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.

This post discusses plot points from the April 14 episode of Game of Thrones. As always, if you want to discuss events from the books in comments, please mark your posts as such.

This episode of Game of Thrones begins with Edmure Tully shooting flaming arrows at the boat that’s carrying his father’s body—and falling short, repeatedly. It’s an apt opening to an episode of the show that’s concerned with rituals and institutions, and that argues, often in dreadful ways, that Westeros’ best institutions and traditions are frequently doomed to failure or misinterpretation, while its worst are the ones to which people adhere most rigorously.

First, there’s the drive for individual glory, which leads Edmure to attack the Mountain rather than listening to Rob’s strategy, and recognizing that long-term goals sometimes involve short-term losses of face, and understanding how badly the King in the North needs to preserve his resources. “I wanted to draw the Mountain into the West, into our country where we could surround him and kill him,” Robb tells Edmure despairingly. “I wanted him to chase him, which he would have done because he is a mad dog without a strategic thought in his head. I could have had his head on a spike right now. Instead, I have a mill.”

South in King’s Landing, Tyrion Lannister is learning that his family has pursued another opportunity open to them to ruinous ends: the ability to finance their war to hold the kingdom together with debt, rather than through taxation or budget cuts. “For years I’ve herad that Littlefinger is a magician. Whenever the crown needs money, he rubs his hands together and poof! Mountains of gold,” Tyrion tells Bronn wearily. “He’s borrowing it…We can’t afford to pay it back, that’s what’s wrong with it. The crown owes millions to my father” Bronn tries to brush his concerns aside, telling the man he serves, “Seeing as it’s his grandson’s ass on the throne, I imagine he’ll forgive that debt,” an assessment that ignores the fact that the Lannisters have a tendency to collect on their debts as well as to pay them. And Tyrion points out a larger problem, explaining that unlike the United States, Westeros has gotten itself in hock to people who will more than gladly move against the regime. ” It isn’t my father I’m worried about,” he tells Bronn. ” It’s the Iron Bank of Braavos. We owe them tens of millions. If we fail to repay these loans, the bank will fund our enemies. One way or another, they always get their gold back.” If the Chinese government worked the same way, then we’d really have a problem.

Overseas and in the countryside, other characters are discovering the weaknesses of institutions and reputations they depended on. “I bet you feed that pig better than you feed us,” a ranger complains bitterly to Craster when the deeply depleted Night’s Watch patrol returns to his keep on their way back to the Wall. “That pig has value to me,” Craster tells him. Craster may never have been particularly deferential to the institutions of the civilized world, given the harem he’s built for himself beyond it, and the extent to which he’s able to enforce his will as law. But the venom of his contempt demonstrates the extent to which the stock of the Night’s Watch has deteriorated as the wildlings organize and as winter approaches. And so has the Greyjoy family’s brand. “I’ll make you a Lord of the Iron Islands for this,” Theon tells the mysterious man who is helping him escape. “We’re not in the Iron Islands,” the man warns him cryptically, though whether he regrets Theon’s lack of power to reward him or is only to happy to reinforce is left an open question by his tone.
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Yesterday at The Daily Beast, I got to dig into an idea that’s been striking me for a while: that in the age of anti-hero dramas, teenage girl characters have become almost as prevalent as middle-aged men with dark secrets who we shouldn’t root for, but do. In a look at Game of Thrones, Homeland, Mad Men, and The Americans, I explained:

Like almost every major anti-hero drama on television today, Mad Men is also a story about what it’s like to be a young girl discovering the realities of the world she’s living in. The secret of today’s prestige television is that it can all be read as young adult fiction….

In Homeland, Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), the prisoner of war who returns home after years of captivity by the terrorist Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), reconnects most easily with his daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor). She’s pulled into her father’s plan to become a suicide bomber and the CIA efforts to stop him when agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), deep in a bipolar episode, asks Dana, in desperation, to help stop him. Dana insists that she doesn’t believe he could possibly be a terrorist, but calls her father anyway. A year later, when Carrie is interrogating Brody, she tells him, “It was hearing Dana’s voice that changed your mind, wasn’t it?” Dana, whether she intended it or not, has become a full participant in the moral world of grown-ups, due to her father’s plot. And she finally reaches maturity in the second season, when she realizes that Carrie was right, though for the wrong reasons—she’s finally capable of seeing Brody independently, rather than through the haze of daughterly love…

Mad Men has always had Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka), who was a little girl for much of the series, but one with secrets of her own, including her relationship with Glenn Bishop (Marten Holden Weiner). But this year, she is growing into maturity. After Betty’s cited for reckless driving, Sally tests her mother’s limits, announcing to Henry, “Isn’t somebody going to say something? Betty got a ticket.” She may have rushed home after getting her period last season, but now Sally’s shutting the door on Betty’s face to have some privacy on the phone and asking to go to New Year’s Eve parties.

The regular presence of teenaged girls, particularly teenaged girls in juxtaposition to anti-heroes, isn’t a new development, either. The Sopranos had Meadow Soprano, Tony’s daughter, The Wire had Felicia Pearson, 24 had Kim Bauer, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer let the teenaged girl herself be at the center of the frame—and even sometimes let her be a little bit anti-heroic herself. At this point, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead are notable in part for having teenaged boys in relation to their main characters, and in giving them fewer opportunities to critically assess their parents than shows like Homeland, Mad Men, or The Americans do, and Justified and Sons of Anarchy are notable for not really featuring teenagers at all.

What’s interesting—and I think considerably unremarked on—about the rise of a teenaged girl as a staple of big, prestige, often anti-heroic dramas is that these characters function as built-in critics of the behavior of the adults who are at the ostensible centers of the shows they share. Sally Draper is one of the first people to really see the cracks in her family’s facade, whether her parents are late to pick her up from ballet practice, or failing to be on the same page as parents, with Betty shunted into the role of enforcer while Don gets to be Fun Dad. One of the things that’s made Morgan Saylor’s performance as Dana so impressive on Homeland is the way that Dana simultaneously loves her father deeply and comes to see his true flaws—not the conversion to Islam that upsets her mother so much—more quickly and clearly than anyone else in her family. On Game of Thrones, teenaged boys like Jon Snow, Robb Stark, and even to a certain extent Loras Tyrell, get sucked into pre-packaged narratives of chivalry and bravery, while it’s teenaged girls like Sansa and Arya Stark, Margaery Tyrell, and Daenerys Targaryen who see the real truth of the system in which they’re forced to live their lives, and find ways to circumvent or expand the boundaries placed upon their lives. And while in The Americans, it’s probably too early for Paige and Henry to figure out the real nature of their parents’ work and marital arrangements, their experiences with American consumerism, latchkey kid culture, and emergent sexuality are as important expressions of the show’s themes as Elizabeth and Phillip’s dalliances with sources and conversations with Claudia, their handler.

This isn’t to say that Don Draper, Tyrion Lannister, Nicholas Brody, or Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings don’t matter. But if you want to know how to judge the dark princes and princesses of prestige television drama, you might be better off keeping your eyes on the girls standing off to the side, rather than watching the throne.

I cover Game of Thrones every Sunday night as one of my regular duties at The Week, but as I’ve followed the fan chatter from last Sunday’s “Dark Wings, Dark Words,” I wanted to use this opportunity to take a more in-depth look at the most polarizing scene from this week’s episode: Catelyn’s confession to Talisa about her role –- perceived or imagined –- in Jon Snow’s near-death experience as an infant. If you missed it, here’s the scene:

This exchange gets at the heart of something Alyssa and I talked about on Bloggingheads last week: The differences between HBO’s Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin’s original novels, and the very, very different goals of each. Though I’ve read all five of the “A Song of Ice and Fire” books, I’ve never been interested in the kind of criticism that meticulously dictates the differences between an adaptation and its source material, though I don’t begrudge anyone who is. (For what it’s worth, I don’t actually see any reason that Catelyn’s story couldn’t fit within the narrative of the original novels –- but that’s a different debate for a different time.)

However, the controversy over the very idea that Game of Thrones might be taking Catelyn on a different path than the books has overshadowed what Catelyn’s confession means for the show, and I’d like to ignore the books entirely to discuss why the scene –- which I’d argue was Michelle Fairley’s best scene as Catelyn to date –- was so significant for her character on the series.

Over the course of the series, we’ve seen Catelyn lose her husband, believe she’s lost her sons Bran and Rickon, and fear for Sansa and Arya’s fates as the hostages she believes both to be. That’s an immense amount of loss for any one character, but the idea that Catelyn has been holding herself responsible adds new resonance to her desperation to make things rights – a desperation that led her to release Jaime Lannister. Game of Thrones is set in a cruel, senseless world, in which a character like Ned Stark can end up beheaded due to the whims of a sadistic young boy. Given the immense powerlessness of her situation, it’s heartbreaking to watch Catelyn blame herself for all the tragedy that has befallen the Starks since the series began. We know, as Catelyn doesn’t, that the tragedy that has befallen the Starks was caused not by a moment of personal weakness or the anger of her seven gods, but by the deliberate actions and machinations of a series of people. Catelyn calls herself a murderer, but we’ve repeatedly seen what murder means in Westeros -– even murder abetted by a god –- and Catelyn isn’t guilty.

And Catelyn’s inability to love or accept Jon Snow extends a strange, fascinating parallel between Catelyn and Cersei Lannister that hearkens back to Game of Thrones’ first season. In “The Kingsroad,” Cersei visited Bran’s bedside and told Catelyn about the vigil she had once kept for her own child, who did not survive. As Cersei’s brother Tyrion has remarked, her one redeeming quality –- aside from her cheekbones -– is how much she loves her children. As it turns out, it’s a quality she shares with Catelyn, who has sacrificed everything to protect her children, but never found room in her heart for Jon Snow. And now, as both women contend with beloved sons that have assumed leadership and pushed them out of the game of thrones (Robb for Catelyn, and Joffrey for Cersei), they remain diametrically opposed even as they undergo a similar trial. Catelyn’s grief and anxiety over the horrors she believes she’s wrought mirrors Cersei’s own fear that the tragedy in her life is “the price we pay for our sins,” which she confessed to Tyrion in season two. As Game of Thrones continues to blur the lines between our heroes and our villains, it’s a worthwhile and powerful reminder that no one on this series is innocent.

This post discusses plot points from the April 7 episode of Game of Thrones.

Game of Thrones, in keeping with its title, spends much of its time meditating on how people maneuver to acquire power. Whether it’s dragons, whispers, sex, or brute force, the show does an excellent job exploring which tools different kinds of people choose, and what happens to them once they adopt their chosen ends. But not everyone in Westeros and Essos is meant to or intends to sit the Iron Throne. And “Dark Wings, Dark Words” is a strong episode of the show because it poses a rather different set of questions. What does it mean to be brave in the world of Game of Thrones when you don’t have armies, or dragons, the right name or gender, or even the physical capability to defend yourself?

It makes sense that an episode concerned with these issues includes a figure who once thought of himself as brave and powerful, but has been stripped of his armor, weapons, and authority. “Where am I?” asks Theon Greyjoy, shackled to a wooden cross, alone in the dark. “Who are you? What do you want?” “I want to do this,” one of his captors tells him, taking a knife to his hand. The man with the weapon has power, but it’s not brave to torture an unarmed and disconcerted man. And even as Theon disintegrates, there’s a certain amount of courage in the little integrity he’s able to hold on to. “Tell us the truth,” his interrogator asks him. “About what?” Theon begs him, still not at the point of simply talking. “I don’t know what you want!” When he breaks down after being hooded, there’s no particular shame in his plea “I’ll tell you anything. Just take it off. Please, please, just take it off.” Invulnerability is a kind of foolishness.

Brienne’s entrance into the season is a reminder that physical strength can be paired with emotional vulnerability, and that sometimes emotional openness can be a kind of strength. Jamie Lannister, irritated by her uprightness, tries to bait her about her loyalty and focus, saying: “You think Lady Stark’s going to want a giant, tow-headed plank following her around for the rest of her life?” What he doesn’t count on is that Brienne’s open to the possibility of rejection. “If Lady Stark is unhappy with any aspect of my service, I’m sure she’ll let me know,” Brienne tells him. “She’s an honest woman.” The only subject on which Jamie manages to get a rise out of her is Renly.
“I did not fancy him,” Brienne insists, giving herself away. “Gods, you did. Did you ever tell him?” Jamie jabs at her. “You’re far too much man for him.” But having elicited a reaction from her, Jamie backs down, in part because it’s a subject on which he, too, is vulnerable. “I don’t blame him,” Jamie tells Brienne. “And I don’t blame you, either. We don’t get to choose who we love.” But he should have recognized that just as loving Cersei hasn’t made him less of a warrior, loving and losing Renly hasn’t made Brienne soft. When he gets her sword and taunts her “See. If you were willing to hurt me, you might have had me there,” Jamie’s forgetting that holding back can be a form of testing someone, that it can show a respect for violence not to use it except when you usually meet it. And when Brienne beats him, she doesn’t need to even look at him to know she’s won. Self-knowledge is as great an asset as a second sword.
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The Week’s entertainment editor Scott Meslow was kind enough to sit down with me to record an episode of Bloggingheads that touched on two subjects dear to my heart: Game of Thrones and Mad Men:

In particular we talked about the idea that television can be a novel, an idea popularized during the heyday of shows like The Wire and The Sopranos. I absolutely agree that television shows can function like novels, in that they can tell long-arc stories, develop characters in a rich way, and play with large themes. But there are technological divides that separate what they can do. In a book, you can stay within the medium and flip back and forth if you don’t remember who a character is, or need to check back in on an event that happened previously. Increasingly, large books hold character guides and world maps. The entire universe of the story is there in a single volume. And that means you can throw an enormous amount of material at a reader. But in a television show, if the world gets big enough, you may need to venture outside of the medium to refresh yourself, whether you’re checking Wikipedia for a character name, switching disks to see an old scene, or skimming through Netflix to find the right moment. If you can’t remember something, you may have to break the spell.

And I wonder if Game of Thrones, which has pulled together an enormous number of characters in a book, may be reaching the limits of the extent to which a television show can act like a novel. Alan Sepinwall, whose review of the third season we discussed in this episode, noted in that piece that “On The Wire, for instance, characters frequently crossed paths, and when they didn’t, you could tell how one person’s actions were affecting someone else far away. On Boardwalk Empire, the narrative strands don’t always seem clearly tied together at first, but they inevitably come together in satisfying fashion by season’s end. Both Martin and Game of Thrones are playing a longer game than that.” And I think that long game poses challenges. It’s hard to remember the names of more than 200 characters you aren’t seeing every episode and as part of the same storylines, especially when you don’t see them written down, and especially when ten months pass in between the last time you’ve seen them and the next time you do. And as someone who obviously read the books before the show started, I wonder if it’s not just harder to remember these characters in the glut of information, but whether it’s hard to get attached.

Now, obviously Martin’s books have been released on a cycle that by the standards of television look leisurely. But they’re also able to give much more space to each character—sometimes for good, sometimes for ill—unconstrained by the production budgets, writing, production, and editing cycles, and standard length of a television episode that inevitably provide structure to the show. That means he writes a fair amount of digression and worldbuilding into the books, but also that he’s not bound by anything except how many pages his publishers can bind into a single volume, and even then, if he’s got to spill over into more volumes, they’re going to be nothing but happy. And those digressions, and the amount of time it takes to read the books, just give readers more hooks into the stories, the characters, and the settings. Sprawl, for good and ill, is a characteristic of books in a way that it never can be of television. I’m not saying that means the books are better than the show. But I do think that they expose some of the irreducible differences between reading and watching television once you reach a certain scope.

In a terrific piece about the appeal of Game of Thrones for the London Review of Books, John Lanchester identifies one of the signal things that differentiate George R. R. Martin’s epic and HBO’s adaptation of it. Rather than asking you to believe in magic along with characters who take its existence for granted, an apparent hurdle for some readers that I must confess I’ve always found to be an inexplicable act of snobbery, the books set up a division between many of the characters and readers: they assume that magic is dead, but we know it’s real. Lanchester explains:

The second big reason for the success of the series may be adjacent to the point about instability. It concerns magic. The whole issue of magic, in turn, seems to be the principal turn-off (‘elves don’t exist’) for non-readers of fantasy. In Westeros, people agree with that. They don’t believe in magic either. There used to be dragons, not just in the distant mythological past but in historical memory, and the dragons’ skulls are preserved as relics. But the dragons got smaller over time, and then died out, and with them the magic left the world. In the north of Westeros there’s a 700-foot-high wall, built to keep out ‘white walkers’, terrifying undead magical sort-of zombies who once lived in this same north and were a mortal danger to men. The wall is guarded by the Night’s Watch, a sworn order of men who take a lifelong oath to defend the world to the south from the white walkers. But nobody apart from them still believes in the white walkers. As Tyrion puts it, the Watch are there to defend Westeros from ‘grumkins and snarks and all the other monsters your wet nurse warned you about’. The Night’s Watch has become a dumping ground for the kingdom’s losers and criminals, and their membership consists of (Tyrion again) ‘sullen peasants, debtors, poachers, rapers, thieves and bastards’.

The reader, however, knows different. The very first scene in the huge saga begins with three members of the Night’s Watch, on a mission north of the wall, coming into contact with white walkers and meeting a horrible end as a result. The Night’s Watch, and the ‘wildings’, outlaws who live north of the wall, are the only people in the world who believe in the white walkers – but we readers know they are a real and imminent danger. We know also that dragons have been reborn into the world, thanks to Daenerys Targaryen, who fled Robert Baratheon’s infanticidal wrath as a mere baby and has grown up over the seas and to the east of Westeros, where she was married off by her brother to Khal Drogo, the terrifyingly martial Dothraki ‘horse lord’ – the Dothraki being a bit like the Mongols. (Oh, in case you’re wondering – he dies.) In the coup de théâtre that ends the first series, Daenerys climbs into a funeral pyre carrying three dragon eggs, and emerges at dawn with three baby dragons, the first the world has seen in hundreds of years. We surmise, from these events and from the title of the sequence, that Westeros is heading for a white walker v. dragon stand-off, at some exciting juncture a couple of fat novels away.

He pivots from this observation to an argument I think is equally fascinating, suggesting that the instability of Westeros’ seasons’ and its increasing brutality and inequality are an appropriate and frightening mirror of our own conditions and confusion about our changing environment. But I want to linger with this idea because I think it’s an important one. What does it mean to posit the belief in impossible things as the height of rationality, while a rejection of magic is set up as a rejection of history, and to a certain extent, a rejection of reasoned inquiry? And what does it mean in particular to set up that inversion in a series that’s deeply dedicated to demythologizing the central bit of magic in its genre, the idea of an inevitable happy ending for the virtuous, particularly the virtuous and disadvantaged?

To a certain extent, I think that the way Martin and his adaptors have treated magic is as a warning not to underestimate how terrible it’s possible for things to become. Magic is normally multi-directional in fantasy, useable for good or evil, and that’s often a key source of tension in any given franchise. But magic in Game of Thrones is far less controllable by individual humans. It’s an independent force of its own. Daenerys Targaryen may have figured out how to hatch her dragons, but they’re individual creatures with a certain degree of sentience. The White Walkers are a force all their own. Melisandre may be able to give birth to shadow-y assassins, but it’s not yet clear the extent to which she’s a miracle worker capable of summoning power independent, and the extent to which she insists that she’s a servant of the Lord of Light is actually a more accurate description of how her power is bounded. In between those significant examples, magic in Westeros effectively functions as a reminder of the dangerousness of assuming that certain challenges to your stability have vanished from the earth, and of assuming that new and hugely disruptive forces can’t suddenly emerge to create enormous technological asymmetries, like a troika of Targaryens showing up dragon-back to conquer Westeros.
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On Friday, Happy Endings, ABC’s warm, wonderful sitcom that’s a cross between the chosen-family dynamic of Friends and the anarchic pop culture analysis of Community, debuted in a new timeslot to just 3 million viewers, and a 0.9 rating in the valuable 18-49 demographic. Two days later, The Walking Dead, AMC’s violent zombie drama, finished its third season with 12.4 million viewers, 8.4 million of them between the ages of 18 and 49. These two disparate bits of data could be evidence for a lot of different ideas: the general ascendence of cable over broadcast networks, for example, or the American viewing public’s appetite for violent media. But I want to use it to point out something different, and something that I think plays a larger role than is generally acknowledged in the failure of some broadcast shows and the success of turning many cable shows into must-see TV: unpredictable broadcast television scheduling has made it impossible to turn any single television show into a predictable viewing event.

When Happy Endings debuted in 2011, its first episode aired at 9:31 PM even though the show would normally be airing at 10PM. After the third episode, ABC began doubling up the episodes, airing one at 10PM and another at 10:30. In the second season, the show moved to 9:30 PM. In its third, Happy Endings aired first on Tuesdays at 9 PM, then on Sundays with Don’t Trust The B—- In Apt. 23, and now on the Wednesday time slot that’s done so poorly. While in the show’s first season, episodes 1-12 ran on consecutive weeks without a break in between, there was a three-month gap between the 12th episode, which aired on May 25, and the thirteenth, which aired on August 24. In the second season, the episodes ran in consecutive weeks with a break for Thanksgiving until December, when ABC aired one episode, then took the show off the air until January. And in this third season, the show went off the air for two months, between January 29 and March 29. In between the shifts of time slot and the gaps in between episodes, it makes sense that Happy Endings would get whittled down to a core group of viewers who were committed enough to follow it from day to day and from month to month: who else could possibly be expected to chase the show across the calendar for years at a time?

Scheduling changes like this are due to a number of factors, among them high rates of show failure and the excessive length of the traditional broadcast season. Happy Endings moved to Sundays to replace the cancelled 666 Park Avenue, and networks often shuffle shows around to plug holes on their schedules that emerge as new shows fail to attract audiences and are removed form the calendar. And no show on network can both be aired every week and fill out a season that’s eight months long when the standard broadcast network order is for around 22 episodes of a program. This mismatch ought to create opportunities for networks to pair up existing shows with miniseries, shorter-run series with expensive stars like The Following, for which Fox promised Kevin Bacon he’d only have to do 15 episodes a year, or launches of new shows towards the end of the year, as was the strategy for another ABC show, Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, which has grown into a genuine hit in its second—but first full-length—season. But in reality, it frequently makes for lumpy seasons with long breaks. Parks and Recreation may be the show on network television to which I am most emotionally attached but now, if I didn’t feel a professional obligation to watch it in a timely fashion (something I do on Hulu the morning after rather than the night of), I’d let the episodes pile up on my DVR until I could have the pleasure of a long, luxuriant evening with it, rather than risk disappointment by clearing my Thursdays only to find that the show isn’t on.
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This post discusses plot points from the March 31 episode of Game of Thrones. If you want to discuss the events of A Storm of Swords or subsequent books in George R.R. Martin’s series, please label your posts as such.

As is necessary with a show like Game of Thrones, the first episode of this third season is concerned both with reiterating the larger forces advancing on Westeros—it begins beyond the Wall, where Samwell Tarly is pursued by the White Walkers and ends in Astapor, where Daenerys Targaryen is contemplating the moral implications of purchasing an army of slaves as a necessary corrective to the slow growth of her dragons—and dealing with the implications of the Battle of the Blackwater, which forged new alliances and left new scars. But it’s also preoccupied with another set of related themes. Where does power come from? And what are the paths to acquiring it, particularly for people born outside of birthright claims to influence?

Some men are made great, or at least elevated to positions from which they can achieve greatness, by circumstance. Mance Rayder, the former Brother of the Night’s Watch who’s united giants and gorgeous red-heads alike into a massive encampment beyond the Wall, brought them together through a shared threat. When Jon Snow, who’s turned his cloak at the behest of his Lord Commander, faces the difficult question of why he’s come to Mance, the answer he gives appears to be the ones that united the wildlings—the real deception is in suggesting that the wildlings and the Night’s Watch don’t share the same goal. “I saw Craster take his own baby boy and leave it in the woods. I saw what took it,” Jon tells Mance. “Because when I told the Lord Commander, he already knew. Thousands of years ago, the first men battled the white walkers and defeated them. I want to fight for the side that fights for the living. Did I come to the right place?”

Back in King’s Landing, another rather disreputable fellow’s found himself elevated by circumstance: Bronn the mercenary is become Ser Bronn of the Blackwater, a promotion related by the nervous Podrick Payne to two members of the Kingsguard who find themselves doubting his bona fides. But as Bronn finds out when he attempts to claim his title and the influence that would go with it is that titles don’t automatically carry power with them. Your claim has to be recognized—just as the wildlings had to grant authority to Mance for him to lead them, Bronn is finding that deference is not an automatic affair.

And power, once granted, can be taken away by circumstance or by a decision that strips you of legitimacy. Last season, Cat Stark made the decision to free Jamie Lannister to trade him for her sons, and now she’s reckoning with the status she forfeited for a chance to have her daughters back. “Find her a chamber that will serve as a cell,” her son Robb orders his men. When his wife, Talisa, protests that “She’s your mother,” Robb explains that Cat forfeited the legitimacy that would have entitled her to deference. “She freed Jamie Lannister. He robbed [Rickard Karstark] of his sons. She robbed him of his justice.”
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