anarchy, so keep your eyes peeled for a lot of blogging on the subject. But I noticed today that the show’s creator, Kurt Sutter, tweeted that “i’ve talked to [FX President John] landgraf about the 1st nine. he digs it, but thinks it might be best to put some time between SOA and a prequel. i agree.” I’d like to see that. I am, perhaps more than the average Sons of Anarchy viewer, in the questions of governance the show raises, whether we’re hearing about SAMCRO founder John Teller’s anarchist theorizing or seeing how the MC interacts with Charming’s law enforcement officials. But it would be neat to see how that synergy developed in the first place. Most of the big governance shows on television give us, in Rhett Butler’s parlance, empire building (Deadwood) or empire wrecking (The Wire). It’d be neat to see a single coherent story about a rise and fall.

This post contains spoilers through the January 29 episode of Luck.

Because Luck is so big and sprawling, I’m going to focus these recaps on a different character every week. And because this is the premiere, and I’m new to horseracing, I want to start with Gus. I’ve always liked Dennis Farina, who I think can be a wonderfully sensitive and underrated actor, and I particularly appreciate him here as Gus, a role I found to be even more sensitive and nuanced on a second pass.

I think it makes sense to look for structure and the larger idea in David Milch’s work. We’re not far enough into Luck for me to see the show as clearly as I do the themes in Deadwood, of course, but Ace is clearly the power broker here, the man who thinks he can see the future and manipulate it, who can turn the recession and the financial desperation of the area into a revitalization and expansion of gaming at Santa Anita. That life is made possible in part by Gus, who handles the great details and the small of Ace’s post-prison existence, whether he’s adjusting Ace’s thermostat to “67 degrees. 67 degrees is perfect,” or acting as “the first front in history” so Ace can own a horse again. But does that make him a butler? A political factotum? Or the citizen to Ace’s great man?

Whatever it turns out to be, there’s a real tenderness in Gus’s service to Ace. “I got a pencil right here, and I got an old ad from Sears I can write on the back of,” he tells Ace when Ace asks him to get a tape recorder, eager to be helpful as quickly as possible even though he misses the larger picture in the process. We learn that he’s answered every letter Ace got while he was in prison, a touchingly old-fashioned gesture. And though he ventures into the world of horse racing out of duty (Gus has trees to tend), telling Ace nervously “What do I know? All four of his legs reached the ground,” Gus finds genuine joy there. The look on his face when Mon Gateau eats a carrot off his hand for the first time is utterly charming in a world that’s already revealed itself to be brutal in the break of a horse’s leg, desperate in the form of Jerry’s gambling.

“All I’m worried about is you relying on me when I’m out past my depth,” Gus confesses to Ace after the latter’s tiring first day out of jail. “You don’t know your own depths,” Ace tells him. It’s an interesting, paternalistic moment, and it remains to be seen what it means. Is this the powerful issuing a vote of confidence in the common people, or a powerful man seeing in his factotum a man who could rise above his station?

Sorry for getting behind on these posts. Glad to be back! Especially now that we get to dig into a juicy electoral fight.

There’s a marvelous contrast between the brutality that Deadwood‘s first elections inspire and the shyness of many of the participants who are standing for election. Seth Bullock may be beating E.B. Farnum to a pulp, but he’s also shyly asking Martha to look over his speech, frustrated that “Words…doing the wrong jobs…Nothing showy, is the main thing.” Charlie Utter may be a tough man when it comes to the deployment of his fists and firearms, but he’s got his transition written on his hand so he remembers to thank Seth when he introduces him. The contest inspires E.B. to new lows, referring to circumcision in his attack on Sol’s qualifications for mayor, but it also brings other people fully into the life of the camp, as Sofia, once an unreachable outsider, tells Martha that her vote is for baking bread in class “And Mr. Bullock for sheriff, and Mr. Star for mayor.”

And the campaign intrudes into the tender relationship between Trixie and Sol, when Al suggests to Trixie that he’s trying to get Sol to buy a house so “you and the Jew can fall on each other free of prying eyes.” Trixie, prickly as always, interprets this suggestion and Sol’s participation in it not as an attempt to legitimize their relationship (Sol’s intention) but to hide it (Al’s). “I’ll pop from the wall like Grandma Groundhog in a storybook and attend to your johnson,” she explodes at Sol. She may be in love with him (though she might not admit it), but her worldview is still all tangled up with how she thinks Al sees her. Similarly, she’s tender with Alma after Doc delivers the awful news that she seems likely to lose her child, advising that “your circumstances make it prudent to intervene.” Trixie stands up for Alma when she’s afraid she’ll relapse into addiction, and reassures her that she’ll survive the procedure. And when Doc starts the operation, Trixie stands up vigorously for her own lack of squeamishness. Can we please have a show where these two, plus a sobered-up Jane open a prairie abortion clinic together? I would vastly rather watch that than Alan Ball’s George Tiller show.

Speaking of Jane, like Trixie, she’s drowning in a sea of misinterpretation. “Off to the Bella Union like a moth to a fucking flame,” she mutters after Joanie, suspicious that her friend is returning to Cy, and to her old ways, before asking Joanie directly if she’s “Returning to the Bella Union?…As residence and workplace, is my meaning.” Joanie, of course, is engaged in a darker struggle than Jane knows, holding a gun to her temple, crying out, “What am I Lord, that I’m so helpless.” When she tells Cy, “I don’t want to run women no more,” Cy tells her, “That’s turning away from your gift and your training.” It may be intended to jolly her back to work, but instead, it shines a harsh light on Joanie’s convictions that she doesn’t have any other options than work she’s come to despise. Similarly, Jane, at first reluctant to take up Martha’s invitation to tell her story to the class, insisting that it would consist of “Custer was a cunt. The end,” sobers up, cleans up, and makes a speech of her own. And in doing so, she finds the courage to ask Joanie if she can stay. Simply being on the frontier, lodging in a nascent society, isn’t actually enough to make people start their lives over. They have to find the will themselves.

I feel sort of guilty comparing Hell on Wheels, AMC’s new Western about the construction of the Trans-Continental Railroad, to Deadwood, but it’s sort of hard not to do when the show is trying as hard as it possibly can to ape as many Deadwood elements as it can transfer to a railroad camp. As I wrote in my review at the Atlantic:

The minister who’s set himself up in Hell on Wheels is a straightforward prairie minister (though one with a dark secret that ultimately reinforces the show’s sympathy for former slave-owners and advocates of slavery), rather than the tormented Union civil war veteran who ministered to Deadwood in its first season before succumbing to the brain tumor that was robbing him of his faith. And when the Hell on Wheels minister mildly asks “Haven’t we had our fill of war? Our fill of killing?” it’s no match for the anguished cries of Deadwood’s camp doctor raging at God: “What conceivable use was the screaming of those men? Did you need to hear them to know your omnipotence?”

Hell on Wheels doesn’t compete with Deadwood in the arts of cussing or whoring, either. Declaring of the Emancipation Proclamation, as Elam Ferguson does at one point, that “Ain’t nothing good coming from this either…Look what this got. I might as well wipe my ass with it,” or the sight of Doc Durant denouncing his own pitch to investors as “Twaddle and shite,” don’t remotely compare to Swearengen promising a crowd fired up by rumors of a massacre by Native Americans “I will offer a personal $50 bounty for every decapitated head of as many of these godless heathen cocksuckers as anyone can bring in. And God rest the souls of that poor family. And pussy’s half price, next 15 minutes.” Hell on Wheels’ prostitutes are hookers with hearts of gold—and in one case, tattoos from her time in Indian captivity—rather than full-fledged citizens in this rough new society, and their interactions with men are entirely predictable.

The one thing that Hell on Wheels has on Deadwood is the sight of Common in a jaunty hat, though of course that doesn’t make up for the show’s Confederate nostalgia. There’s a really interesting story to be told about the black experience in Westward expansion, or about the railroad and Manifest Destiny from the perspective of the Native Americans who are being displaced by it. But this isn’t it. Also, this is a reminder that I need to finish blogging Deadwood. That starts again tomorrow.

I’m somewhat anxious about the turn that Raising Hope has taken this season into incredibly broad humor, but this article and watching Deadwood made me think about how much I like Garret Dillahunt. He’s a wide-ranging actor, but he’s also very good at doing something pretty difficult: making sympathetic characters who aren’t very smart.

Maureen, the Bunny who is supposed to be our entre into The Playboy Club in the show of the same name, is hard to sympathize with not because she’s bought into a false idea of liberation (though, the whole my-long-lost-dad-will-see-me-on-the-cover-of-Playboy-and-get-in-touch thing is pretty false), but because she’s really, really dumb. She leaves her blood-stained Bunny uniform poorly concealed under her bed in a Playboy-owned dorm. She keeps the key to the club owned by the man she killed in self-defense. She doesn’t seem to understand that hanging out in her underwear with a man one of her coworkers is dating might not be interpreted as a good-faith attempt not to flirt with the dude. All of her problems are self-created. And the plot doesn’t exist and move forward without Maureen making transparently dreadful decisions. That’s a recipe for disaster and perpetual infuriation.

But Dillahunt is kind of a genius at portraying characters who are, well, not that, but who don’t seem repellently stupid. Jack McCall is an obnoxious, thin-skinned sot, but in Deadwood, you can sort of see why Wild Bill Hickock needles him so much. Hickock has everything, but he’s not happy about it, and he’s not blowing it gleefully: he’s bitter, and obnoxious. McCall has nothing but the power to mess with Hickock, not even the power to resist doing it.
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A good post from Nikki, in response to some of my writing, saying that it’s not enough to want more women writing and directing television episodes. She writes:

If we suggest that increasing the number of women ON television might increase the number of women BEHIND television, thereby effecting a change in how sexist or feminist television shows might be, we excuse men from the process entirely, except as Upholders of the Status Quo. Set aside the question about women behind the scenes and focus on the men behind the scenes, who are definitely still in power in the media and it’s that power structure that should be held accountable for the current portrayal of women on TV.

Amen. I’m a pretty firm believer in the carrot-and-stick thing, though, because it’s relatively easy for male creators to clap their hands over their ears when they’re being criticized for not giving us wonderful, developed female characters and just not listen. And it’s much easier to get people to listen when you’re praising, and for other people to see that praise and think “I want that!” So without further ado and in no particular order, 10 fantastic female characters on television who were created by men.

1. Trixie, Deadwood, David Milch: I know this list isn’t in order, but if it was, I’d still put it at the top. Milch’s prostitute-turned-accountant, pimp’s-trick-turned-Jewish-businessman’s-girlfriend would still be at the top. We meet Trixie at the beginning of the show when she’s been accused of murder, and watch her help another woman beat a drug addiction even when it means defying her employer’s orders; seek out an education no one ever gave her so she can have more options in life; stand up for her friends when they get married and grieve for them when they bury their children; and develop a new relationship. She’s always making choices. And when she takes steps backwards, we understand why, at the gut level. She’s empowered, but the show doesn’t fall prey to the trap that strong female characters created by men often do — that women’s liberation is purely a matter of will, not circumstance.

2. Alice Morgan, Luther, Neil Cross: Alice, who enters the scene when she murders her parents, melts down the gun, and feeds the remaining parts to her dog, is a certified crazy person, but she’s not a victim. Her attraction to John Luther doesn’t make her a nymphomaniac. And her decision to work cases comes out of a clearly defined alternate morality and worldview. Rather than setting her up to be judged by the audience, she’s a compelling — and sometimes very scary — way to see the universe.
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