After one of the most memorably ridiculous weeks in politics, whether it’s the state senator who declared that ladies just don’t care about money that much in comparison to gentlemen, or the Fox outlet that referred to a group of Florida neo-Nazis as “a civil rights group,” I was perfectly primed for this observation from Carina Chocano’s exceedingly fun profile of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who is playing Vice President Selina Meyer in HBO’s upcoming political comedy Veep:

Every decade gets the political show it deserves, or thinks it deserves, though some decades are pretty disingenuous. “The West Wing” gave us an idealized account of the Clinton era, with a saintly president and high-minded pols. In the ’00s, “24” offered an ultraparanoid version of the Bush era that legitimized torture as the primary means of dealing with a world in a constant state of crisis.

“Veep,” by contrast, comes not to justify Caesar but to goose him. It captures our post-Reagan, post-Clinton, post-Bush, 24-hour tabloid news and Internet-haterade dystopia, and reflects our collective queasy ambivalence toward a political system that we fear simply reflects our own shallowness back at us. If “The West Wing” was a fantasy of hyper-competence, “Veep” is its opposite: a black-humor vision of politics at its bleakest, in which both sides have been co-opted by money and special interests and are reduced to posturing, subterfuge, grandstanding and photo ops. Naturally, it’s hilarious.

This is true—I’ve seen the pilot for Veep—and it’s uproarious. But it’s not the only show that gets this, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Last night’s Scandal ended with an uproarious parody of the idea that if we got lawmakers of both parties in the room and talked things over sensibly, that Reason Would Prevail and everything would be all right. Faced with a Supreme Court nominee who was facing a prostitution scandal (the hooker he’s patronized turned out to be his wife), gladiator-in-a-suit crisis fixer Olivia Pope combed a DC madam’s records, figured out which Senators had also been her clients, had her minions seek out said men and drop the code words for the sex acts they’d been ordering up all those years, and blackmailed them into keeping their traps shut. It’s an utterly nonsensical scenario, but not actually more nonsensical than the idea that our politicians are people of good will we can just pull together and everything will be all right.

It remains to be seen if USA’s Political Animals, about a First Lady-turned-Secretary of State and her dysfunctional family, and NBC’s 1600 Penn, which will be out this fall, take the same tack. And it’s true that we don’t lack a serious show in the vein of 24, though Homeland‘s paranoia’s aimed more at the national security bureaucracy than at proving we should have all means at our disposal to wring information out of terrorists. But is interesting that a truly idealistic show hasn’t thrived in the age of Obama. Maybe it’s the the ridiculousness of our politics has consequences bigger than the President’s sex life this time around, and idealism would actually be kind of a downer.

At the end of the second season of Homeland, Showtime’s compelling drama about a Marine who had become a terrorist and the bipolar CIA agent desperately trying to stop him, two significant questions remained. First, how could Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), whose obsessive pursuit of former prisoner of war Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) had gotten her drummed out of the CIA and sent her to memory-erasing electroshock therapy, continue to investigate him without the resources of her office or the memory of her prior research? After his attempt to detonate a suicide vest failed, will Nicholas Brody continue to run for Congress? And if so, what role will Abu Nazir, the man who held him prisoner, converted him to Islam, and convinced him to become a terrorist, play in Brody’s run?

Some second-season casting news could clarify both of those plot points: David Marciano, who plays Virgil, Carrie’s friend and assistant in some of her freelance investigations, and Navid Negahban, who plays Abu Nazir, have both been upped from recurring roles to series regulars.

When I talked to Marciano during Homeland‘s first season, he emphasized how close Carrie and Virgil are, especially given that Carrie’s mentor, Saul, turned Virgil down for a CIA job:

Virgil was an outsider as a kid. And he grew up in a neighborhood in New Jersey where it was brawn over brains, and Virgil was a little bit of a tech nerd. And he was a brainiac and he had a sharp tongue, and you take a few beatings. You take a few shots to the ego and shots to your manhood, so to speak. And therefore, when you get older, you want to take care of people who are being abused or being ostracized. So it makes sense that Virgil would look after [Carrie], because she is an outsider, she is an outsider in this community. Also, everyone had someone to answer to. Saul has to answer to someone. Estes has to answer to answer to someone. Virgil has her back. Virgil’s going to look after her and take care of her. He doesn’t want what happened to him to happen to her.

Given that dynamic, it’ll be interesting to see what happens now that Carrie and Virgil are both outsiders, and both have things to prove to a CIA that rejected them. Will Virgil be a voice of moderation as Carrie recovers from the dual shocks of her medical procedure and her firing? Or will the two of them, freed from the constraints of needing to avoid getting Carrie fired, push the boundaries even further?

Similarly, while we don’t know what role Abu Nazir will play in Brody’s life now, the fact that he’ll be a full cast member means he’s not going away—far from it. It will be fascinating to see if he and Brody come up with a new plan, or if Brody resists Nazir. Whatever the dynamic is, I think the idea of a prominent American and a prominent terrorist in ongoing conversation is a wildly thought-provoking, if totally unrealistic scenario. We assume that there can be no conversation with the people who hate us. But it’s certainly intriguing to imagine what those conversations would look like if they happened at all.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that New Regency’s just signed a deal that lets it have first crack at content coming out of one of Israel’s biggest production companies. Israeli shows are never going to translate directly the way British ones do—you can’t just slap a Hebrew-language show on PBS or Hulu and expect that it’ll find a well-established audience like the one that’s willing to give almost any BBC content a shot. But Israeli shows have been the basis for programs like In Treatment, part of the second wave of well-regarded HBO shows, Homeland, which is helping Showtime steal a match on HBO, and Who’s Still Standing?, an NBC quiz show that’s helping the struggling network fill hours.

Obviously, this sampling of shows is a bit too small to use to draw conclusions about what American and Israeli audiences have in common, or why Israeli story templates work here. Americans have complicated relationships to and feelings about Israel, but none that translate into pop culture as easily as thinking that British people and their accents are inherently cool, that MI-6 makes for an excellent action setting, or generalized royalty and aristocracy nostalgia. An LA Times article from earlier this year offered some theories, both psychological and structural: “Some others: Israeli television’s gallows humor fits with post-9/11 American anxiety; Israelis are preoccupied by some of the same subjects as American network executives (‘the country has more psychologists per capita than anywhere else in the world, and that leads to psychologically complex stories,’ said David Nevins, Showtime’s president of entertainment); a U.S. business that has grown restless with traditional sources; Israeli shows are relatively cheap; and Israeli TV’s small budgets birth creative storytelling.”

In a sense, I regret that we’re really only going to be able to remake Israeli shows rather than rebroadcasting them directly. Our national conversation about Israel is bigger than this, but it might be healthy to keep the setting so audiences here can see the country the same way we see England: as an ally, a place of both great natural beauty and sometimes-prosaic urban design, where some people are involved in existential struggles against security threats and others are consumed with the prosaic business of everyday life and everyday jobs.

Pamela AuCoin has a piece up at IndieWire that, in what seems to me to be a fairly aggressive misreading of the first season of Homeland, argues that the show takes a dishonest approach towards the intelligence community that ends up validating the war on terror. While I think it’s absolutely true that Homeland argues that we need a vigilant bureaucracy to address a risk of terror that I don’t think any sensible person would deny exists though reasonable people can argue over the magnitude, I think the show is vary more intelligent than AuCoin gives it credit for about parsing terror-fighting techniques.

First, she argues that Carrie’s actions are: “quite horrifying; she installs bugs on the home of a terror suspect, which she has been ordered to take down before she can gather any meaningful intelligence. Isn’t that convenient? Our civil liberties are what come between sniffing out Al Qaeda operatives, who just won’t allow well-meaning if somewhat psychotic spies to do their jobs properly.” But this is a total misreading of Carrie’s bugging activities. The cameras turn up no useful information. Carrie’s first break in the case comes from analyzing publicly available cable footage and finding Brody’s tell. The fact that Carrie’s been spying on him ruins the rapport she’s building with him in person when she accidentally reveals that she knows more about him than she could have without surveillance. And not only does the show emphasize that Carrie’s surveillance of Brody is ineffective, it’s repeatedly and clearly stated by credible actors that it’s illegal. (Relatedly, AuCoin says that Carrie doesn’t lose her job, which is true in that incident, but factually untrue by the end of the season).

Second, she says that the al Qaeda operative who commits suicide was about to give up valuable information. But I’m not actually sure what textual evidence there is that the information he was about to surrender would be significant, actionable, or even true. If anything, the man seemed relatively stoic throughout his ordeal, his suicide a triumphant martyr’s death rather than a desperate act to preserve his silence. By contrast, Saul’s road trip with a homegrown terrorist produces the first break in the case, revealing that Tom Walker is alive. He uses conversation, compassion, and intellect to get her to talk—and the show devotes an entire episode to showing how and why that approach works.

I’m also puzzled by her assertion that, after the effort to capture Tom Walker goes wrong, “the issue is not dealt with; it is understood this will not create an international or even domestic incident. They are Muslims, and therefore expendable; this seems to be the show’s message.” Again, on a factual basis, the idea that the shooting isn’t dealt with isn’t supported by the text of the show: there are protests after the shooting, and Carrie says clearly that the shooting is a public relations disaster that her agency should deal with directly and compassionately. That they don’t is a clear strategic and moral error. And to say that the show’s message is that Muslims are expendable is a dramatic and offensive misreading of a show that treats Muslim prayers as lovely; has the show’s most prominent Muslim talk at length about the beauty and joy his faith has brought into his life; and argues that we should sympathize with that Muslim because of his outrage over the murder of Muslims in a drone strike that treated Muslim children as acceptable collateral damage.

Finally, AuCoin seems to assume that the audience for Homeland is too stupid to parse the gap between how the characters view themselves and how we’re clearly supposed to view them. Yes, David has a lot of power and is told he’s smart: we’re also show than he’s venal, ambitious, petty, close-minded, and an enabler of the Vice President who is more interested in beefing up his anti-terror credentials than the truth. AuCoin praises a British show called The Sandbaggers because “The agency bosses are portrayed as careerists, all too willing to send the sandbaggers on highly dangerous and morally ambiguous missions while they wine, dine, and dream of knighthood.” it’s hard to imagine a better description of David Estes. AuCoin says Homeland would “would never go so far as to suggest that there is something rotten about the State Department, whose endorsement of internationally illegal prisons abroad has served to encourage the growth of terror cells and damaged our authenticity when we criticize other nations like China, Syria, and Russia for not respecting civil liberties,” except that the show clearly shows a lower-level State Department official objecting to CIA tactics only to get sold out by his bosses and rolled by the CIA in such a way that even casual viewers couldn’t miss it. Carrie’s errors and insane decisions, including her affair with Brody, are clearly errors and insane decisions. And if Homeland doesn’t pick up on AuCoin’s pet issue, it makes a strong, sustained argument against the use of drone strikes.

And it’s not really true that “Carrie is the rogue genius who might become occasionally unhinged, but her unorthodox methods are what is needed, and can lead to results.” Carrie’s brain works faster than her colleagues, but her tragedy is less that the people around her can’t understand her, but that her mental illness causes her to undermine her own good, legitimate work and prevents her from presenting it in a way that resonates with and is comprehensible to her colleagues. Given that the first season of Homeland literally ends with her wiping her own brain via electroshock therapy and Saul begging her not to do it, it’s nigh-incomprehensible to me that someone would argue that the show is endorsing a vision of the CIA rife with rogue agents: it’s clear that both Carrie and the organization she works for are deeply broken.

So, I haven’t seen absolutely everything that won Golden Globes tonight, but I’ve seen a lot of them. And I am very, very happy for Claire Danes and the lovely folks behind Homeland, and very, very irritated by the victories for The Descendants, though George Clooney could have won a directing award for Ides of March, so things could be worse. But if you want to know why you should—or shouldn’t—check out the winners, or just need some water cooler talking points when you head back into the office on Tuesday, I gotcha:

TV Series, Drama: Homeland
Actor in a TV Series, Drama: Kelsey Grammar, Boss
Actress in a TV Series, Drama: Claire Danes, Homeland
TV Series, Comedy: Modern Family
Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV: Downton Abbey
Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for TV: Idris Elba, Luther
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV: Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones
Motion Picture, Drama: The Descendants
Actor In A Motion Picture, Drama: George Clooney, The Descendants
Supporting Actress In A Motion Picture: Octavia Spencer, The Help
Best Director: Martin Scorcese, Hugo

And seriously, watch Luther everybody.

In his review of Rob, Todd VanDerWeff says something: “Everybody’s trying to figure out the way to do these vaguely politically incorrect shows where the characters talk about race and culture and so on frankly and honestly. Everybody’s chasing that whole envelope-pushing thing that cable does so well because they vaguely sense that this is something network could do well, too.” In that case, they might well look to David Nevins and to Showtime for tips on how to do those things right without being obvious, or without making a hash of things trying to represent the full range of a debate.

At his executive session yesterday, one of my fellow critics asked if he thought House of Lies glorified the 1 percent and the people who produce their wealth at a time of rising anger against them. “House of Lies is all about excess and confronting the contradictions of it and the hypocrisies of it. I think House of Lies is an incredibly timely show,” he said. “We’re not really about taking the sanctimonious, obvious route to confront those issues of income disparity. But I think it’s got very interesting things to say about how business is run.” He trusts his audience to see something on screen and to interrogate it, rather than to simply accept that because it’s on screen, it must be good.

When I asked him about whether, given the nice ratings for Homeland and House of Lies, he thought there was an unmet appetite for shows that took on the issues of the day, he agreed heartily:

Relevance is a big deal for us. I want to do shows that resonate in the wider culture. I think theere’s a huge opportunity to challenge the world that we live in. Relevance, timeliness, is, I think, one of the things that can define Showtime…I feel like that’s a big part of what happened with Homeland. I got to Showtime the summer of 2010. My first day was in August. And that script showed up. I’d had conversations with Howard [Gordon] and Alex [Gansa] back when I was a producer. They gave me the script within my first week there…we started talking about what the pay cable version of that would be. I realized we didn’t have a show that played in the fall with Dexter, and a year from then, the fall of 2011 would be the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and her was a script that if we were smart about it, was going to resonate with a lot of the things that were going to be occupying journalists and pundits. It’s rare that something lines up like that…In a similar way, House of Lies, some of it is by coincidence but some fo it is by design.

The political cycle moves much faster than the television development process, so Showtime would have be unusually good at forecasting to have shows land in the same way that Homeland and House of Lies have. But I appreciate hearing anyone say that trying is worthwhile.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the finale of the first season of Homeland, which I enjoyed, but I gather a lot of people were vexed by in various ways. But Carrie’s decision to undergo electroshock treatment, even at the cost of her memory and some valuable analysis, reminded me the theme of self-sacrifice in Sucker Punch. As I wrote at the time:

This is a distinctly female story. And I’m surprised no one’s discussing the ending, and the complicated themes of self-sacrifice at its core. Going into the movie, I expected a bunch of sexy asskicking. I didn’t really expect Snyder to pull a Joss Whedon. In the course of this movie, three of the main characters die, and their deaths are genuinely shocking. Malone throws herself in front of a knife to save Cornish, playing her sister. Vanessa Hudgens’ and Jamie Chung’s characters are murdered. And, that moment between Abbie Cornish and Emily Browning? At the end of the movie, Babydoll sacrifices herself to save Sweet Pea, gives herself up to Jon Hamm’s lobotomist as a distraction so another woman can run away. They all choose collaboration. The price of getting just one woman to freedom is so high. And while that’s less dramatically true in the world at large, I think it’s still true

I wonder if there’s something to both of these stories that’s an interesting anecdote to the Strong Female Character nonsense, and to the triumphal narratives of action movies in general. There’s a difference between tearing your female characters down before building them up, the process Tad Friend described in his critically important profile of Anna Faris last summer, and recognizing that it’s extremely difficult to win. Particularly if you’re a woman. It is harder to beat a man of equal fitness in a fight. It may be harder to convince people of something terrible that’s happened to you or your family — or to the country — if you’re at risk of being dismissed as a crazy, hysterical woman whether that’s an accurate description of your brain chemistry or not. Women may be more accustomed to compromise, to accepting outcomes that are less than ideal for them if they think it’s the best deal they can get. That might not make for action movies or thrillers that are satisfying in the straightforward ways that most stories in that genre are. But they could be the basis for something more complex and uneasy, and very interesting.

Megan McArdle shares a lament with some of us here about Homeland‘s errors in Washington, D.C. geography:

The anomalies started small. A marine sergeant and his young wife seemed to be living in a fairly sizeable ranch house on a large lot located fairly close to Washington, a configuration that I am not sure exists–but which I am really quite sure is not available on at E-6 pay grades. A terror suspect was described by a CIA officer as living in “Truxton Circle”, a neighborhood which happens to be just southwest of ours. However, the appellation is a new one, and since both Truxton Circle and my own beloved Eckington are both on the outer frontier of gentrification, I can testify from personal experience that it’s highly unlikely that a CIA officer who lives in Virginia would be able to name the neighborhood; if he called it anything, it would far more likely be something like “way the fuck over on New York Avenue”. Furthermore, if he did somehow manage to apprehend that a suspect’s address was in “Truxton Circle”, anyone he reported this to would respond with a puzzled stare. Right now, the area is known less by its name than by its notorious housing projects.

We will not even ask why someone who is supposed to be teaching at one of our fine local universities–all of which are located west of 20th street NW–would be living miles away in an area that is at least an hour from work via public transportation.

This is true in all cities, but there’s an extent to which geography is destiny. And failing to understand the geography of Washington, D.C. is to fail to understand how power in the city works. Megan’s right, of course, that Farragut Square is fairly small, and that people don’t necessarily linger there. But it also gets very busy during lunchtime, particularly during the summer when it’s surrounded by lunch trucks, and it’s close to the Old Executive Office Building, which means that some of the people who go there during lunch are reasonably important. That, combined with the closeness of the space, and its proximity to two major Metro stations, means that a targeted, powerful attack there could be even more devastating than the one depicted in the show.

More broadly, not getting that the Brodys might not be able to afford the house that they have means that the show doesn’t entirely get how running for office and getting plugged into Washington’s power elite would change the family’s lives. Not knowing, for example, as the remake of State of Play didn’t, that Georgetown doesn’t have the Metro means you don’t know what it means for a young congressional aide to live there, to pay the extra rent, to have a car or schlep on the bus. Not getting the shifting dynamic of neighborhoods, the social realignment of the city, is to be stuck telling stories about the Washington that was, and may yet be. Not to understand that people in Washington are powerful but not as wealthy as the most powerful people in New York or Los Angeles is not to understand the particularities of the elite here — it’s not that there aren’t members of the 1 percent, lobbyists make bank, but proximity is more important than acquisition, and certainly more important than style. Motivations matter. And geography can be a measure of what someone — or a city — thinks counts.

The bridge is yours.

-Me. Maureen Ryan. Ryan McGee. Todd VanDerWerff. Homeland. Parks and Recreation. You know what to do.

-Some of the best television lines of the year.

-Brave‘s fired female director talks Belle, her daughter as inspiration, and her split with Pixar.

-Super-cute Game of Thrones house banners.

-Art, healing, and the Happy Valley.

I’m obviously thrilled to see good ratings for Homeland‘s first-season finale: I like seeing pop culture behave like a meritocracy once in a while. But it got me thinking about whether or not Showtime’s new hit is trading off with All-American Muslim, which is seeing a downturn in viewership. 10 p.m. on a Sunday is obviously a tough time for a family-oriented show in any case, and I’d be curious to see how the show did in another slot, like 8 p.m. on Fridays. But it also meant that a show specifically designed to dismantle misconceptions about American Muslims by showing them living and debating their faith was running against a show that poked holes in stereotypes about Islam and terrorism and gave one of its main characters space to explain his conversion and show him at prayer. It would be great to open up new audiences to that conversation. But that takes time. And it’s too bad to have two shows with those themes competing with each other.