Urging—as I would—readers to watch Top Of The Lake, David Haglund uses the excellent Sundance series to make an important point. American television, he argues, needs to rediscover the miniseries if it wants to retain its creative vitality:

Characters interesting enough to serve as engaging companions week after week for years are wonderful creations, but their stories lack the meaningful shape found in the best novels and movies and plays. We may get glorious moments, and terrific episodes, and occasionally excellent multi-episode arcs. But the need to leave the door open, to keep the story going a little bit longer, and then a little bit longer, is an artistic impediment. Breaking Bad aside, there are few if any shows which have run for more than a couple seasons that one can hold in one’s mind complete and consider as an artistic whole. Contrast that shapelessness with, say, Scenes From a Marriage, or The Best of Youth, or The Decalogue, all limited-run TV programs from Europe that are better than just about anything American TV has ever made.

Many viewers are fine with baggy imperfection in exchange for more of their favorite shows, of course. Why ask for less of something as good as The Sopranos? But perhaps if David Chase had been able to tell The Sopranos in 12 or 15 hours of perfect television, he could have then moved on to another epic story—instead of stretching it out for 86 rather up-and-down installments and then leaving TV behind to make a movie. And really, if The Sopranos had to be an uneven, six-season show, then fine. But can’t we have great miniseries, too? Given how much quality TV the U.S. churns out, why does Europe have better miniseries than we do?

I think Haglund is right, and that he’s correct that financial implications are the main reason that we don’t see more miniseries: you can’t race to syndication with something that’s only going to last six or seven hours, and it’s hard to recoup the investments in sets and costumes, which are fixed no matter how many episodes you produce. But granted those factors, I actually want to take a step further: television’s continued creative vitality depends on great flexibility on episode numbers across the board.

I’ve been a long-time advocate for shorter seasons, because I think the 22-episode season is a disaster. It requires shows with overall story arcs to write in a lot of filler. It means that shows are off the air for almost half of the forty-ish week-long television season, which alone makes it almost impossible for fans to regularly shape their weeks around their favorite television shows. It makes much more sense for fans to schedule a single or several evenings of television-watching and to see everything in their DVRs. And most importantly, it’s arbitrary. Part of the reason a show like Enlightened feels like it’s going out on a tremendously high note is that the short seasons fit its arcs well: it was believable that Amy Jellicoe could become a whistleblower and the story she wanted written about her employer, Abaddon Industries, could come to fruition, or something close to it, in eight episodes.

But lately, I’ve been feeling that the problem of arbitrariness applies to shorter seasons, too. I completely understand that Game of Thrones can produce about ten episodes a year, but there are times when I’d prefer to miss a year so the show could handle whole story arcs in a single season, or simply devote more time to certain characters who inevitably are getting short shrift in a ten-episode season. I’d argue that Girls‘ second season was substantially hurt by the fact that it only had ten half-hour episodes—there wasn’t enough time for developments like Hannah’s rise to a book deal or her OCD to percolate. Luther, a wonderful British miniseries, took six episodes to cement the bond between its main character, a detective, and the psychopath who understands him better than anyone else, but then went shorter in its second season to mixed effect. Similarly, Sherlock has felt more like the product of constraints on its in-demand stars’ time than the actual creative needs of the relationship between Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, and Sherlock’s brother Mycroft.

There’s no question that variable scheduling causes headaches for networks, and complications on the overall mix of advertising sales. But it’s not as if they don’t do it already. Shows like Scandal and Don’t Trust The B—- In Apt. 23 were launched with short orders. ABC Family premiered Melissa and Joey with 35 episodes. NBC was able to adapt both 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation to Tina Fey’s pregnancies. It would just be nice if networks could expand or contract the length of seasons for creative reasons, rather than simply for logistical ones.

If we hadn’t already heard that Joss Whedon will be writing and directing The Avengers and returning to television with a Marvel series, this would be by far the most exciting pop culture news of the week: BBC America is apparently considering a spin-off show that would feature Alice Morgan:

There’s a school of thought that says crazy-quirky supporting characters aren’t as appealing when they’re thrust into the center of the action, but I’m willing to bet against conventional wisdom if BBC America greenlights a Luther spinoff centered around brilliant sociopath Alice Morgan (played to delectable perfection by Ruth Wilson). “The BBC is very interested in the project,” Luther creator and exec producer Neil Cross told Variety. “The only real question would be how many and how often we would do it — whether it would be a one-off miniseries or a returning miniseries, a co-production or not.” “Even if I didn’t sell this thing, I would still end up writing the miniseries,” Cross went on to say. “It’s something peculiar, but she’s far more clever than me, far more witty than me, far more everything than me.”

That’s a fantastic idea, and not only for those of us who are anticipating the withdrawal when Cross finishes his last miniseries installment about troubled detective John Luther (Idris Elba). Morgan, as portrayed by Ruth Wilson (who resembles an evil Emma Stone), is a powerful, original television character, a genius who killed her parents and when Luther figured her out, made him her moral lodestar, the only person she felt any emotional attachment to, and the only person who she recognized as having valid desires and needs other than her own.

As I’ve written before, in the great anti-hero shows of our era women, often wives, serve the audience-alienating role of reminding both us and the anti-heroes themselves that their anti-social behavior is less awe-inspiring and badass than it is a gross violation of community norms and often, other people’s rights. Even a female anti-hero like Patty Hewes does grotesquely awful things to other people does so in the name of a clearly-articulated greater good, and sometimes feels bad about it, as in that repeated scene of her shaking violent in the chair at her beach house in the first season. And while Aspergerian nerd Sheldon Cooper is one of the biggest characters on television, on Bones, Temperance Brennan’s confusion about social cues has been muted over the years. We like, or television thinks we like, to like our female characters uncomplicatedly, rather than transgressively.

Alice Morgan fits none of those models. It’s not that she doesn’t understand other people’s values and feelings—she just doesn’t particularly care about them. She’s ingeniously violent in service of her own interest, unlike Brennan’s use of her abilities to solve crimes and ease the pain of the bereaved, or Patty’s manipulativeness in service of her clients. And her sexual heat with Luther is unapologetically freighted, manipulative even as it stems from perhaps the only sincere affection Alice’s ever felt in her life.

TVLine suggested that a show build around Alice might follow a Dexter-like format, where Alice struggles to maintain a code that helps her pass as a decent person, while channeling the impulses she’s unable to repress. That makes sense, although I think there’s an important inverse. In that show, Dexter learned that some of the impulses and behaviors he’d been faking actually had meaning to him. A show built around Alice that intersected with a thoughtful consideration of gender could let her have some of those experiences, and also expose some of the uglier motivations behind the expectations that women be nice, and primarily oriented towards the needs of others. Anti-heroes have primarily been used to expose the flexibility of our own morality, our ability to attach to a corrupt cop or a family mobster. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be used to reveal the rot in what we cling to, as well as what we’re eager to let go.

Luther creator Neil Cross, in an interview in which he confirmed that the four-episode third season would be the end of the character’s run on television, also had some interesting things to say about white writers trying to create characters who are specifically intended to be black (the casting for Luther proceeded on a race-neutral basis, as I reported last year):

It was cast as a character, purely and simply, which is one of the aspects that attracted Idris to the role. I have no knowledge or expertise or right to try to tackle in some way the experience of being a black man in modern Britain. It would have been an act of tremendous arrogance for me to try to write – and you have to try to imagine the quote marks around the words – a black character because I don’t know what a black character is and we would have ended up with a slightly embarrassed, ignorant, middle-class, white writer’s idea of a black character, which would have been an embarrassment for everybody concerned. I suspect that there’s a dearth of decent roles for black actors because most writers are white and they try to write their idea of black and it’s an embarrassment.

In theory, I appreciate this kind of humility and think it’s important. But I also think it’s the kind of thinking that can easily feed the continuing dominance of white characters unless you’re deeply committed to race-neutral casting, and to the idea idea that the actors you cast may contribute substantially to shaping the backstories and motivations of the characters you created. If you can do that, and leave for a black, Hispanic, or Asian actor to come in and bring new accents, physicality, and insight into the characters’ decisions that might not fit cleanly with white defaults, than I’m all for the idea that white writers shouldn’t try to specifically write black characters out of respect for the points where their insight ends. But if you’re not in a position where casting is race-neutral, where the default will always be white, then I’d rather have actors flagging some characters as non-white. Otherwise, the palatte’s in danger of staying depressingly, dully monochromatic.

The bridge is yours.

-Downton Abbey and Luther will move from the miniseries category to the drama category at the Emmys next year—and the category may expand as a result.

-Inspector Spacetime, to tide you over until the return of Community on March 15.

-How Oscar voters made their decisions.

-Kid Rock turns out to support the Detroit Symphony.

-Estelle’s back! Summer’s here!

The ratings are in for the last episode of Downton Abbey, and PBS has got to be thrilled—5.4 million people tuned in to see Matthew Crawley and Lady Mary finally get engaged. Those are numbers that in some slots, NBC would die to have. And as the Daily Beast reported last week, the show hasn’t just drawn good numbers: it’s helped PBS pull in new donations. But Downton Abbey‘s only one show, and the last time the network pulled numbers like this was for Ken Burns’ series on the America’s national parks. That doesn’t exactly provide a clear guide to what PBS might build its brand into.

I suggested in January, and I still believe, that PBS could rebuild by airing a lot of British content that isn’t widely available over here. Hulu’s been able to make some inroads by airing Misfits, Party Animals, and The Only Way Is Essex, the kind of show that one would think would land on BBC America but didn’t. PBS could go the same route, but the shorter runs of British shows means they’d have to come up with a ton of material to fill the schedule. And not all of the options for promising British shows, be it Luther or Misfits, share what I think is a crucial attribute of Downton Abbey: it’s very family friendly. Certainly we know that Lady Mary had sex, and people suffer grievous war wounds, but there’s a world of difference between Mr. Pamuk’s death and the sex scenes in Misfits, or seeing bandaged fake Patrick and seeing the victims in Luther. Your mileage may vary, but I think you could watch Downton Abbey with a sophisticated 10-year-old, give or take a few years, and I think it’s a good thing to have shows available that a family can watch across the generations.

And finding that sort of programming is hard. I think what Ken Burns does is noble, but he can’t turn out these documentaries very quickly, and I don’t know that there’s an audience for more of them. ABC Family’s shows may be accessible to a wide age range of viewers, but I’m not sure they’re really intended to draw in adults. Finding something that’s genuinely appealing in a cross-generational way, rather than simply broadly age-appropriate, is tremendously difficult, and it’s not a code I’m sure anyone’s consistently cracked. I’d really like to see some creative experimentation with age-appropriateness as a starting constraint rather than an end goal. There are stories where sex, drugs salty language, and all the other things parents might want to wait to expose their kids to are essential. But that’s not true for every human story.

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.

Downton Abbey scored 4.2 million viewers in its return on Sunday, 1.28 million viewers more than Mad Men averaged in its most recent season and just 280,000 viewers below what Community averaged in its second season (in other words, numbers NBC would like to see again as a minimum). The numbers are cheering if only because it’s nice to see that public television can score a program that’s as compelling as network offerings, that if public broadcasting is to be the bastion of eggheads and intellectuals, that there are 4.2 million of them willing to turn out to support quality programming.

But what does it mean for what kind of slate PBS might put together? I’ve been having some trouble finding ratings for the U.S. airing of Sherlock on PBS, but it certainly seems at least like an anecdotal success. Luther got poor ratings on BBC America, which may be a product of the network’s availability as a standard part of cable packages, despite the fact that it seems like a logical crossover for those of us nostalgic for The Wire. I wonder if it might have been more successful on PBS, and helped PBS build a bit of edgy cred, as Luther is nothing if not often and significantly uncomfortable. I do think it’s a challenge for PBS, both in terms of its public support and building a broader audience long-term, to be seen as too British. But how awesome would a drama block that starts with Downton, continues to Sherlock, and ends with Luther be?

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.
Read more

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if you’re not watching Idris Elba’s turn as a not-particularly-mentally-healthy police detective in Luther (which, as I write in The Atlantic today, may be the scariest show on television), you are missing. out. Whether the show’s making callbacks to London’s artistic history, tapping the underpinnings of racism in the U.K. to fuel unnerving crime sprees, or exploring the alienation of returning servicemembers, the show jumps off big issues to profoundly new and strange places. And Elba is fantastic in a role that gives him far greater range than playing Stringer Bell ever did, alternately wounded, sly, and forceful.

In preparation for the second series finale, which airs on BBC America tonight, I interviewed the show’s producer Phillippa Giles, and asked her about something that, as an American viewer, has always stood out to me. Whether it’s Luther’s South Asian wife, his white female boss in the first series, his friendship with the murderous but charming Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson), and in this series, the fatherly interest he takes in a the daughter of a friend who’s been working in pornography and as a prostitute (watch out for an adorable scene between them tonight), the show is full of interracial relationships that range from the emotionally and sexually intimate, to the professionally bracing. In an environment where it’s striking when advertising campaigns start subtly including interracial couples and when our entertainment can seem rigidly divided between black and white audiences and black and white casts, Luther‘s profoundly refreshing.

“It was nothing to do with black or white,” Giles said of the casting of Ruth Wilson to play Alice Morgan. “Obviously it looks really good, you’ve got a red-headed woman and a dark guy, so that wasn’t bad. We would have cast anybody that had what Alice needs. It was just color-blind casting.”

When I told her how fresh the show’s approach to race — not quite a neutrality, but an insistence that race can be a factor without being the sole focus — felt to me, Giles said she was surprised.

“We always think we’re behind the States,” she told me. “We always color-blind cast. We thought we were copying you. We had no idea that you would feel that that was…Idris is brilliant. Not only is he a mentor to black writers, BBC has a development deal to bring on young black writers. He said he wanted us to try to reflect the country. We’ve tried really hard. We didn’t achieve that.” And when the show introduced an ambitious young black female detective to Luther’s team this year, Giles notes,
“She was written to be cast black or white. We really enjoyed that she was black.”

And I think that’s perfect. When shows and movies assume by default characters will be white and that if they’re going to end up black, or Latino, or Asian, that isn’t a neutral choice. There are stories that are driven by particular racial dynamics, and in that case, it may be important to, say, have a cop be white and a subject of an investigation be black. But if your story doesn’t absolutely require that characters be of a certain race or ethnicity, trying to eliminate any assumption about which race they’ll be before you cast a specific actor to play them seems like a decent rule of thumb. That may take a little work for white creators, but it’s not exactly onerous. And it’s something that Luther gets right and makes the show more fun to watch, both visually and narratively.

A good post from Nikki, in response to some of my writing, saying that it’s not enough to want more women writing and directing television episodes. She writes:

If we suggest that increasing the number of women ON television might increase the number of women BEHIND television, thereby effecting a change in how sexist or feminist television shows might be, we excuse men from the process entirely, except as Upholders of the Status Quo. Set aside the question about women behind the scenes and focus on the men behind the scenes, who are definitely still in power in the media and it’s that power structure that should be held accountable for the current portrayal of women on TV.

Amen. I’m a pretty firm believer in the carrot-and-stick thing, though, because it’s relatively easy for male creators to clap their hands over their ears when they’re being criticized for not giving us wonderful, developed female characters and just not listen. And it’s much easier to get people to listen when you’re praising, and for other people to see that praise and think “I want that!” So without further ado and in no particular order, 10 fantastic female characters on television who were created by men.

1. Trixie, Deadwood, David Milch: I know this list isn’t in order, but if it was, I’d still put it at the top. Milch’s prostitute-turned-accountant, pimp’s-trick-turned-Jewish-businessman’s-girlfriend would still be at the top. We meet Trixie at the beginning of the show when she’s been accused of murder, and watch her help another woman beat a drug addiction even when it means defying her employer’s orders; seek out an education no one ever gave her so she can have more options in life; stand up for her friends when they get married and grieve for them when they bury their children; and develop a new relationship. She’s always making choices. And when she takes steps backwards, we understand why, at the gut level. She’s empowered, but the show doesn’t fall prey to the trap that strong female characters created by men often do — that women’s liberation is purely a matter of will, not circumstance.

2. Alice Morgan, Luther, Neil Cross: Alice, who enters the scene when she murders her parents, melts down the gun, and feeds the remaining parts to her dog, is a certified crazy person, but she’s not a victim. Her attraction to John Luther doesn’t make her a nymphomaniac. And her decision to work cases comes out of a clearly defined alternate morality and worldview. Rather than setting her up to be judged by the audience, she’s a compelling — and sometimes very scary — way to see the universe.
Read more