Awards are always a terribly flawed way of determining what makes for good popular culture. Limits on the number of nominees lock deserving contenders out of their categories. Differences between the people who watch television shows or movies and the people in the pool assigned to judge them can produce some truly baffling biases and decisions. And winning doesn’t automatically transform a show’s prospects of staying on the air or an actor’s chance of getting good work in the future. But all of those caveats aside, it can be hugely satisfying to see a small show get the recognition you assume it’ll be denied, or an actor break barriers. And if you want better television, here are the shows and performances you should root for get whatever boost it’s possible to wring out of the Emmys on Sunday.

COMEDY SERIES
Who’s Nominated:
The Big Bang Theory
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Girls
Modern Family
30 Rock
Veep

Who Should Win: Girls

Why: There are a lot of legacy shows on this list, and some very notable omissions, particularly Parks and Recreation, which had a much stronger season than its network counterpart 30 Rock. Given that, I have to root for Girls, one of the few comedies to arrive on television knowing exactly what it was and what its strengths were, even if during its run, creator Lena Dunham had to confront some of its more notable weaknesses and absences, particularly when it came to race. Flawed though it may be, those of us rooting for more personal, low-budget shows—and who would like to see folks of color get the opportunities Dunham and Louis C.K. have—should hope for Girls to take home the statuette over more commercial favorites like The Big Bang Theory.

COMEDY ACTOR
Who’s Nominated:
Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory
Larry David as Himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm
Don Cheadle as Marty Kaan in House of Lies
Louis C.K. as Louie in Louie
Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock
Jon Cryer as Alan Harper in Two and a Half Men

Who Should Win: Louis C.K. or Don Cheadle

Why: It’s impossible to compare C.K.’s exploration of wounded and uncertain middle-aged masculinity and Cheadle’s turn as a hyped-up management consultant struggling to raise his potentially transgender son with tenderness and consideration. House of Lies is an inconsistent mess in comparison to the jewel-like Louie. But C.K. isn’t exactly lacking in recognition. And Cheadle’s playing a character who’s more distant from his real self than C.K. Plus, a black actor hasn’t won the Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Emmy since Robert Guillaume for Benson in 1985.

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I had a lovely time at SXSW talking Islam and pop culture this spring, and I’m hoping to head back next year. Slate’s proposed a panel involving me, Slate editor Hanna Rosin, The New Republic’s Noreen Malone, and Girls executive producer Jenni Konner talking sex and raunch involving women on television. If it happens, I think it should be a good conversation. In between Louie, Girls, Don’t Trust the B—- In Apartment 23 and movies like Bridesmaids, I think we’re at an interesting moment where female characters are playing with dignity, instrumentalism and aggression in sex in challenging ways, and the reaction to these sex scenes and approaches to sex demonstrate how early we are in these sorts of conversations. If the right to be undignified without having it reflect on every member of every group you’re a part of is a marker of true equality, then this conversation gets at something particularly important. If you agree, I’d appreciate it if you’d take a moment to support the panel through SXSW’s Panel Picker. And if we get to go, I’ll be sure to arrange a meetup in Austin, especially now that I have a better sense of the city.

Ryan McGee has a great post up in defense of comedies that don’t have traditional jokes, like Louie and Girls, and that end up confounding audience expectations as a result. He writes:

We don’t expect our dramas to be comedy-free. In fact, we’d lambaste such programs for having an enormous stick up an enormous orifice. “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad” quite often is the funniest show on television on the week a particular episode airs. And we don’t ding them critically for making us laugh. If anything, the ability to make us laugh AND cry is seen as a bonus. Why do hour-longs get the benefit of the doubt while the 30-minute shows are greeted with widespread befuddlement when attempting the same magic trick?…Shows like “Modern Family” thrive because people understand what they will be getting. The ability to repeat that type of content is admirable, and certainly serves a purpose that television has provided as a genre for decades. But it’s time to also point out the shows that constantly have fans wondering what type of show they will be watching that particular week as well.

I’d actually go a step further than this—there’s something odd about assigning comedies thirty-minute slots and dramas to full hours. I understand that it may be more difficult to keep jokes coming over 42 minutes of programming as opposed to 22, and that some dramas require 42 minutes (or on premium cable) an hour to unspiral whatever problem’s been set up for the characters in any given week. But something like Louie’s “Duckling,” a predominantly funny episode of television with some documentary qualities, filled an hour easily last year and to great acclaim (and the next two episodes of the show could easily form an hour whole). And a show like Law & Order, which split episodes fairly evenly between cops and lawyers, shows a model for how you could make half-hour dramas—I feel like a half-hour drama about public defenders catching cases or cops working smaller crimes could work well. In any case, it’s a funny restriction, and it would be interesting to see people experiment around it.

I loved last night’s episode of Louie, starring Melissa Leo as a woman Louie is set up with on a blind date and ends up having a hilarious, insane, uncomfortable discussion about sexual reciprocity with, which I thought did something brilliant: gave an uncomfortable but important idea the least effective spokesman of all time for it, and validated it anyway. As I wrote about the episode at Slate:

Louie claims that Laurie has suckered him into an unfair bargain. “If you doing that for me hinged on me doing that for you, you should have said something,” he grouses, inadvertently proving her point. Louie’s default assumption is that he can get something he wants without having to give anything up or think about the other person’s needs in return. There’s something refreshing about the blast of rage Laurie sends back to him. “You know how many dicks I sucked that I didn’t want to suck, because I’m a good kid?” she asks, her voice echoing with years of pent-up indignation. Laurie may be a scary, irritating pain. But Louie doesn’t have an answer to her question, or a defense against the accusation that he’s let a lot of women go unsatisfied even as he’s judged them for being attentive to his desires. Once they’re over the shock of Laurie, I doubt anyone in the audience has a good justification for that double standard either.

To other people, though, what was powerful—and in some cases overwhelming and uncomfortable—about the episode was its depiction of a man getting coerced into sex. As Zach Dionne wrote at Vulture in a piece I read after writing my own:

Laurie sears through a handful of stages — anger, Obama-blaming, bargaining, accusing Louie of homosexuality — before finally arriving at the logical endpoint, which is rape. Argue this if you want, but a woman smashing a man’s head into a car window, climbing upon his stunned head and growling “lick it or I’ll break your finger!” with a bloodthirsty war face … is female-on-male rape, making a rare televised appearance. The shock is so strong it raises the question of why Louie is cool with going out again.

I pinged a bunch of my TV critics buddies to talk it over, and I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about this scene. One of them raised the question of whether Louie, in the context of the show, thinks he’s been assaulted, and whether that’s different from the show’s perspective. Is he afraid to get out of Laurie’s car? It sure seems like she’d be willing to run him over on that motorcycle. Or is he staying because he wants to prove her right even though he knows the entitlement he’s displayed is fundamentally untenable?

I think the ultimate point of this episode of Louie though, is that Louie’s feelings and motivations, and our reactions to them are confusing. The show is a sharp rebuke to the idea that all sexual encounters are marked by clarity, that not knowing what you want to do in a fraught moment and feeling guilty and ambiguous about it later are the products of women’s weak wills or ill intent towards men they later resent. Laurie’s behavior is frightening and coercive and violent and inherently ridiculous, and confusing in part because one of the arguments she’s making is appealing to Louie, that if he gives her what he wants, he’d be doing the equality-oriented, fair thing, and make her happy. And at the end of the day, that’s what date rape often looks like: it’s violent, and scary, and coercive, and upsetting, and the rapist in question holds out something the victim wants, the ability to validate the victim’s behavior and whole person. Laurie may be a wild character, but her behavior is not actually more ridiculous, illogical, or effectively coercive than the way male date rapists behave towards women. Her actions recast a common event and make it freshly upsetting. Louie is upset and confused because anyone would be confused in that situation.

I can’t think of another show that could do what Louie did last night, demolishing two double standards at once by giving credence to both a victim and an attacker. Laurie has a right to be angry, in both a specific and a global sense, about the fact that she’s both expected to and shamed for pleasing the men she’s with. And Louie has a right to be angry, confused and frightened about what Laurie is doing to him. Unlike most conversations about sex and fairness and consent, the episode doesn’t force you to side solely with one of them. Both of these points are correct, and both of them are vitally important.

I’ve been holding off on writing about this season of Louie, in part because the first five episodes of the season, which I was fortunate enough to watch in advance, are so good that I’ve had a hard time thinking critically about them. But over at Slate, David Haglund wrote something terrifically perceptive about the show that I think is worth sitting with a little bit. He explained that where Curb Your Enthusiasm “keeps David in the kind of fictional (or semifictional) universe we’re accustomed to on TV, with a cast of regular characters and plotlines that extend through multiple episodes in the manner of a more typical sitcom. Louie has none of those things. While the show’s premise, if it can be called that—single dad with two daughters bumbling through life in New York City—might feel familiar, almost nothing else does.” That’s key to the show’s shambling, improvisational feel. But it also means that Louie can grow and improve faster than almost any other show on television, unmoored by a consistent continuity, timeline, or ensemble cast.

In previous seasons, Louie fell back frequently on a somewhat problematic crutch: he’d encounter a young, very pretty, blonde woman who challenged his worldview, hear her out, and sometimes, win her over. He did this with the anti-masturbation activist he debated on television, who he ended up spending a physically chaste but mentally filthy evening with, and with the cheerleader who was disgusted by his stand-up material but charmed by his tender care for his daughter’s duckling during their USO tour in Afghanistan. I don’t think that at any point Louie was condescending to these characters—he’s spoken about how his desire to have his character try to learn something from these kinds of people is genuine, and how he sincerely believes that his worldview is kind of broken and doesn’t serve him well. But they were never quite people so much as they were stand-in for ideas.

Now, if this was a conventional television show, Louie would have to go through a clear process of character evolution. He’d have to realize that his fascination with winning these women’s approval, much like his crush on Pamela, were a symptom of something, whether chasing unobtainable people after his divorce to avoid risk, or a reversion to his single years. There would be error, reckoning, hurting someone he loved (maybe his daughters), and a recalibration, moving Louie towards the kind of women we see him dating this season. And then, somewhere along the way, there would be will-they-or-won’t-they, and the promise of true love. Louie has precisely none of these things. Instead, it’s just recalibrated. The show suddenly has Louie dealing with his wife in a relatively mature way—even if their interactions are occasioned by relatively immature circumstances, like a midlife crisis motorcycle accident. He’s dating women his own age—even if he can’t handle a breakup appropriately or navigate a blind date (tonight, with Melissa Leo) with grace. Louie is just there, doing these things, jettisoning a schtick that was in danger of getting old without feeling angsty about it.

I’m not sure this kind of freedom is something that would be good for, or workable in, most television shows. Continuity and clear character arcs are a helpful tool for shows with multiple writers, a solution to a too many cooks problem that Louie doesn’t have to grapple with since C.K.’s vision is so clear throughout it. Even Girls, a show which is similar to Louie in its approach to sex and bodiliness, has been well-served by the imposition on Lena Dunham’s of both a sitcom structure and the need for clear in-episode and season-long arcs. But in the very rare case like Louie where the audience is on board for the project and the vision, it’s pretty breathtaking to watch a show both fix its weaknesses and move its main character forward in big leaps and bounds. Louie’s life may be a mess. But Louie is assured and precise in a way that’s truly wonderful.

I’ve been watching screeners of Louie‘s absolutely terrific third season over the past few days—y’all have a real treat coming in your direction at the end of the month—and it got me thinking. Television often revels in the father as a clueless or disconnected figure, whether it’s the cheerful bigotry of Peter Griffin on Family Guy or the raft of shows that treat the very prospect of men raising children as if it’s inherently comedic. In this environment, Louis C.K. has to be the best father on television. That doesn’t mean he’s the most competent father in pop culture, or the best provider—among his bits are his discomfort over the fact that he doesn’t own a home. But his mix of honesty, tenderness, and attempt to pass something like wisdom and honesty along to his daughters, on television and off, make him remarkable. Here are five of the best reasons to hold up Louis C.K. as a role model on Father’s Day.

1. He thinks hard about how to teach his kids about prejudice, America, and the virtue of living life to its fullest: In “Country Drive,” Louie takes his daughters to see an aged female relative—who turns out to be a virulent racist. The lessons he gives in the episodes about how to love your country, respect even your most difficult relatives, and take responsibility for your privilege should be a textbook for all parents who want to raise their kids with awareness of American racism.

2. He’s willing to bury his bitterness about his divorce for his children’s sake: Watching Louie bite his lip as his youngest daughter explained in the first episode of the last season of Louie that she likes her mother’s—Louie’s ex-wife—house better than Louie’s was an exemplar of staying civil, if not together, for the kids. The show is a constant reminder that children have the power to wound as well as to delight. Being a good parent means working through the pain.

3. He’ll protect his daughter’s duckling on a USO trip through Afghanistan: In “Duckling,” one of the best episodes of television of 2011, Louie got saddled with his daughter’s elementary school class ducklings the night before a USO trip—and touched down in a war zone to find he had a baby duck on board. Rather than trying to pass off the responsibility on someone else, Louie nurtured it through Afghanistan. That’s devotion to the family pet, and your child’s happiness.

4. He’ll reconcile with Dane Cook to get his fictional daughters concert tickets: In “Oh Louie / Tickets,” Louie sat down to work out his character’s (and real life) beef with frat comedian Dane Cook to get his daughter concert tickets. Given Cook’s general wretchedness, and the widespread assumption that he stole jokes from C.K., that’s a pretty awesome sacrifice to make for your kids.

5. He’s teaching his daughters that his love for them isn’t linked to their looks: When I interviewed C.K. at the Television Critics Association press tour in January, he told me that he tries never to tell his daughters that he loves them because they’re pretty. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t tell them that they look nice, but he’s trying not to make his love for them feel conditioned on their appearance. It’s an awesome example of thoughtful, feminist parenting.

One of the best things about writing about multiple media is that you’re not subject to the tyranny of Best Of lists. I could no more decide between Shame and Hugo for a numbered slot than I could pick between Revenge and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (though can we please get Kanye writing rhymes for and about Emily Thorne? I need an update on Snoop Dogg and his Sookie Stackhouse obsession). However, there were a lot of things that made me happy this year, and because Oprah’s not rockin’ it anymore, here is a semi-chronological-but-unranked list of my 26-odd favorite things to consume or discuss in 2011. A similar list of my least favorite things will follow tomorrow.

1. Frank Ocean makes us all hurt so good: I’m more irritated than anything else by the antics of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. But it’s worth it for Frank Ocean, who rocks specific melancholia like nobody’s business. “Novacane” was one of my favorite songs of 2011.

2. Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch: Before y’all accuse me of getting all Armond White up in the business, let me be clear. I don’t think Sucker Punch is an affirmatively good movie or that Snyder is a visionary director (though I appreciate that he actually has a distinctive visual style). But as aestheticized meditation on the horrors of lobotomy, a frightening and overlooked part of American mental health history, I found it unexpectedly moving. Plus, Snyder circumvented a ban on female leads with the movie.

3. Cedar Rapids sets Ed Helms loose: Up In the Air, but for people who actually live in flyover country, and Parks and Recreation with a deeper undercurrent of bitter darkness and isolation. There should be more popular culture about the struggle to be fundamentally decent.

4. War photographers movie The Bang-Bang Club and HBO’s biopic of the Louds, Cinema Verite: After the death of Tim Heatherington and as Joao Silva recovered from his injuries, The Bang-Bang Club offered a look at what it takes not just to put yourself in danger as a war photographer, but at what it means to be an observer rather than someone who intervenes. Conversely, Cinema Verite went back to the invention of reality television to explore what it means to be watched — and dissected — by a mass audience.

5. Game of Thrones is brilliant, and even the frustrating A Dance With Dragons is grist for the mill: I worry that George R.R. Martin’s universe is spiraling completely out of control, too big for any series to contain. But the first season of the HBO adaptation featured great performances, particularly by a host of very young actors and a smart sense for cuts and world-building. I don’t know if we’ll reach the end of this fascinating, maddening saga any time soon. But the ride looks like it’s going to be delightful.
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This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 8 episode of Louie.

This episode began with an expression of the world’s miraculousness, as Louis C.K. explains why his daughters wake him up so early in the morning “I get it, they want to share with me. ‘Daddy, look, it’s all still here!’” But as the rest of the show explains, sometimes life is not that mysterious and delightful. And sometimes the things you feel most sharply and clearly are shattering rather than elevating.

First, Louis succumbs to the temptation to hang out after a successful gig on the testimony of, quite literally, a random guy on the street who tells him he has a moral obligation to hang around and reap the sexual benefits of his funniness. Almost immediately, it becomes too complicated to be fun. “Can I get a shot?” he asks the bartender, who asks him what kind, and when he says whiskey, demands that he specify a brand. “Just, please, brown liquid that makes people feel differently than if they didn’t drink it,” he asks plaintively. The sheer number of signaling preferences you’re supposed to have as an adult makes the fact that you can legally do things like drink alcohol less funny and breezy than they ought to be.

Of course, Louis goes from that simple setup a hugely complicated one, ending up stranded in Jersey after walking away from a threesome. Though when Chris Rock is your emergency pickup (even if his wife is declaring in the background, “I told you to stop being friends when you got divorced. You can’t trust divorced people.”), life can’t be that bad. Still, Rock lectures Louie, reminding him of the folly of the latter half of his evening. “I’m not taking you to the city at 2 o’clock in the morning because you had to look at some crazy woman’s vagina,” he reminds his friend. “That’s not how I plan my life.” Part of being an adult is the moment when you stop telling yourself that certain things are fun.

Among those things? Unrequited love. Louis’ already confessed his love to Pamela, but he revisits that same futile well when he drives her to the airport only to find out that her ticket to Paris is one way, because as she tells him “I’m going to Paris to make it work with my kid’s dad, and I’m not coming back…I’m not attracted to you. Why do you keep making me say mean things to you.” But hope springs eternal, and there’s something powerfully understandable about watching Louis watch her walk away and be lifted up when he mishears her instruction to wave to her as Pamela asking him to wait for her. Our willful self-delusions can be powerfully sustaining if we’re not forced to confront them too harshly. Or maybe it’s just that it’s not a great idea to get into a car with a random woman, no matter how much you want a peek at her lady-bits, a lesson that the women in Louis’ audience have long known, even if it’s sadly funny to watch him learn it for himself.