(Courtesy ABC News)

When I got the news this evening that the actor James Gandolfini had died of an apparent heart attack at 51 while on vacation with his family in Italy, I gasped so sharply that the friend I was having dinner with thought a family member had died. In a way, he had. If you write about television, as I do, or watch it frequently, Gandolfini’s performance as Tony Soprano on the titular show that helped remake HBO and prestige television along with it was a major contribution to the world we inhabit together. But like a good friend or good relative, Gandolfini didn’t just provide a larger context, he kept showing up, in ways large and small but always pleasant. So many of us remember Tony Soprano, but we have our private Gandolfinis, too.

For me, Gandolfini played two of the most important supporting roles in film’s exploration of the War on Terror, and what we’ve done to ourselves in pursuit of nebulous victory within it. As Lieutenant General Miller, Senior Military Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Defense in Armando Iannucci’s lacerating look at the run-up to the war in Iraq, In The Loop, Gandolfini had a quiet, frustrated dignity even as he was dragged into self-important conversations at parties or dealing with diplomatic disaster that could lead to far worse things than embarrassment. Though he was overshadowed by showier performances in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, as the unnamed director of the CIA, Gandolfini was the adult in the room in his scenes, whether he was asking for risk assessments, or trying to figure out the puzzling, intense young analyst (Jessica Chastain) who presented him with absolute certainty in a time and place plunged into factual and moral darkness.

In Cinema Verite, one of the better movies HBO’s made in the last several years, Gandolfini played a role that was simultaneously less conventional and more predatory. As Craig Gilbert, the television producer who convinced the Louds to permit themselves to be filmed for America’s first widely-watched reality program, Gandolfini was simultaneously predatory and charming, particularly as he wooed Pat Loud (Diane Lane) into believing they’d be partners, rather than exploiter and exploited, on an important project. Tony Soprano might have killed you at sea. Craig Gilbert would eat your heart for a story.

As Carol, the lead Wild Thing in Spike Jonze’s tremendous adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are, a movie I deeply hope will become a classic that parents and children can watch together, even as it separates them, Gandolfini was a different kind of monster. If Tony Soprano presented self-indulgence as a matter of family, of tradition, of honor, Carol was the id to his super-ego, the creature who pursued pleasure for pleasure and wonder’s sake, and was crushed when he found out it wasn’t enough for Max, the little boy he’d adopted and befriended. Tony may have destroyed people he claimed to love out of a need for control, but Carol’s promise to “eat you up, we love you so,” was about desire run wild, about affection that didn’t understand the benefits of restraint.

And among my favorite Gandolfini performances was in a little movie he did with John Turturro, who wrote and directed it, a musical called Romance and Cigarettes. Blessed, as Tony Soprano was blessed, with the evocative sobriquet of Nick Murder, Gandolfini plays a working class-guy who is married to Kitty Kane (Susan Sarandon), cheating on her with Tula (Kate Winslet), and failing at being a father to Baby (Mandy Moore), Constance (Mary Louise Parker) and Rosebud (Aida Turturro). It’s a fabulously strange, sexy picture, and it begins with Gandolfini singing Englebert Humperdinck’s “Lonely Is A Man Without Love,” before proceeding on to other joys, including Eddie Izzard as a church choir director:

But more than anything else, it was Gandolfini, who gave us a man who fascinated us and commanded our sympathy despite the enormity of his crimes, reminding us that people whose only sins are against each other’s hearts deserve our attention, too. Tony Soprano opened the gates of hell to an awful lot of memorable monsters. But as an actor, James Gandolfini never seemed to forget what it meant to be profoundly, sensitively, almost obscenely human.

In the second season of Veep, Armando Iannucci’s caustic comedy about the woman who occupies the second-highest office in the land (though if you ask Kent, the President’s chief of staff, that should make her half as tall as the president), something happened. Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) got good at her job, or at least as good as a secretive President, a depressed staff, a daughter in college, and a sexually magnetic weasel of an ex-husband would let her be. And in tandem, Veep got wiser about the awkwardnesses of foreign travel, what it’s like to be climbing the Washington career ladder in your twenties, and how hard it is for people in public life to date.

I sat down with Iannucci to talk about why Selina did a Leslie Knope in her second season, what made Dick Cheney the most powerful vice president, and what makes HBO sitcoms different from their network counterparts. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to start out by asking something that had been sort of noticeable to me in the second season, which is that all of the characters seem somewhat more competent and I was wondering if you talk a little bit about that evolution of that decision.

I think there’s two things, one is, you know, we’re getting to know them and therefore, it’s all about them, doing more with them. So I think any politician, when they go into a high office, there’s a period of adjustment. All the huge mistakes that presidents make usually are within the first six months, all the embarrassing stories, and they didn’t quite get this right, and why didn’t they do that, you know, that sort of goes on. But also I felt the first season was about coming to terms with the limitations of her job and also her staff. The second season would be more about what happens when you have power and influence, what does that do to you? Because that’s what you got into politics for. Okay what happens when you get what you’ve been asking for?
Read more

The finale of the third season of Game of Thrones featured a whole bunch of major developments, including Arya going full murderer on some minor Freys, Dany taking Yunkai, and Jaime Lannister’s less-than-totally-joyful reunion. But it also ended a season that made significant changes to George R.R. Martin’s novels, both in the moment, and in terms of the implications of this season for events that Martin hasn’t yet resolved in prose. For those of us who have read the novels, here are five questions that the third season raises both for Martin’s novels, and for how events will play out in subsequent seasons.

1. What happens at Joffrey’s wedding? In Martin’s books, Jaime Lannister makes it back to King’s Landing after Joffrey’s wedding to Margaery Tyrell, not to celebrate, but to mourn the death of his unacknowledged son with his sister Cersei, after someone poisons Joffrey during the nuptial feast. That timing means that Jaime can’t do much to avenge Joffrey’s death in the moment, except to visit his brother Tyrion, the main suspect, in prison. But even though Jaime’s been maimed, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t want to take immediate action to try to keep Joffrey alive, or to exact violent revenge against whoever he suspects of killing his son. This is, after all, a guy who pushed a little kid out a window as one of the “things I do for love.” What’s the wedding going to look like now?
Read more

“It’s funny that this crowd would like something this gay,” Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), tells his date, Bob Black (Scott Bakula) at a Liberace concert in Las Vegas at the beginning of Steven Soderbergh’s HBO movieBehind The Candelabra. “Oh, they have no idea he’s gay,” Bob tells him. That willingness to see what you want to see, and the question of who can hide in plain sight, and under what circumstances, is at the heart of this biopic of the musician, and Scott, who would become his lover. Behind The Candelabra is campy, blunt, and strange, but most of all, it’s an enormously perceptive movie about how the closet works, and how the lack of legal recognition for relationships can become not just a weapon the state uses to distinguish between its citizens, but a void that the people in those relationships can use to hurt and degrade each other.

The New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum wrote in her review of the movie that for Liberace, “His was a closet that had its own pleasures, particularly since he had the resources to decorate it to his specifications.” That is undeniably, tackily true, but there’s a larger point there. Liberace had the resources to design a closet that would be largely impregnable to the outside world, including the ability to get rumors about which woman he might be dating, and what kinds of women he liked, into the press, and the lawyers who could successfully mount libel suits in countries like Britain, discouraging other press outlets from pursuing the suggestion that he might be gay. But because Liberace had to construct that closet so carefully, and to consider the consequences were he to be outed, he also had confronted his sexuality fully. If Liberace was going to go to the effort of closeting himself, he was going to make sure he had a dandy time while ensconced in it, whether explaining to Scott that “I’ve had implants,” asking the younger man to use poppers during sex, or consuming pornography and visiting sex shops.

Scott, by contrast, has neither Liberace’s need nor resources to hide his sexuality from the outside world. His foster parents seem relatively understanding about his sexuality—though not his decision to take up with the older musician—and before he meets Liberace, he’s obviously got a social life, meeting Bob at a Los Angeles bar. But Scott also seems to have a more ill-defined relationship to his sexuality, and to the very act of sex with men, than his more formally closeted lover. He maintains that he’s bisexual, a sexual identity regarded with contempt by Liberace’s houseboy Carlucci (Bruce Ramsay), who witheringly tells Scott that he’s replaceable, and later by Liberace himself, who says he sees no evidence that Scott likes women at all, suggesting that bisexuality is a sort of waystation Scott’s stuck at because he can’t admit that he’s gay. And it’s not just the label he uses that comes under criticism from Liberace. “I don’t know how you can be gay and be such a prude,” the older man asks Scott when the younger man objects to some of the pornography Liberace is watching. “Disgusting is all in the eye of the disgustee.” And when Liberace wants to switch up their customary sexual positions, Scott expresses discomfort, telling his lover no “Because I don’t like it…Because it’s kind of repugnant.” “Only when it’s done to you,” Liberace deftly diagnoses him.
Read more

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.
Read more

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.
Read more

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.
Read more

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.
Read more

Alan Sepinwall has a great post up about one of the best problems a person can have, the fact that there’s too much excellent television airing right now, and that the number of shows overall, much less excellent shows, is growing far too fast for anyone to keep up. He’s got the numbers on just how big the television marketplace has grown:

Because FX keeps track of this, I asked their research department for some hard numbers on how many shows we have now versus then. In 2002 — the year “The Shield” debuted on FX — there were actually 28 original scripted dramas on premium and basic cable (some of it famous stuff like “The Wire” and “Monk,” some of it long-forgotten like “Falcon Beach” and “Breaking News”) and 6 original comedies. In 2007, there were 42 original dramas and 17 comedies. By last year, that number had ballooned to 77 original dramas and 48 comedies. And in the first four months of 2013 alone, there have been 34 dramas and 19 comedies. And that’s on top of everything that ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC and the CW are doing. That pace will slow down somewhat as we shift into summer, but I’d still expect 2013 to top the 2012 numbers, and to keep rising. Netflix is making its own original shows now, and releasing all the episodes at once. Amazon has pilots in development. The amount of television expanding, but so is our definition of what counts as “television.”

But while Alan is discussing this challenge mostly in terms of being a critic who is expected to keep up with as many things as possible, and as a consumer, I think these numbers hold the key to a larger business insight: the number of television shows has proliferated far faster than the amount of time we could dedicate to new programming could possibly expand.

I couldn’t find exactly comparable data, but television viewership doesn’t appear to have fluctuated enormously in response to this boom in content. During the 2006-2007 television season, the average American viewer was watching 4 hours and 34 minutes of television a day. Today, that number is close to five hours, 98 percent of which is watched on a traditional television. An increase of 26 minutes, give or take, isn’t bad, but it’s a rise of 9.5 percent over six years, even as there are 275 percent more original scripted drama on premium and basic cable. And 26 minutes is an increase of a single sitcom per day, which is not nothing, but not keeping pace with the rate of new programming development, either.

Or in simpler terms: the cable networks which previously relied on reruns, movie content, or other forms of programming have hours to fill with original content if they want to. But we don’t have hours to offer up to watch them—the networks seem to be responding to their own schedules rather than to ours. Five hours a day is a lot, and for most employed people, it’s hard to imagine where they’d find more hours in the day to television watching than that. Maybe the ceiling is higher. But I wouldn’t put money on it being that lofty. It’s hard to imagine that oversaturation is totally unrelated to the ratings woes so many networks are facing now. As a viewer, it’s great to have more options, an embarrassment of riches, really, though the diffusion of the marketplace means I have fewer people to discuss some of my favorite shows with. But the networks need to realize that it’s rare that they’re going to get a show like The Walking Dead that enters the marketplace and siphons off a truly impressive number of viewers. More likely, something depressing is going to happen: the product is getting better and better, but there are simply fewer people who have available time with which to consume it. There’s something tragic about the idea that television’s arrival at maturity as an art form could coincide with the implosion of its business model, and that one could directly contribute to the other.

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.
Read more