The most recent episode of Girls aired while I was at South By Southwest, and in a way I’m glad I’ve had some time to watch the episode slowly, and to think about it before writing about it, given the flood of reaction and debate to the half-hour of television.

The storyline that’s provoked the most commentary has been a sequence towards the end of the episode in which Adam, after running into Hannah while on a date with his current girlfriend Natalia, falls off the wagon, takes Natalia back to his apartment, and when she expresses some dismay at the state of it, orders her on all fours and has her crawl to her bedroom. What commences there clearly makes Natalia uncomfortable from the outset. When Adam pulls off her panties and begins trying to get her aroused, she notes she hasn’t showered that day, which Adam interprets only as an expression of concern for him, rather than as a tactful attempt to ask him to stop. They have short-lived penetrative sex, at which point Adam pulls out and prepares to ejaculate on Natalia. Though she only tells him not to come on her dress, an injunction he complies with, she is obviously deeply distressed after the event, telling Adam “I, like, really didn’t like that.”

Much of the analysis of the episode has centered on the question of whether Adam committed a sexual assault against Natalia. “‘No means no,’” wrote my friend Amanda Hess at Slate, “is not the only measure of consent.” “This episode asks us why we’re so, so careful not to call things rape, or why we think there’s an acceptable level of reluctance, coercion, or intimidation that can be part of a sexual encounter,” Margaret Lyons writes at Vulture. Adam is clearly a man with boundary issues, someone I’ve found creepy enough to justify the cops showing up and creating some distance between him and Hannah. And while I think that the fact that this episode has been so upsetting, confusing, and sparked such a powerful debate about the space between an outright no and a clear yes that’s so often interpreted as consent to sex or sexual acts, I actually found myself focusing on something else: the fact that Adam was also portrayed as miserable and upset at the end of the encounter, too.

This is not to say that Adam’s feelings about his encounter with Natalia are more important than her feelings. But in his question to Natalia after she made clear how upset she was, “Is this it? Are you done with me?” there are some interesting issues, and potential answers to the question of how to train men, not just women, to prevent sexual assault.

Part of the reason I was so struck by this episode of Girls is because I’ve been rewatching How I Met Your Mother for a piece on what that show says about contemporary relationships. And I’ve been struck by the extent to which that show both fetishizes Barney Stinson’s (Neil Patrick Harris) conquests, and how much his technique has to do with impairment and manipulation of consent. On New Year’s in the first season he picks up Natalya, whose most important trait seems to be that she hails from “The former Soviet republic of Drunk-Off-Her-Ass-Istan,” as Barney puts it. Lily asks Barney at one point “they’re blonde and drunk, isn’t that your type?” But I can’t think of a moment when the show ever discusses the impact of sobriety on consent—it’s just a running joke that Barney likes to, and is very good, at taking advantage of women who are heavily intoxicated. He’s also a liar, changing his presentation of himself so women will be more likely to consent to sex with him. ” I’ve told some outrageous lies. I have told women that I was famous, a war hero, that sex with me would cure their nearsightedness,” he explains in season seven. And at one point, these deceptions do seem to cross over into a clear, and what ought to be ugly, taking of sexual advantage, when Barney explains that he likes to meet women new to New York “with no idea what a casting director could legally ask her to do, hold, or lick during an audition.”
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While watching the new fall television pilots and revisiting some old shows that are back this fall, I was struck by a worrisome conclusion. There are a lot of shows that have picked the wrong person to place at the center of their storytelling at the expense of much better characters, or that are treating people other than their true main characters as if they’re the main attraction for purpose of advertising. A bad offender on the latter score this fall is Last Resort, which is running print ads that make it appear as if Scott Speedman is the show’s star, rather than Andre Braugher, who dominates the pilot, for reasons you can probably do the math about. But while it’s one thing to start a show with the assumption that one character is the hook and to have others emerge, it’s a shame to watch a show spend seasons focused on the wrong people.

1. Boardwalk Empire: Now in its third season, Boardwalk Empire remains convinced that the best thing it has going for it is Nucky Thompson, who isn’t much more than a chance for Steve Buschemi to show off and wear great suits. But its strongest assets lie elsewhere. How fantastic would a version of Boardwalk Empire that focused on Chalky White and the rise of an East Coast black middle class and aristocracy be? What about Kelly Macdonald’s fantastic Margaret Schroeder, a woman who transformed her lot in life and now is determined to pay it forward through philanthropy, even if it means challenging a powerful head doctor at a hospital over the cause of maternal health? And then there’s Richard Harrow, mutilated in war, grieving the loss of Angela Darmody, one of the few people who ever understood him, and now raising her child with Gillian Darmody as a monstrous replacement mommy. But any chance the show had to be about soldiers returning from World War I appears to have died with Jimmy Darmody last season, replaced by the increasing presence of showy mobsters, and Boardwalk Empire is poorer for all its lost possibility.

2. How I Met Your Mother: I get it. This show is the story of how Ted met the mother of his children. But it’s also an illustration of the weaknesses of selling sitcoms, which are designed to go on forever, on premises that really only feel viable for a short time. Marshall and Lily’s split, reunion, and road to parenthood, experiment with suburbanization, and return to the city is the true big arc story of How I Met Your Mother. And I’m as sick of waiting for Ted to grow up as Ted is as waiting for the love of his life to show up.

3. Revolution: NBC’s new post-apocalyptic drama wants to capture the cachet of The Hunger Games so badly that it turned its main character, Charlie, into a person I refuse to call anything but Fake Katniss. She’s got a leather jacket, a bow, a penchant for woodsiness, but entirely lacks a personality. And Revolution has the same problem that The Hunger Games does: the world it’s set in and the events it explores means that what the knowing adults are up to is vastly more interesting as story material than watching kids run around. At least The Hunger Games‘ kids were relatively well-developed. Revolution doesn’t even have that going for it, and it’s particularly painful to see it focus on its CW-quality leads when Zack Orth’s former Google executive character’s been relegated to the wings, and assigned the task of providing Hurley-style quips.

4. New Girl: Watching the premiere episode of the second season of New Girl, I was struck by two things. First, Jess isn’t even close to the new girl in the apartment she shares with her male roommates anymore. And second, the show found its legs last year when it turned into an exploration of masculinity, rather than a celebration of Jess’s Manic Pixie grade school teacher. Jess isn’t a terrible character, and the show’s pokes fun at some of the whimsy-cures-everything attitude that was so gratingly front and center early in the show’s first season. But still, if it weren’t for all the branding that went into making New Girl a Zooey Deschanel vehicle that’s probably impossible to undo at this point, it would be nice to see the show recenter on the ensemble that makes it so strong.

5. Modern Family: ABC’s smash hit made waves in the offseason when production was delayed on new episodes because of a nasty contract dispute between the producers and the show’s adult stars. It’s too bad, because increasingly, they’re the least interesting part of the show. Mitch and Cam are a TV-sterilized sexless gay couple. Gloria’s a bombshell stereotype. Claire gets stuck with periods-make-ladies-crazy storylines. But the kids remain the most winning part of Modern Family. If the families involved had some more children, you could build an entire show about the dynamics of the siblings and cousins. And in a television environment where kids get to be props more than actual people, a program from the perspective of young people would be fascinating.

Mother Jones’ campaign ads from Game of Thrones are pretty genius, all the way down to quotes pulled from WesterosNetDaily—and present a genius case against Daenerys Targaryen:

They’re also a reminder of an interesting and underdiscussed factor, I think, in A Song of Ice and Fire: the fact that only few people have access to a very limited set of accurate information. There aren’t town criers or rudimentary publications. The public forums we see are largely organized by religious factions: rumor is spread as part of prophecy and preaching, rather than presented as news. Elites who can send and receive ravens are among the few people who get reasonably timely reports about events, and news is expected to trickle down from there. When Stannis Baratheon challenges Joffrey’s legitimacy, he sends ravens to noble families, and assume that’s what needs doing—there’s no thought of or means to spread the news publicly and to the masses.

I had one of those weekends where you sit down on the couch and get up three days later having watched four seasons of How I Met Your Mother. And while at first there wouldn’t appear to be much that a Friends-like CBS sitcom and a quirky HBO show from Mike White, the show that How I Met Your Mother most reminds me of is Enlightened. They’re both shows about compromise, but while Enlightened‘s Amy Jellicoe rages against a system that makes her dreams futile, How I Met Your Mother is all about anaesthetizing the pain of selling out.

One of my favorite scenes in Enlightened is when Amy, desperate to escape a corporate job that she hates (and is admittedly terrible at and makes no effort to succeed in), interviews for her dream gig at a homeless shelter. It’s something that would use her skills and that she’d find fulfilling. And it pays less on an annual basis than she owes in debt from her stint in the treatment center. Laura Dern does an incredible job of selling how dreadful that revelation is to Amy, and how insanity-inducing it is that the non-profit system is set up so that only a very small number of the people who would like to work there can actually do so under existing conditions.

Beyond that scene, Enlightened makes clear why Amy hates her job, even if we ultimately can’t entirely sympathize with her approach to it. Dougie, her boss, is crude and unprofessional. Amy’s ideas for making her company stronger and more socially responsible are blown off, and when they finally get attention, she’s set up as the entertainment by a vicious group of executives. It’s humiliating, and it’s boring, and we can sympathize with her desire to get away from it.

How I Met Your Mother, on the other hand, kind of blunts Marshall’s ultimate decision to walk away from trying to work in environmental law when he first does it (I know he leaves Goliath National Bank in future episodes, I just haven’t gotten to them yet). The montage of him standing in front of the mirror, psyching himself up with increasingly diminishing returns, as he goes on job interviews is funny, but it doesn’t actually communicate the loss of a life-long dream (never mind that the show doesn’t really communicate that Marshall is a committed environmentalist other than telling us repeatedly that he is). The fact that Lily’s enormous credit card debt basically forces him to take a corporate job after he’s fired from his first firm should be a deep betrayal with long-term consequences and the show basically deals with it in two episodes.

And even though we’re told that Marshall’s given up on the whole reason he went to law school, the show suggests that ultimately it’s no big deal. When he goes to work at his first law firm, the voiceover tells us that he ends up representing a hazardous amusement park. But we never see him handle one of its manifold issues, which both could have been great plot fodder and could have presented actual moral dilemmas that show what it meant for Marshall to sell out. And when Marshall ends up working for Barney at Goliath National Bank, rather than something that makes him miserable, the job actually looks fine. He and Barney hang out on the roof drinking beer, Marshall appears to get along with his coworkers and to feel no particular qualms about the work that he’s doing. The biggest problem he faces is finding a place where he can go to the bathroom in peace.

I think it’s probably true that most folks aren’t working jobs that are perfect reflections of their passions: it’s not like Amy and Marshall are alone in ending up in a place other than the one they hoped to be. But I appreciate Amy’s raging hope. And there’s something rather quietly sad about seeing Marshall surrender. How I Met Your Mother doesn’t have to—and shouldn’t—be Enlightened. But I wish it respected its characters enough to spend some more time with their pain and disappointment.

Regular-schedule blogging commences tomorrow. But while I was making personal resolutions, I thought of a couple of cultural ones I want to take care of, too.

1. Get over my anxiety about getting stuck on levels and finish playing Portal.

2. Film school: lots of Kurosawa. Lots of Truffaut.

3. Catch up on or finish: Sons of Anarchy, Mad Men, Cheers, The X-Files, Enlightened, Dexter, How I Met Your Mother, Misfits.

4. See John Lithgow in The Columnist and Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Death of a Salesman,” “Chinese Art in the Age of Revolution” and “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition” at the Metropolitan Museum, “Strange Interlude” at the Shakespeare Theater Company, “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980″ and “Zarina” at the Hammer Museum.

5. Read: a lot of Judge Dredd. Barchester Towers. Play It As It Lays. Joseph Lelyveld on Gandhi. Manning Marable on Malcolm X. Swamplandia.

What’s everyone else working on?

It turns out that poor, pokey NBC, home of much beloved, wildly creative sitcoms like Community and Parks and Recreation, is the network most willing to trade product placement for financial support for its shows. And while I suppose I should be up in arms about the marching corporatization of our entertainment, I can’t say that the supposed evils of product placement are at the top of my list.

First, there’s a difference between using product placement to make already-cheap shows cheaper, as is the case with reality television as NBC does with The Biggest Loser and The Celebrity Apprentice, and using product placement to subsidize quality but low-rated programming as NBC has done with Friday Night Lights and Chuck. Using donated products to carry out the same repetitive rituals doesn’t actually make the formula of a predictable competition show any more predictable, or the emotional arc of the show any less manufactured. And the small but dedicated audiences for those other kinds of shows are aware enough to recognize artifice when they see it, and to appreciate that they’re enjoying something that’s been kept alive by something other than pure audience size. Better Chuck with the Subway references than no Chuck at all, I guess.

More to the point, the assumption that characters wouldn’t use brands and talk about products actually runs counter to reality. We all have irrational brand loyalties, and talk about products, and recommend stuff to each other. It’s not some dramatic distortion of the universe of the show, as long as the characters aren’t Amish or live in a socialist future, for characters to talk about the things they buy and why they like them.

And finally, for the most part, we’re not dumb. People know what product integration is, and that it’s being done to them. Not every show is going to be 30 Rock and laugh at the concept even as it uses it:

But even if people end up buying a Snapple because Liz Lemon likes it, or shampoo because it makes Robin’s hair look fantastic on How I Met Your Mother (I just started watching, and her hair), or test-driving a car because the main character on Castle does it, this is hardly the worst thing to happen. And for the most part, I suspect people know why they’re doing what they’re doing. It may be foolish to think that I can ever look like Jennifer Morrison without a set full of dresses, extensive plastic surgery, and a magical application of extra tallness. But if I spend a few dollars occasionally because I dig her eye shadow, no harm, no foul, in the indulgence of the fantasy and its immediate debunking.