Before last night’s episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit aired, NBC was promoting the episodes by teasing that the headlines it would be ripping its storyline from were the ones made by former Rep. Todd Akin last year, when he claimed that women who were survivors of so-called “legitimate rape” couldn’t become pregnant. The episode did that, recasting Akin as a former Congressman and discredited obstetrician. But rather than stopping there, SVU did something even more effective and important, illustrating the consequences of “legitimate rape” claims not just for policymakers, but for survivors—particularly for what they mean for rapists’ ability to seek custody of the children born to women they’ve attacked.

The case Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) was investigating involved Avery, a sports reporter who brought rape charges against her cameraman, Rick (Homeland‘s David Marciano). When she became pregnant, Rick, who was defending himself, brought to the stand as an expert witness a former Congressman and practicing obstetrician who testified that “Many of my medical colleagues won’t admit it, but in my experience, it’s nearly impossible for a victim of legitimate rape to become pregnant.” The show used the character to illustrate the true insensitivity of that position from both a lawmaker and a doctor’s perspective: when Rick asked the Congressman what he’d do if a rape survivor came to him for medical treatment, the Congressman said, on the stand, “I would tell her, honey, if you need to lie to yourself or your family, okay. But don’t lie to Doc Showalter. Or the Lord.”

That’s not exactly subtle, but SVU did something smart with the episode, showing how Rick used the Congressman’s testimony to try to retcon not just consensual sex between himself and Avery, but a relationship with her. When Rick had Avery on the stand, he suggested that their conversations on the road as coworkers, her asking him for help with her bags, and the fact that she undressed after she thought he’d left the apartment were all evidence that she had somehow seduced him or consented. “I gave you the child you always wanted,” Rick told Avery in the courtroom, using the fact that she kept the baby because of prior difficulties getting pregnant as evidence of her emotional attachment to him. “How often have you seen an actual rape victim become pregnant and decide to keep the baby?” Rick asked Olivia when he was cross-examining her. Ultimately he’d be acquitted because one member of the jury believed the “legitimate rape” argument, a potent testimonial to the damage that even the limited spread of an idea like this can do.
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Chicago Fire, a new procedural about firefighters and the EMTs who work with them which premieres on NBC tonight at 10 PM, is intentionally a bit of a throw-back. “What we’re trying to do here is a very, very classic, adult, NBC platinum drama,” executive producer Dick Wolf said of the show at the Television Critics Association press tour in July. By that, he means a procedural with a large ensemble cast, full of flawed professionals with good intentions, in this case, the residents of a single Chicago firehouse who are dealing with broken engagements, a foreclosed house, who’s cooking dinner, and an upcoming visit from Mayor Emanuel. I spoke with the show’s creators, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, about the pop culture tropes of fire-fighters and first responders, why they chose Chicago, and how Wolf responds to reminders about diversity from executives. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The expectations audiences have for police and medical procedurals are very well-established, but the character beats and story arcs are less clear for firefighters and EMTs. Were there shows you looked to as models? Were there things you could do because those tropes aren’t as calcified?

Michael: One thing that got us interested in doing television was the idea of going back to some of the classic NBC dramas. For us, the drama on network television right now is almost reactionary in terms of how good Law & Order was. We were thinking in terms of ER and Hill Street Blues, where you had a big ensemble. It doesn’t matter if it’s a firehouse, or a hospital, or a police station. Those ideas work. Thematically they work. You have a family, and like any family, they have problems internally, but when the shit hits the fan externally, they come back together.

The Law & Order franchise played a key role in both defining New York and giving New York actors work. Can you talk a little bit about your vision of Chicago? And to what extent will fire and accident victims be actual characters on the show?

Derek: We picked Chicago a because it was a city that was born out of fire, the entire city was knocked down and had to start anew. And the fire service has a history here that seemed a perfect setting and then what we constructed was a firehouse that, when you turn left, you’re in a really poor, dangerous neighborhood, and when you turn right, you’re in the middle of downtown, and skyscrapers, and luxury apartments. [Firefighters] will hear a very short description of what they’re rolling up on. They might hear building fire, they might here man down from unknown causse. For us to throw out an address and for you not know what these guys are rolling up on, are they going to be smashing out of a high-rise? Or rolling up on a gang fight?

Micheal: When the show first came to us, NBD and Dick had decided they wanted to do a firefighter show, and said what city would you want to do it on, and we walked through options. New York is so tied up with 9/11. Los Angeles really doesn’t have enough weather to make it interesting. Chicago’s a city where you can put a camera down and point it anywhere and see something interesting.
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This post contains spoilers for Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

I read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a novel about a woman in a troubled marriage who goes missing, in a single sitting on Monday, and while I raced compulsively through the book, I was left with a rather empty feeling at the end. I hunger for stories about difficult women, sometimes even dangerous ones, and so I felt I should have loved Gone Girl‘s central twist, that Amy was not, in fact, a victim, but a psychopath who framed her husband for her disappearance. But instead, I was annoyed by the expectation that the twist itself was enough for me, that we’re still at a point where suggesting that a woman is a psychopath, or a killer, or even a bad wife or mother was supposed to be surprising and daring. Just as the anti-heroes of the last decade of great television tell us something about suburban denial, the difficulty of being a self-made man in the drug trade, or the costs of toxic masculinity, I wanted Gone Girl to tell me something else about marriage, or the Midwest, or being a woman than I felt like it actually did.

In Gone Girl, the revelation that Amy is not the Cool Girl she pretended to be, but rather, dangerously amoral and manipulative, is what brings Amy and Nick back together. “I couldn’t return to an average life,” Nick concedes to himself. “I’d known it before she’d said a word. I’d already pictured myself with a regular woman— a sweet, normal girl next door— and I’d already pictured telling this regular woman the story of Amy, the lengths she had gone to— to punish me and to return to me. I already pictured this sweet and mediocre girl saying something uninteresting like Oh, nooooo, oh my God, and I already knew part of me would be looking at her and thinking: You’ve never murdered for me. You’ve never framed me.” For Amy, it’s realizing that Nick is her perfect victim, someone who has truly wronged her, but also, who is too afraid of becoming his father to be much of a person at all. “I am a little too much, and he is a little too little,” she thinks. “I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.”

Her psychopathy is the point. It doesn’t reveal anything else. The novel doesn’t really explore whether Rand and Marybeth, her parents, actually raised or exploited Amy in a way that contributed to her mental state. It’s not an expression of contempt for the world, as is Kevin’s boredom and suspicion of anyone who shows passion for an idea or activity in We Need to Talk about Kevin. And it’s not really an attempt to elicit a reaction from someone, the reason way Jo Gage (an incredibly scary Martha Plimpton), the daughter of a criminal profiler, becomes a serial killer in Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Whether you find the uses of psychopathy—to compel the attention of an absent father, or to provide a situation so extreme that a mother who failed to bond with her son finally experiences maternal instincts—in either of those works compelling, the revelation of psychopathy isn’t where either story ends.

“Blind Spot,” the Criminal Intent episode that features Jo Gage, functions in much the same way as Gone Girl. In both the novel and the television episode, the assumption through much of each is that the person who kidnapped Amy or who is torturing and murdering women must be a man. In Gone Girl, the question is whether Nick kidnapped or murdered his wife, and if he didn’t, whether an ex-boyfriend Amy accused of rape, a high school ex who was obsessed with her, or an impulsive girl who Amy accused of stalking her is guilty. And in “Blind Spot,” for much of the episode, Robert Goren assumes that the person torturing and murdering women is either an old serial killer who has resurfaced, or a male copycat killer, despite the fact that the new victims have been sexually violated but don’t have semen on their bodies, like the old victims did. And in both cases, the dynamic of the narrative radically changes when it becomes clear that the narrative of Amy’s that we’ve been reading is a fabrication, that Jo, initially treated as if she’s a victim (she was the roommate of one of the women killed), is, in fact, the killer the police have been seeking all along.
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It’s been a long summer, hasn’t it? In between the resurgence of the War on Women, the torments of The Newsroom, and the slog of the political conventions, I’m ready for it to be fall–and for the return of the fall television season.

This autumn is the beginning of a big turnover for NBC on Thursday nights, as The Office and 30 Rock head into their confirmed swan songs, and Coommunity and Parks and Recreation enter what could also be their final seasons. Fox is more stable, but investing in female-centric comedy as it adds Ben & Kate and The Mindy Project to run alongside New Girl. ABC, coming off a fourth-place finish in the ratings, is throwing everything at the wall, but with more joie de vie and less desperation than NBC. And while I never thought I’d say this, one of the more intriguing dramas of the fall is taking its bow on CBS. To help you sort through the new offerings, here’s the complete ThinkProgress guide to fall television.

SEPTEMBER 11

Show: Go On (NBC)
Time: 9:00
The Concept: A radio host (Friends vet Matthew Perry), in deep denial after losing his wife unexpectedly, gets ordered to a support group by his boss (John Cho). There, he meets a possibly-underlicensed group leader (Laura Benanti), a widowed lesbian with anger issues (a fantastic Julie White), a taciturn young man whose brother is in a coma (Tyler James Williams), and a middle-aged Latina woman who’s lost her entire family (Tonita Castro).
Watch If: You appreciated Community‘s ability to pull off a relatively low-concept episode. In a lot of ways, Go On feels like the show NBC initially hoped Community would be, about misfits who choose and build an adult family for themselves. You’re interested in seeing more diverse casts on television. Your mileage may vary on Perry’s white-dude cheerleader effort, but Go On may have the most diverse cast of any network pilot ever, and makes that a strength of the show rather than an excuse for lazy racial and ethnic humor. You like Matthew Perry, who could have the opportunity to do some really interesting work here.

Show: The New Normal (NBC)
Time: 9:30
Concept: A gay couple, Bryan and David (Andrew Rannells and Justin Bartha), decide to try to have a baby by surrogate, and end up working with Goldie (Georgia King), a single mother, who decides to act as a surrogate to fund her dream of going back to law school to give her daughter (a sharp Bebe Wood) a better life–and to escape from her narrow-minded mother (a sharp-tongued Ellen Barkin).
Watch If: You miss the days when Glee had actual focus. The New Normal doesn’t improve on some of Glee‘s core problems, including a weird distance from lesbians and Ryan Murphy’s fondness for stereotypical gay men, mean older women, and Nene Leakes. But at this point, it’s got at least a core story that in some places comes across as deeply felt. You want to see more gay families on television. I’m more curious how Go On will pull off Julie White’s character’s family, but hopefully, Murphy can pull off a gay-headed family with a couple that has more sexual chemistry than Modern Family‘s Mitch and Cam.
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The bridge is yours.

-You should read Mere Smith’s diary of approaching pilot staffing season, and everything she’s done to her looks this year in an experiment to see if it matters.

-Law & Order: Special Victims Unit should totally give Fin a backstory.

-Rats. Prometheus may have been the reason we didn’t get At the Mountains of Madness.

-FX might give us a series about a lady serial killer.

-Tom Hiddleston is just ridiculously attractive. Er, I mean, good at Shakespeare:

I tend to agree with Amanda Marcotte that torture’s become a dangerous cliche in popular culture, though I think we come at it from rather different directions:

More importantly, torture scenes violate the audience’s trust that the characters onscreen, no matter how outlandish their surroundings, will behave like human beings. On TV, torture almost always works. The victim usually knows the information, and gives it up immediately. In rarer cases, they know nothing but are able to stop to torture by stating this fact. Either way, they respond positively to torture, and somehow the tormentor magically knows when their victim is speaking the truth.

I agree that it’s a problem that torture is shown as being effective in popular culture. But I think that should actually be a second-level objection to torture: the point that’s important to win, and the line it’s important to draw, is that torture is wrong. What actually scares me about torture and violence against prisoners and interrogators in pop culture is that there are settings in which it’s presented as at least somewhat justified. Almost all cop shows involve an officer of the law snapping and doing violence to a suspect at some point. But those actions are generally presented as failures of control, as was the case with Elliot Stabler’s beatings of suspects on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, or of desperation, as was the case with the beatings of Bubbles on The Wire. When that’s not the case, torture can be an opportunity for a victim to prove their fortitude—specifically, their manhood. In the Casino Royale remake, Le Chiffre’s torture of bond provides an opportunity for him to prove his imperviousness to pain, and to make a joke that emasculates Le Chiffre.

What was interesting to me about the torture in this week’s episode of Game of Thrones, which Amanda focuses on, is the extent to which those scenes were about neither of those things. Joffrey and Harrenhal’s interrogators are torturing people not out of fits of temper, and not because they think there’s information for them to get out of the people they’re targeting. Joffrey doesn’t have questions that he wants to ask Ros and Daisy. The Harrenhal interrogators ask the same set of questions to every person they talk to, no matter where that person comes from or their likelihood of knowing any relevant information. These people are torturing their victims because they enjoy doing so. These scenes are all about giving us information about the torturers, to draw a line between the characters who behave like human beings and those who exist and act beyond the laws that govern the rest of us.

The charming and ridiculously smart Douglas Wolk did me the favor of sending me the Judge Dredd trilogy “America,” “America II: Fading of the Light,” and “Cadet,” about a singer, an anti-Judge activist-turned-terrorist, and the child they eventually have together, and then asking me to discuss it with him. Our very long conversation about the books, including their startlingly beautiful and fully-realized backgrounds, and their pretty awesome gender politics, as well as whether it’s possible for fascists to embrace reform, is up here. Some thoughts on the core story about pro-democracy terrorists taking on the Judges:

As a former student activist, I have a somewhat complicated relationship to America, the Democrats, and even to Total War. I should be clear that most of my activism was working through the democratic process—registering voters, agitating down at City Hall, asking questions in forums—though I did get arrested for occupying the admissions office at my college as part of an action to push the university towards more progressive financial aid reform. (Pro tip: singing the same folk song as a round for three hours will speed up the rate at which the university decides to arrest you, which can be useful when you’ve been sitting in the same hallway all day.) And so part of what strikes me about America and her cohort is that they’re kind of terrible activists. The march is a good idea—but the Democrats don’t plan for there to be instigators in the crowds, or to document their work. There doesn’t appear to be much of an organizing program. The terrorist campaign waged by Total War is fairly stupid as propaganda: yes, killing Judges demonstrates their vulnerability, but it’s guaranteed to bring down reprisals. And their plan to kill celebrities during an awards show without any plan for a communiqué is a huge wasted opportunity to reach the masses. I’m frustrated with them because I’d like them to be better.

And of course, that’s sort of the point of the book. We see the Democrats and Total War from the perspective of a very weak sympathizer. And we see the Judges from the perspective of their most articulate representative, who gets space to break down ideas about why democracy isn’t particularly representative. Nobody gets a fair chance for a rebuttal. The comic works for the same reason the Judges maintain an effective hold on government—they control the narrative.

This was my first go-round with Judge Dredd, but I’ll definitely be back. The character’s obviously been around for decades, but he feels particularly timely, a logical extension of both our law and order fetishes and our anti-hero obsessions in a way that subverts both.

Deadline’s Tim Adler sat down with a bunch of international television executives at the Monte Carlo Television Awards to find out why international audiences like American police and medical procedural shows so much. The answers weren’t as revealing as I might have liked — with the exception of the beautifully stereotypical explanation that “what appeals to the French about House and The Mentalist is that lead characters Dr. Gregory House and Patrick Jane are irreverent.”

Most of the executives mentioned higher production values in American shows than in a variety of domestic competitors. Thomas Bellut, the head of programming for ZDF, the non-profit German public television broadcaster, apparently thinks that German audiences don’t like watching shows that don’t resolve problems within a single programming hour on television, and that the’re more likely to watch something like Lost or Damages when they can consume a lot of episodes in a row, via DVD or another method (as a side note, I’d love to know how more complex, non-procedural shows do in countries like Chile, where something like the telenovela wars require audiences to tune in every night for months). But other than talking about the comfort-food, one-off factor, none of the executives said anything about cultural or values factors.

There’s no denying that shows that you don’t have to make a major commitment to are very effective at gaining casual viewers, be it Ace of Cakes or Law & Order. But police and medical procedurals also are a very effective way to get American audiences to reconcile their conflicting feelings about authority. Procedurals don’t just demonstrate police or medical effectiveness within the hour; they also let audiences acknowledge that police brutality and bullying patients are bad things while making the argument that it’s worth accepting those behaviors as long as they contribute to someone ending up behind bars or not dying of an incredibly baroque disease. In that respect, procedurals are a conservative genre: they undermine arguments for reform, suggesting that reforms might upset the efficacy of the status quo. But I have no idea how those arguments play abroad, whether they’re part of the appeal of American procedurals, or a limiting factor, and what they mean for how other countries think about justice in America.