“This isn’t happening for a reason.” -The Boy, Game of Thrones

“They were real.” -Huck, Scandal

“You don’t want to be the last one caught holding a dog collar.” -Dan, Zero Dark Thirty

When Fox announced that it was bringing back 24, its serialized drama about counterterrorist federal agent Jack Bauer that finished its initial run in 2010, as a limited-episode special event in 2014, much of the commentary about the news focused on questions of structure, rather than content. Time Magazine television critic James Poniewozik argued that 24′s resurrection was part of an exciting move by Fox to make more limited series and more special events, a strategy that includes a shorter run for its serial killer hit The Following, a move that both was meant to accomodate star Kevin Bacon’s schedule and to ape the success of dark cable dramas with shorter runs, and an order of limited-run series Wayward Pines. Others saw it as part of Fox’s decision to walk away from a focus on female-focused comedies and return to an old, reliable—and male-centered—hit from its past. But I’m curious about another question. How is Jack Bauer, whose use of torture, as reported by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, prompted U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan to meet with the producers of 24 to talk to them about how the show was affecting American soldiers, going to play in a world where pop culture has become more thoughtful and searing about the impact of these tactics on both both the tortured and torturers themselves?

One of the most painful depictions of torture presently airing appears on HBO’s medieval fantasy Game of Thrones, where the destruction of Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), formerly a spoiled ward of the Stark family, and now the prisoner of a man who appears to be systematically remolding him according to a monstrous blueprint. It’s a storyline that’s been so grotesque and emotionally agonizing that it’s turned off some critics like The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr, who have found themselves exhausted by what they see as an exploitative element to the proceedings, which are presented only in flashbacks in the novels on which the show is based.

But the relentless return to Theon’s cell, to his crucifixion, flaying, hooding, starvation, sexual manipulation, and last week, emasculation, seems precisely like the point, even if it’s so unpleasant to watch that I’ve taken to peeking at those scenes through my fingers on the first go-round and leaving the room for the second. Theon can’t escape his torture, and neither can we. His lead torturer tells him that “this isn’t happening for a reason,” and in point of fact in the narrative, it’s mostly not. The only new information Theon reveals, that he has not actually murdered the heirs to Winterfell, a Northern stronghold, doesn’t defuse a ticking time bomb scenario, but gets filed away for reference. “You’ve already told me everything, remember? Your daddy was mean to you. The Starks didn’t appreciate you. One good bit, though. The Stark boys. They’re still alive. Wouldn’t that be a hunt to remember?” the mysterious man reflects menacingly. When Theon asks “Where am I? Who are you? What do you want?” one of that man’s henchmen replies, “I want to do this.” Torture is arbitrary and endless, a manifestation of insanity, whether that madness is innate or simply the logical place men arrive at during an endless war.
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This post discusses plot points from the May 12 episode of Game of Thrones.

The third novel in George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire is titled A Storm Of Swords, but through much of this third season of Game of Thrones, the battles have happened off-screen or between the wooden troop markers on Robb Stark’s map and in his mind. Instead, the game of thrones is being played in a more literal sense, as the great lords and ladies of Westeros negotiate who will sit not just in the great chairs of the realm, but beside the people who occupy those chairs—in other words, through marital alliances. It’s only fitting, then, that Game of Thrones should spend an episode grappling with marriage and sex, with the very real difficulties of people who get to choose who they love, as well as with the fears of those who have no choice at all, and with the question of bonds between men and women outside of marriage in a society where friendship across gender lines is almost inconceivable.

The last episode of Game of Thrones, “The Climb,” ended with a transcendently romantic embrace between Jon and Ygritte after they survived a harrowing ascent of the Wall. It was a nasty little tease for a show where no one gets much in the way of happiness, a dare to the audience to continue believing in true love after an episode that brutally eviscerated the possibility of hope. So it’s fitting that their moment of joy immediately comes into question as Jon and Ygritte move from her country beyond the Wall into his in Westeros, and Jon’s choice whether or not to be “loyal to his woman” or to the vows of his that remain to him comes closer and closer.

“Is that how you lot do your fighting? You march down a road banging drums and waving banners?” Ygritte teases him about his country, which seems impossibly civilized to her. “You mean right foot left foot right foot left foot. You lot can’t remember that?” But even though Ygritte pretends not to be impressed by Westeros, her inexperience with civilization is clear. “Is that a palace?” she asks Jon of the first windmill they pass on their trek. “Who built it? Some king?…They must have been great builders, to stack the stones so high.” “If you were impressed by a windmill, you’d be swooning if you saw the great keep at Winterfell,” Jon teases her back. Their banter is a negotiation. Jon is still coming to terms with his liaison with a woman who tells him things like “Why would a girl see blood and collapse?…Girls see more blood than boys.” And Ygritte, for all she sees the wilding in Jon, is still unsure of the solidity of their relationship. “I know that you’re beautiful, and fierce, and wild. I’ll be good to you,” a painfully Jealous Orrell tells her. “You love him? Cause he’s pretty, that it? You like his pretty hair and his pretty eyes? You think pretty’s going to make you happy? You won’t love him so much when you find out what he really is.” And he’s not wrong. “I know it. If you attack the Wall, you’ll die. All of you,” Jon warns Ygritte on the road, unwilling to tell her the full truth of his continued allegiance to the Night’s Watch, but hoping to dissuade her from a mission he sees as suicidal. “All of us,” Ygritte tells him in a declaration that’s also a question. Ultimately, they delay their reckoning. “You’re mine,” Ygritte tells Jon. “And I’m yours. If we die, we die. But first we’ll live.”
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This post discusses plot points from the May 5 episode of Game of Thrones.

“If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention,” the man who’s been torturing Theon Greyjoy tells his screaming victim as he prepares to flay his finger. George R. R. Martin’s project as an author has always been to mount a critique of chivalric ideals, piercing the purity that armors knights along with their plate, and revealing that behind marriages branded as love lie horrific acts of marital rape. That this episode of Game of Thrones ends with a moment of piercing happiness, as Jon and Ygritte stand on the wall together and she gets to see not just the world she’s known, but the much bigger one South of it, is particularly painful. We’re torn between wanting to believe in the happy ending, in Jon’s joy, in Ygritte’s delight that he not only was true to her, but able to gratify her heart’s desire, and knowing what Game of Thrones has taught us over three years. Believing is a sure road to agony.

This episode is full of people who want to believe, and will take extraordinary risks to pursue their dreams. “It’s a long way up and a long way down. But I’ve waited my whole life to see the world from up there,” Ygritte tells Jon as they begin what appears to be a suicide mission of climbing the Wall. “You didn’t stop being a Crow the day you walked into Mance Rayder’s tent. But I’m your woman right now. You’re going to be loyal to your woman. The Night’s Watch don’t care if you live or die. Mance Rayder don’t care if I live or die. we’re just soldiers in their armies and there’s plenty more to carry on if we go down. With you and me. It matters to me and you. Don’t ever betray me.” Samwell Tarly, whose father was a monster to him, can still sit in the forest with Gilly and her child and sing to them “The father’s face is still and strong / He sits and judges right and wrong.” Edmure Tully sticks by his belief in true love, or at least true lust. “At least I should be able to have the same choice you had,” he tells Robb. “The laws of Gods and Men are very clear. No man can compel another man to marry.” And Robb believes that he can be fair to his uncle in some way. “You’re paying for my sins,” he says. “It’s not fair or right. I’ll remember it.” Sansa is blindly excited by the prospect of her upcoming wedding to Loras, and Loras, though he isn’t sexually attracted to her, seems to be trying to convince himself that everything will be all right. “I’ve dreamed of a large wedding since I was quite young,” he tells Sansa. “The guests, the food, the tournaments. And the bride of course. The most beautiful bride in the world, in a gown of gold and green with fringed sleeves.”

But those dreams start to come apart almost as soon as they’re articulated. Gendry, who told Arya in the previous episode that he planned to join the Brotherhood in part because he’s attracted by their egalitarian governance structure, finds himself sold by them, and neither his appeals to the Brotherhood’s core values, nor Arya’s can save him. “You told me this was a Brotherhood. You told me I could be one of you,” Gendry begs Beric Dondarrion and Thoros of Myr. “You are more than they can ever be,” Melisandre tells him, whether he wants to be or not. “They are just footsoldiers in the great war.” “He wants to be one of you,” Arya screams at her captors. “He wants to join the Brotherhood. Stop them!” “We serve the Lord of Light. the Lord of Light needs him,” Beric tells her, revealing a mix of pragmatism and dogmatism that Arya failed to see before. “Did he tell you that? Or did she?” Arya asks a man she’s come to admire, before turning on Melisandre, telling her “You’re a witch. You don’t hurt him.” But Melisandre has a response that puts Arya back on her heels with a promise of Arya’s own unhappy ending: “I see a darkness in you. And in that darkness, eyes staring back at me. Brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes. Eyes you’ll shut forever. We will meet again.”
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We’re halfway through the third season of Game of Thrones, a year that’s seen the elevation of female characters—and consensual sex—suggestions that one religion, the worship of the Lord of Light, could be gaining precedence and validity in Westeros, and some of the best swordfighting the show’s ever seen. I talked to executive story editor Bryan Cogman about how the show’s handled changes in characterization from the page to screen, how he wrote those steamy sex scenes in last week’s episode, and how the action choreography of the show comes together. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

To get started: halfway through the third season, Game of Thrones remains largely true to George R.R. Martin’s novels, but there are diversions in both plot and characterization. As the story editor, I’d be curious what the conversations about those changes look like. And in the case of characterization changes, do they tend to be driven more by the actors cast in the roles? The need to pace the story? Or a mix?

Oh, good you started with an easy one! Well, for one thing, now that we’re in Season Three — a lot of the changes stem from changes/alterations we made in previous seasons. Now, Margaery Tyrell, as we’ve talked about before, is an important character in the novels in terms of plot but she isn’t a point of view character and you don’t really get to know her until later in the saga. And even then, she’s not really driving her own storylines. Now, in Season Two, we always planned to go behind the curtain, if you will, with Renly and his relationships, but even with that, Margaery was still planned to be (more or less) a minor character. Now, Natalie Dormer was original considered for another role. I’m not sure who’s idea it was to have her be Margaery, but casting her immediately changed the character and the possibilites for her before we even started writing. It allowed us to move up the Cersei versus Margaery dynamic–that’s a big part of a later book).

And this solved a few problems we needed to deal with as we started adapting A Storm of Swords. If you break down A Storm of Swords, there isn’t a ton of King’s Landing story in the first half of the book, and virtually nothing for a few characters (Cersei, Littlefinger, Varys) to do. So having Margaery be a greater presence on the show (coupled with her arrival of grandmother, Lady Olenna) allowed us to dramatize the arrival of the Tyrells and their effect on the Lannisters (and Cersei, Joffrey) in particular. And the idea of Margaery as a sort of Princess Di type was very interesting–and that’s definitely in the books–her popularity with the people is mentioned, we just took that ball and ran with it.
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It’s far from confirmed, but some early reports are coming out that Friday Night Lights, Chronicle, and Fruitvale Station star Michael B. Jordan is under consideration to play Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four reboot—and that his sister would be played by Allison Williams, making the formerly white siblings interracial:

According to The Wrap, Michael B. Jordan of Chronicle fame could take the role of Johnny Storm aka the Human Torch in the upcoming Fantastic Four reboot.

We recently reported that Girls star Allison Williams was up for what we assumed was the role of Johnny’s sister Susan the Invisible Woman. Jordan is black and Williams is white, which raises questions regarding Johnny and Susan’s parentage in the film, considering they are brother and sister in the comics, but certainly adoption or making them step-siblings are among the options if both of these casting choices are finalized.

Jordan is a phenomenal actor, and the prospect of him leveling up to blockbusters should make people who like excellent performances very happy. Unfortunately, this news seems likely to prompt the same sorts of hysteria that came to the fore when Idris Elba, the black British actor, was cast as Heimdall, the guardian of the rainbow bridge in the film adaptation of Thor, and when Nonso Anozie was cast as fabulously wealthy merchant in Game of Thrones. For some reason, there are certain fans of established particularly poorly when adaptations of their favorite material either change the race of a character in the transition from page to screen, or cast an actor of a race that the fans didn’t have the imagination to expect.

What’s striking about a lot of these characters is that, whether they’re written as white or not, their race doesn’t tend to be particularly important to their characterization. Johnny Storm is a playboy. Xaro is rich. Heimdall is impassive. These are the characteristics about them that are foregrounded in the texts where they originate. Of course, there are ways in which either illustrating those characters or assuming that they’re white inflect those characteristics. Johnny can probably get away with things that, were he black, might get him branded irresponsible or profligate. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing recently, the black-white wealth gap is a matter of public policy, and that produces different assumptions about how black and white characters, even in fiction, obtained their wealth. And big white men and big black men face obvious and different assumptions about their strength and what they might use it for. But even though these characters are assumed to be white—or there’s an assumption that they should continue to be portrayed by white actors—by fans, there isn’t any compelling reason for them to stay that way. If these characters aren’t used to explore whiteness, then there’s no reason for them to stay that way other than that fans prefer to see white people in those roles. And in the absence of specific white people competing for them, the objections don’t even become about specific things certain actors might bring to the role. It’s just about whiteness.

Sometimes, casting a black actor in a role previously assumed to be white won’t make that role about blackness either, nor should it. One would hope that Asgard and Westeros (or Essos) haven’t somehow managed to replicate America’s racial politics, or that in worlds with gods and dragons, people of color aren’t the things that are implausible, or that stand out most. But if people want to defend keeping characters white, and if reverse racebending is going to work right and put more non-white actors in roles where race doesn’t matter to the characters, I hope these conversations don’t stop there. It would be terrific to see more thought put into what living as both a white person and a person of color bring to certain characters. Not all stories are explicitly about race, and not every experience characters have is defined solely about their racial or ethnic experience. But considering race among many other factors, including class, gender, and sexual orientation is a way to build out a character, and a whole world.

Over at the Daily Beast yesterday, I wrote about a television phenomenon that officially became a trend over the weekend: the prestige television male virgin. I explained:

On last night’s Game of Thrones, after getting seduced by wildling warrior Ygritte (Rose Leslie), Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) confessed that “There’s been no one else.” Ygritte knew that as a man of the Night’s Watch, the celibate brotherhood who guards the Wall which marks the border of Westeros, Jon was forbidden from having sex after he swore the vows she asked him to break. But she assumed that he’d had sex before he joined up, and was surprised to learn she’d been mistaken. “A maid! You’re a maid,” she teased him.

An hour later on Sunday night’s television line-up, Mad Men copywriter Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman), whose father sprung a blind date with a pretty schoolteacher on him, confessed during a bout of logorrhea at the diner where he took her that “I’ve never had sex, not even once.” His confession was inexplicable, even to him. “What am I doing?” Ginsberg moaned. “I ordered soup. I just said that.” And Jon and Michael are in good company. Much of the third season of Downton Abbey, which aired on PBS earlier this season, concerned the sexual awakening of Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) after he marries Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery), ending years of sexual yearning and passing into the realm where, in the words of his bride “all things are permitted.”

As I wrote earlier in our discussion of lies pop culture tells us, one of the biggest is that everyone’s having sex all of the time, and that everyone started having sex sometime late in high school or early in college. It’s worth noting that all three of these stories which have acknowledged that there isn’t a set age at which everyone is miraculously divested of their virginity are in some form or other period pieces. Game of Thrones is set in a world where youthful marriage means that a lot of people do have sex for the first time at a relatively early age, but often not in a truly consensual fashion. Downton Abbey is set in an environment where nice people of both sexes are expected to come to marriage inexperienced, and when the slow burn of sexual tension is a key source of cultural drama. And one of the things that Mad Men captures with great perceptiveness is the uneven arrival of the sexual revolution in different characters’ lives depending on their level of privilege and the conditions of their upbringing.

It would be nice to see some shows attempt to tell similar and similarly respectful stories about characters in contemporary settings, and about women as well as men. High school and college may be the point by which the majority of people have sex for the first time, but they aren’t the only times that people decide to—or get a chance to—have sex for the first time, and there are different concerns and different anxieties about it at different ages. I’m not saying that pop culture should abandon teen and young adult sex stories. But Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and Downton Abbey all serve as a reminder that there’s rich material in different kinds of first time stories, whether someone’s having sex for the first time at a different point in their life, or having sex for the first time with a new partner, which can be just as momentous as the first time period.

This post discusses plot points from the April 28 episode of Game of Thrones.

Much of Game of Thrones is concerned with the question of how individual players accumulate authority, consolidate their positions, and expend their resources, whether it’s Varys living to spite the man who maimed him and taking delivery of the once-powerful sorcerer in a box, or Dany taking terrible gambles to hatch her dragons and free a slave army that will be loyal to her. But this week’s episode, written by story editor Bryan Cogman, asks a rather different question. If you’re not a major player in the game of thrones, how do you decide who is deserving of your loyalty? And what happens when you withdraw or transfer it?

In the captivity of the Brotherhood Without Banners, Arya struggles with the idea that judgement should be outsourced to the Lord of Light, who Thoros entreats to “Show us the truth. Strike this man down if he is guilty, and give strength to his sword if he is true,” in the matter of Sandor Clegane. “He’s guilty!” Arya protests when the giant knight survives his trial by combat, and of course, she’s right, she saw him kill Micah. But she is entranced by at least some of what she sees in the cave, particularly Thoros’ resurrection of Beric Dondarrion after the Hound kills him. Every time I come back, I’m a bit less. Pieces of you get chipped away,” the knight tells her. “Could you bring back a man without a head?” Arya asks Thoros, wistfully, thinking of her father. “Not six times. Just once? “I don’t think it works that way, child,” Thoros tells her gently but truthfully—his faith can give her many things, but neither the revenge nor the healing that she wants.

And if Arya’s confused by that, she’s equally upset by Gendry’s decision to pledge his loyalty to the Brotherhood, particularly given the way it exposes the fault lines between them and the difference between Arya’s worldview and that of the man who’s become her surviving older brother. “I’ve served men my entire life,” Gendry tells Arya when she suggests he come with her to rejoin Robb at Riverrun. “I served Tobho Mott in King’s Landing and he sold me to the Night’s Watch. I served Lord Tywin at Harrenhal wondering every day if I’d get tortured or killed. I’m done serving…He may be their leader, but they chose him.” “I can be your family,” Arya protests.“You wouldn’t be my family. You’d be my Lady,” Gendry tells her. Even in the wilderness, Arya’s coming up against the limitations of her family name and her station of birth. She’s one of the few people in the story for whom being downwardly mobile might be genuinely liberating.
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This post discusses plot points from the April 21 episode of Game of Thrones.

“Power is a curious thing,” Lord Varys told Tyrion Lannister in the second season of Game of Thrones, offering him up a parable to explain his point. “Three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man. Between them stands a common sellsword. Each great man bids the sellsword kill the other two. Who lives, who dies? Power resides where men believe it resides; it’s a trick, a shadow on the wall, and a very small man can cast a very large shadow.” But this week’s episode of Game of Thrones is a seminar in all of the ways that Varys’ story itself is a masterful piece of misdirection. Power is sometimes where you least expect it, and those wise enough to know that can magnify their influence by taking advantage of those foolish enough to overlook and underestimate them.

Varys—who is emerging as one of the strongest characters in Game of Thrones, thanks to his enhanced role and Conleth Hill’s stiletto of a performance—knows that, of course. “Prodigies appear in the oddest of places,” he muses, both considering reports of Podrick Payne’s sexual prowess*, and letting Ros knows he appreciates the initiative she took in approaching him with information about Littlefinger’s plans, in wise recognition that she won’t have her existing patron for much longer.

He’s not the only one who reflects on the advantage of surprise. “Are you here to seduce me, Lord Varys?” the Queen of Thorn asks him. “Please, seduce away. It’s been so long.” The man who has been helping Theon, and who turns out to have betrayed him, brags of his cleverness in what turns out to be a canny act of double misdirection that takes advantage of Theon’s lofty self-regard, unbroken by torture. “I served them, the men who were torturing you,” the man tells Theon, playing innocent in reporting his play at innocence. “I did what they said and waited for the right moment.” You speak Valyrian?” the Wise Master of Astapor asks Daenerys Targaryen when she reveals that she’s been listening to him insult her throughout their entire negotiation. “I am Danyaers Stormborn of the House Targaryen, of the blood of Old Valyria,” she tells him with calm contempt. “Valyrian is my mother tongue.”
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Starz seems to have settled on explicit sex and violence as the keys to its brand precisely at the moment when the flagrant use of both of those elements in television drama has ceased to be a novel advantage cable held over the networks and started getting embarrassing, and not a little dull. And even though Spartacus, the franchise that perhaps made the best use of those elements in service of genuine ideas, has just finished its run on Starz, the network appears to be doubling down with Black Sails, a pirate show that’s being advertised as an opportunity for Michael Bay to move on up from showing Megan Fox arching her back to depicting actual lesbian sex and for Toby Stephens to get another crack at the American market after playing Fergus Wolfe in Possession didn’t exactly set his career on fire:

There’s a good show to be done about piracy. But it’s one that requires the showrunners to know as much about Caribbean governance, and economics—some privateering contracts guaranteed fair, consistent monthly wages and advance pay—social dynamics that gave pirates a certain amount of social capital in polite society as well as in island enclaves, slavery, and cooperative organizing as about how to make a lady look fetching in a corset.

It’s notable that this season of Game of Thrones has—with the exception of this weekend’s scene in Littlefinger’s brothel—dramatically scaled down its use of nudity and scaled up its discussion of policy issues, from the ethics and efficacy of purchasing a slave army to the impact on Westeros of the particular people who have helped the country run up a sizable national debt. There was a sense in some of the commentary on the show last year that the prodigious use of nudity in both non-consensual scenes and situations involving prostitution was cheesy, a sop to less sophisticated viewers who might not otherwise be inclined to keep track of the show’s enormous roster of characters or engage with its big ideas about the morality of war. In other words, a clear distinction was emerging between adult drama and “adult” content. And in the show’s third season, characters have talked more about sexual assault and sexual experiences than we’ve actually seen on screen. How characters like Brienne of Tarth and Jaime Lannister respond to a threat of sexual assault, or how Tyrion Lannister interrogates Podrick Payne about his first sexual experience matters much more than watching their bodies in motion.
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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.