Over at Feministing, Mychal Denzel Smith has a great piece comparing Rick Ross and Don Draper as men who are very invested in building up fantasy worlds that justify their own privilege:

I don’t mean to compare the rapper and Mad Men’s leading character’s status as sex symbols, because the parallels go beyond the superficial. They are both products of fiction. They’re both identity thieves whose actual life stories hold the potential to ostracize them from their chosen communities. But more importantly, they both have constructed elaborate fantasy worlds around an idea of masculinity they know isn’t true to who they are. And neither one can escape.

Or it might be that they don’t want to escape. They both know that what they’re selling is bullshit, but they do it anyway because it affords them the opportunity to indulge every hyper-masculine fantasy they’ve been told would bring them happiness. In Don’s 1960s world it means he has a beautiful wife, a beautiful ex-wife, beautiful mistresses, beautiful kids, a beautiful home, a thriving business, the envy of Pete Campbell, and respect. Every night he should lie down to sleep feeling like a king.

The occasion for the piece was Ross’s decision that it’s super-cool to rap that he: “Put molly all in her champagne, she aint even know it. I took her home and I enjoyed that, she aint even know it.” After having it pointed out to him that this sentiment is less than charming, Ross insisted that he wasn’t advocating rape because that wasn’t the term that he used, and added that “”I would never use the term rape in my records. As far as my camp, hip-hop don’t condone that. The streets don’t condone that. Nobody condones that…I just wanted to reach out to all the queens that are on my timeline and all the sexy ladies, the beautiful ladies that had been reaching out to me with the misunderstanding.” Talib Kweli has been among the people who have pointed out that this sentiment is idiotic.

But Ross’s attempt at an explanation also points to a direction I think Smith could have taken his piece in: Ross is making the same attempt to narrow down what constitutes rape and sexual assault that characters on Mad Men make all of the time. Don Draper would never think of himself as someone who assaults a woman when he shoves his fingers up Bobbie Barrett’s vagina in a restaurant. Ken Cosgrove couldn’t possibly think that chasing a coworker down, dragging her to the floor, and pulling up her skirt to see the color of her panties is harassment or assault. Pete Campbell doesn’t understand that pressuring the German au pair employed by his neighbors is an ugly form of sexual coercion. And Greg Harris, Joan Holloway’s fiancee, doesn’t see himself as a rapist for years after he assaults Joan on the floor of Roger Sterling’s office—and maybe not even after Joan tells him that “You’re not a good man. You never were, even before we were married, and you know what I’m talking about.”

Because rapists are bad men, and a specific class of bad men. They’re men who can’t get a woman’s consent to have sex, rather than ones who just don’t, or won’t. Rapes happen in alleys, in bushes, late at night, rather than in martial beds, during the day. Rape only happens between strangers, rather than between people who know each other. A woman wasn’t raped unless she has cuts, bruises, was in fear of her life. If a woman had too much to drink, she wasn’t raped. If a woman consented to sex with a man before, she wasn’t raped. If a woman is unconscious and therefore unable to give a definitive no, it isn’t rape. If a woman ought to be sexually available to you, it can’t possibly be assault.

Rick Ross may have a better class of drugs available to him than the men who harass and assault the women around them and go on thinking of themselves as perfectly nice guys, if not world-conquering ballers on the same scale as Ross or Don Draper. But he’s a great illustration of how the same old excuses echo down the ages—and how they transfer from one set of men to another as men of different races and classes get access to the kind of privilege that men like Don guarded so carefully in the past.

The Week’s entertainment editor Scott Meslow was kind enough to sit down with me to record an episode of Bloggingheads that touched on two subjects dear to my heart: Game of Thrones and Mad Men:

In particular we talked about the idea that television can be a novel, an idea popularized during the heyday of shows like The Wire and The Sopranos. I absolutely agree that television shows can function like novels, in that they can tell long-arc stories, develop characters in a rich way, and play with large themes. But there are technological divides that separate what they can do. In a book, you can stay within the medium and flip back and forth if you don’t remember who a character is, or need to check back in on an event that happened previously. Increasingly, large books hold character guides and world maps. The entire universe of the story is there in a single volume. And that means you can throw an enormous amount of material at a reader. But in a television show, if the world gets big enough, you may need to venture outside of the medium to refresh yourself, whether you’re checking Wikipedia for a character name, switching disks to see an old scene, or skimming through Netflix to find the right moment. If you can’t remember something, you may have to break the spell.

And I wonder if Game of Thrones, which has pulled together an enormous number of characters in a book, may be reaching the limits of the extent to which a television show can act like a novel. Alan Sepinwall, whose review of the third season we discussed in this episode, noted in that piece that “On The Wire, for instance, characters frequently crossed paths, and when they didn’t, you could tell how one person’s actions were affecting someone else far away. On Boardwalk Empire, the narrative strands don’t always seem clearly tied together at first, but they inevitably come together in satisfying fashion by season’s end. Both Martin and Game of Thrones are playing a longer game than that.” And I think that long game poses challenges. It’s hard to remember the names of more than 200 characters you aren’t seeing every episode and as part of the same storylines, especially when you don’t see them written down, and especially when ten months pass in between the last time you’ve seen them and the next time you do. And as someone who obviously read the books before the show started, I wonder if it’s not just harder to remember these characters in the glut of information, but whether it’s hard to get attached.

Now, obviously Martin’s books have been released on a cycle that by the standards of television look leisurely. But they’re also able to give much more space to each character—sometimes for good, sometimes for ill—unconstrained by the production budgets, writing, production, and editing cycles, and standard length of a television episode that inevitably provide structure to the show. That means he writes a fair amount of digression and worldbuilding into the books, but also that he’s not bound by anything except how many pages his publishers can bind into a single volume, and even then, if he’s got to spill over into more volumes, they’re going to be nothing but happy. And those digressions, and the amount of time it takes to read the books, just give readers more hooks into the stories, the characters, and the settings. Sprawl, for good and ill, is a characteristic of books in a way that it never can be of television. I’m not saying that means the books are better than the show. But I do think that they expose some of the irreducible differences between reading and watching television once you reach a certain scope.

On Friday, Happy Endings, ABC’s warm, wonderful sitcom that’s a cross between the chosen-family dynamic of Friends and the anarchic pop culture analysis of Community, debuted in a new timeslot to just 3 million viewers, and a 0.9 rating in the valuable 18-49 demographic. Two days later, The Walking Dead, AMC’s violent zombie drama, finished its third season with 12.4 million viewers, 8.4 million of them between the ages of 18 and 49. These two disparate bits of data could be evidence for a lot of different ideas: the general ascendence of cable over broadcast networks, for example, or the American viewing public’s appetite for violent media. But I want to use it to point out something different, and something that I think plays a larger role than is generally acknowledged in the failure of some broadcast shows and the success of turning many cable shows into must-see TV: unpredictable broadcast television scheduling has made it impossible to turn any single television show into a predictable viewing event.

When Happy Endings debuted in 2011, its first episode aired at 9:31 PM even though the show would normally be airing at 10PM. After the third episode, ABC began doubling up the episodes, airing one at 10PM and another at 10:30. In the second season, the show moved to 9:30 PM. In its third, Happy Endings aired first on Tuesdays at 9 PM, then on Sundays with Don’t Trust The B—- In Apt. 23, and now on the Wednesday time slot that’s done so poorly. While in the show’s first season, episodes 1-12 ran on consecutive weeks without a break in between, there was a three-month gap between the 12th episode, which aired on May 25, and the thirteenth, which aired on August 24. In the second season, the episodes ran in consecutive weeks with a break for Thanksgiving until December, when ABC aired one episode, then took the show off the air until January. And in this third season, the show went off the air for two months, between January 29 and March 29. In between the shifts of time slot and the gaps in between episodes, it makes sense that Happy Endings would get whittled down to a core group of viewers who were committed enough to follow it from day to day and from month to month: who else could possibly be expected to chase the show across the calendar for years at a time?

Scheduling changes like this are due to a number of factors, among them high rates of show failure and the excessive length of the traditional broadcast season. Happy Endings moved to Sundays to replace the cancelled 666 Park Avenue, and networks often shuffle shows around to plug holes on their schedules that emerge as new shows fail to attract audiences and are removed form the calendar. And no show on network can both be aired every week and fill out a season that’s eight months long when the standard broadcast network order is for around 22 episodes of a program. This mismatch ought to create opportunities for networks to pair up existing shows with miniseries, shorter-run series with expensive stars like The Following, for which Fox promised Kevin Bacon he’d only have to do 15 episodes a year, or launches of new shows towards the end of the year, as was the strategy for another ABC show, Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, which has grown into a genuine hit in its second—but first full-length—season. But in reality, it frequently makes for lumpy seasons with long breaks. Parks and Recreation may be the show on network television to which I am most emotionally attached but now, if I didn’t feel a professional obligation to watch it in a timely fashion (something I do on Hulu the morning after rather than the night of), I’d let the episodes pile up on my DVR until I could have the pleasure of a long, luxuriant evening with it, rather than risk disappointment by clearing my Thursdays only to find that the show isn’t on.
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In next week’s episode of Sundance Channel miniseries Top of the Lake (which premiered last night), Robin Griffin, the New Zealand police detective investigating the pregnancy and then disappearance of a twelve-year-old girl from her home in a rural community, quietly and almost casually sinks a dart in a man’s shoulder in the middle of a bar. It’s a shocking, violent act, particularly for a female character on television. But it’s also in keeping with the finest work of Elisabeth Moss, who plays Robin, and who stars as Peggy Olson Mad Men: she’s one of the best actresses working today at conveying anger from a female perspective, and exploring the constraints on how women are allowed to express that anger.

In Top Of The Lake, we learn before we meet Robin that she has a difficult reputation. “Robin Griffin,” a local police officer remarks after a young girl, Tui, is found up to her chest in a freezing lake—and after she is pulled out of the water, discovered to be pregnant—and it becomes necessary to pull in a detective with more specific experience, Robin is called in because she is in the area, visiting her mother. “This is going to be painful,” another remarks. When Robin arrives on the scene, she’s impatient. “I want this window covered with sheets of A3, and I want her on my own for as long as it takes,” she says of the room where Tui is waiting at a table, in full view of everyone in the precinct. “Clear? I want a clear yes from everyone.” When Robin objects to the idea of Tui being sent home, a police officer tells her “She can’t get any more pregnant.” “She could be attacked for being pregnant,” Robin snaps back at him.

But if Robin seems like a live-wire of tension, she has good reason to be angry. Her mother is undergoing treatment for cancer. Tui’s case comes at a moment of great tension in the region where she lives. Her father, enraged after a local realtor, Bob Platt, sells a tract of land that he believes was promised to him to a group of women who are setting up a quasi-feminist commune, drowns the man during an attempt to scare him. When he learns of Tui’s pregnancy, his instructions to the detective who called in Robin are harsh. “Here’s what you do. You get on your radio, you phone the detective, and you tell her she’s had a miscarriage, or she’s marrying the kid down the road,” he demands, trying to delay time. “I had my first orgasm when I was seven, my first fuck when I was eleven. So she’s a slut. Her dad’s a slut…But she’s not having a baby. I wouldn’t do that to one of my bitches.” The reaction of men in the—except for the commune—overwhelmingly female town is just as ugly. “Are you a feminist?” one of them asks Robin in an upcoming episode. “Are you a lesbian?” asks another. “You’d be better off being a lesbian,” a third chimes in. “Nobody likes a feminist except a lesbian.”

If the attitudes are frightening, even worse is the likelihood they’ll be made manifest. Tui’s father shoots a dog in front of Robin. The implication after the realtor’s death is that if the women don’t move off the land he believes to be his, he could come after them next. And what’s been done to Tui already, and what could have been done to her after she vanishes from the commune, is horrible enough. It makes sense that Robin is angry, and in a place where she’s been physically intimidated already, it’s not surprising that she’d defend herself, as she does when a gun’s pointed at her. And it’s unnerving that she’d strike first through the creative means of the dart—or, as the show suggests, that she’d be involved in a domestic incident where a wall was punched in. Robin’s enraged by sexism and sexual violence, and she’s responding by claiming a kind of physical power—and more importantly, physical aggression—that’s often reserved for men.
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On Friday, Showtime announced that it had picked up a new show called The Affair, which would tell the stories of a relationship that interrupts two marriages, splitting up the episodes to explore the perspectives of the men and women involved separately. It was a decision that, along with the forthcoming Masters of Sex, a historical drama bout the sex researchers Masters and Johnson, and Ray Donovan, which follows a Los Angeles fixer who is also dealing with the consequences of childhood sexual abuse in his family, that furthered a brand that underlies a great deal of Showtime’s work, and that makes the network unusual among its peers. Showtime increasingly as interested in exploring sex as it is violence.

This isn’t to say that all of Showtime’s programming is solely preoccupied with sex, but three of its foundational shows, The L Word, about affluent lesbians, Queer As Folk, an adaptation of the British drama, and Soul Food, an adaptation of the movie, were all substantially concerned with how adults approach sex, sometimes in the context of their families. It’s a theme that continues in the shows that are airing on it presently. Shameless is substantially about the sexual relationships of multiple generations of the Gallagher family. House of Lies examines both the sex lives of successful consultants and the sexual and gender identity of the main character’s son. Californication‘s focus is announced in its title. Dexter is a serial killer show that’s frequently explored the sexual components of violence. And Homeland started out as a show about national security and has morphed into an epic romance grounded in a striking sexual connection between its two main characters, a dogged CIA agent and the undercover terrorist she is pursuing.

I asked Showtime president David Nevins about that trend at the Television Critics Association press tour in January, and about how intentional the network’s focus on sex was.

“We have the ability to be adults, try to use the lack of restrictions that we have because we don’t sell to advertisers, use it to most interesting effect. And there are
taboo subjects that we can explore that other people don’t have — other programmers don’t have the same freedom and ability,” he said. “Masters of Sex feels like a show that only we could get away with, that only pay cable could get away with…Sex is one of the places where we can distinguish ourselves. But it’s really important to me also that we be interesting and provocative in a deeper way, not just salacious.”

That’s an ambitious goal to set, and one I’m particularly curious to measure The Affair, Masters of Sex, and Ray Donovan against. And it’s hard precisely because fewer people have worked at it. Mainstream movies and television have done an enormous amount of work to explore what makes for stylish violence, and what about the employment of violence we find alternately exciting and revolting. Some of the reason that’s happened is because of incentives set up in the television and movie ratings systems, which make it easier to make violent content reach a mass audience than to do the same with considerations of sex that are comparatively grown-up and intense. Some of it’s happened because there’s an alternative to mainstream entertainment that’s making sexual content that mainstream entertainment can’t and wouldn’t want to replicate.

And some of it is simply because the practice we’ve had at making entertainment intelligently or entertainingly violent isn’t matched by an equal set of established conventions around sex. It’s pretty easy to figure out what will make an audience either gasp in admiration at violent prowess—James Bond’s ability to take as good as he gets, and to dole out violence with precision is a good rule of thumb—or recoil in disgust from the damage done to a body. It’s much harder to figure out how to do a sex scene that will make a mass audience have the same unified reaction, and some of that’s because what we feel about sex isn’t close to standardized. In The New Republic, Sam Lipsyte, writing about how to write about sex, suggests that aspiring novelists “Trust in the modern gods who guide your hand: Sad and Funny. Like it or not, these are the twin poles for most of our tiny thoughts and doings. Sad and Funny are both the world and how we withstand it.” But poles aren’t the entirety of experience, and joy deserves some recognition in there as well.

I understand the many reasons that a network would choose to go with violence as its primal stakes and subject for exploration: it’s exciting, our reactions to a lot of it are easy to predict, and it is, in a lot of ways, easier to get on screen and easier to sell once it’s there. But even if violence isn’t an exhaustible subject, it’s far from the only one that matters, or the only stakes that any of us experience—for many of us, we’re deeply fortunate to avoid it. Going after sex and romance, and doing it with the same level of sophistication and style as many of the great cable dramas is a harder thing to do, and it’s why sex is an equal or close to equal subject maybe only in Deadwood and Mad Men.

“I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure,” Bikini Kill sang in 1995. Television still hasn’t even begun to tap that potential, but I do wish they’d start getting around to it. If Showtime is digging in on questions of what sex means to us, how we study it, and how we survive trauma around it, I’m excited to see what arguments those shows are going to make—and how viewers will react to them.

After I wrote yesterday about feeling overloaded on both violence and baroque plot mechanisms that ratchet up the intensity of shows, Linda Holmes at NPR wrote a wonderful piece about what we lose about focusing on violent death as the only possible stake for dramatic storytelling:

But what is concerning is that this revolution has been deep but narrow; it’s like we have an army of dazzlingly fluent poets who all write in one language. That doesn’t, of course, make all the poetry the same, any more than all English-language poetry is the same. These shows are varied in many ways: The Wire is not the same show as The Walking Dead just because people get shot and otherwise brutalized, and American Horror Story and Boardwalk Empire are hardly identical twins. But they share elements, one of which is that the stakes involve — not solely but largely — avoiding being violently killed. And for that reason, they ask the viewer to want to watch people being violently killed now and then, and sometimes now and then and then and then, because otherwise the threats are false…

The “television versus film” debate is absurd and always has been; there’s no way to attain a weighted average of all of television and all of film, nobody sees all of either one, and comparing best versus best ignores everything else. But at some point, if dramatic television wants to be considered as vibrant and exciting as film can be, it needs a better mix. It needs love stories and family stories, workplace stories and friendship stories, and they can’t all be soaked in blood. Inevitably, there is a portion of the audience that is — as Alyssa pointed out — eventually exhausted by that. Not offended; exhausted.

I also took some time yesterday to talk to Maureen Ryan of Huffington Post both about Sons of Anarchy and some of the issues I raised in my piece. Sons fans may be interested in the whole diavlog. But I wanted to pull this section of it, where we talk a bit about how to work our way out of hugely complex plots that are dependent on violent stakes. We talked a bit about British series, which have developed in the opposite direction that Linda described, exploring a broad range of forms and tones but without delving deeply into a limited set of tropes and themes. And I suggested that maybe we need a halfway point between traditional procedurals, which devote very little time to long character arcs and keep their plots largely confined to single episodes, and serialized dramas, which have both very long plot and character arcs. Mad Men, after all, is fundamentally a procedural, a show that has a discrete task per episode, often one that very clearly snaps onto the previous episode’s task like a Lego in the construction of the major goal of the season, and one that leaves significant space in every episode for character development. And it’s avoided the trap of both the traditional procedural, and of violent death stakes as the only ones:

By Arturo Garcia

In the wake of the big, clumsy Avengers/X-Men crossover AvsX, which concluded on Oct. 3, Marvel Comics is selling the reintroduction of a version of the original X-Men as a bold move. And the company’s sort of righ–for all the wrong reasons. Because what Marvel’s saying is, a franchise built and marketed as a grand metaphor about race is going to center around white people. “Re(e)volution”? More like Re(e)tread.

As part of the upcoming “Marvel NOW!” marketing line, the cynically-titled All New X-Men will allegedly feature the team’s original five members–the young Scott Summers (Cyclops), Jean Grey, Warren Worthington (Angel,) Hank McCoy (Beast) and Bobby Drake (Iceman)–landing in the present-day Marvel Universe. (I say allegedly because, this being comics, you have to account for the chance they’re actually from Another Dimension, An Alternate Timeline, Skrulls in Disguise, a veiled insult to cosplayers, what have you.) The move is especially disappointing coming from the new series’ writer, Brian Michael Bendis, who has shown the ability–and more importantly, the clout–to elevate characters of color in other parts of the Marvel Universe.

It was Bendis who took Luke Cage from a blaxploitation throwback to a featured player in the pre-movie Avengers franchise, and Bendis deserves credit for not only crafting a heroic death for the Ultimate (alternate) universe’s Spider-Man, but introducing a Black Latino, Miles Morales, as his successor and using the Spider-Men mini-series to solidify his role. So it’s disheartening to read him gushing to Newsarama about some mythical consensus of X-Men fans: “That’s the thing X-Men fans always say they want,” he said. “You go anywhere—’Bring back Jean Grey!’ But they don’t want a reincarnated Jean Grey, and they don’t want a dug-up Jean Grey. They want Jean.”

I’m not sure who Bendis is talking to, but I’m willing to bet there’s also a sizable contingent of fans who’d like to see Storm–a former leader of the team and a former Queen of Wakanda–have a more prominent role than being chained up on the cover of Wolverine’s latest series. Or who would prefer younger characters like X-23 and The Runaways (this group, not that group) to be involved in something other than a Battle Royale homage. It doesn’t say much for Marvel’s confidence in its product or the customers it chooses to listen to see that it would rather dote on characters from 1963 than renew development of more recent properties — nearly 30 years’ worth, as Matt Price pointed out at Nerdage. Price’s post highlights years of opportunity the company has let go by the wayside: all of those teams, introduced as the Next Generation of the Mutant fight for equality, have been stuck in comics Neverland; they’re the Lost Boys and Girls of the Marvel Universe until, well, probably forever, if series like All New are going to be taking priority.

Or maybe it’s just time for Marvel to give up the ghost; while series like Uncanny X-Force and the issues of Uncanny X-Men that preceded AvX were solid when showing us professional superheroes, the fact is that the company has squandered many story possibilities the Mutants-As-Minority analogy has offered, even before the epic racefail that was X-Men: First Class. I talked about that creative stagnation at Racialicious last year, nothing that “We never met, say, a relatively-super-fast courier in the New York depicted in ‘Amazing Spider-Man.’ Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson never hired a legal assistant with an extra-eidetic memory in ‘Daredevil’” Mutants have been part of Marvel’s world, but never really in it, unless they were either engaging in terrorism against “normal” humans, or part of anti-terrorism factions.”

We’re talking about a company, after all, where an executive feels it’s okay to publicly state that a team of black Avengers would be “contrived.” Why expect it to show enough awareness to introduce a political successor to Charles Xavier? Instead, we get characters from the Mad Men era. The idea has a little bit of charm–Jean as Joan? Scott as Don? Bobby as Pete? Comedy alert!–and will probably goose sales for the immediate future. But it would be easier for Marvel to make their “events,” and their overall line, mean something if it invested more in characters who were most relevant after the Civil Rights struggle it claims to be trying to evoke.

Arturo R. García is the Managing Editor at Racialicious and an Editor at The Raw Story

Homeland‘s complete domination of the drama Emmy Awards last night—Claire Danes and Damian Lewis won for their lead performances, and the show took home awards for writing for a drama series and for best drama series—was a surprise for many of us watching at home, whether we doing so for personal or professional reasons (or in my case, watching football while following along on Twitter). It’s possible to quibble with some of the awards. Breaking Bad, in particular, had an extremely strong season, and I might have gone with Bryan Cranston over Lewis just for the sheer range he was required to deploy. But on the whole, I’m very happy with the drama awards (vastly less so with comedy, but that’s another story). And there’s something exciting to me about watching the enthusiasm for Homeland on display last night.

On Twitter, a number of critics I care for dearly and admire were quick to declare Mad Men a vastly superior show to Homeland, which in the final analysis of history, may prove correct. But there’s something brave and bracing to me about the way Homeland has tackled the issues and environment of our own time, rather than reaching back into our history to explore the psychological contours of debates that are essentially settled, and settled for the better. Mad Men explores a broader universe through the lens of its advertising agency (and its much larger core cast) than Homeland does from within the intelligence community, but it sometimes does so with less courage. It’s a show that’s much more interested in exploring Don Draper’s reaction to having to put up with a token black employee than with the experiences of Dawn, SCDP’s African-American pioneer, herself. The show tells us that sexism is damaging to both men and women, and than white men could be shocked when their obliviousness was breached. These are things I think we know, gussied up in beautiful clothes and gilded with performances that are sometimes exceptional.

Homeland, by contrast, is concerned with the urgent present rather than the weight of history. At a moment when President Obama’s drone program raises profoundly difficult questions about how to regulate the president’s right to kill, Homeland has charged into the debate with an exploration of the impact of the people who are killed because they are in the way of drone strikes, and how those strikes can be used to powerfully shift opinion against the United States. At a time when large numbers of Americans persist, against all evidence and reason, in believing that our president is a foreigner and a secret Muslim so they won’t have to accept that their nation actually chose a black man to occupy its highest office, Homeland has given us a sensitive, even tender portrait of a convert to Islam, presenting the practice of his faith as beautiful and sanctified, who hides his religion (something that will become an issue in the second season premiere next Sunday). And in Carrie Mathison, Homeland‘s given us a female lead who is damaged less by history than by the things that make her brilliant. These are narrower concerns than the broad societal forces Mad Men explores, but that specificity doesn’t make the show less bold: instead, it makes it more painful and immediate.
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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.

This last season of Mad Men heightened the debate about the show’s approach to race and the 1960s, bringing Dawn, a young secretary, into the office as Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s first African-American employee. Would these exceedingly exceedingly privileged white people have much contact with black people who weren’t their domestic help or much awareness of the civil rights movement? Did the show tokenize Dawn by bringing her into the office but building no significant storyline around her presence there? I expect all of those debates to continue next season, particularly as we see whether Matthew Weiner has long-term plans for Dawn, or for how his white folks will bend or break under the winds of change.

But in the meantime, Santigold’s new video for her song “The Keepers” may be my favorite critique of the obliviousness of people like the Drapers:

It’s a house where impeccably coifed, white-blonde people eat food that glows with poison. When shooters in a car shred the walls, they momentarily startle, then check their hair and make sure their clothes are in place, and sit back down to dinner. And when their milkman’s caught in the crossfire, they make a spectacle of his death without considering the risk outside. The house build by racism is burning down around them and they don’t even notice.Mad Men did horror stories last season, but to slightly cartoonish effect. Don Draper still had to be the person we rooted for, even as he courted rot in his jaw, even as he was haunted by his dead brother. It seems it takes someone like Santigold to do the job properly, to reveal the obscenity of moving through your swish, stylish life ignorant of the fundamental inequalities you benefit from, and unprepared to adapt to a world without them.