Yesterday, my friend Matt Zeitlin tweeted: “The idea that characters are more realistic or human because they change substantially over time is, when you think about it, pretty LOL.” He was responding, I think, to Monday-morning quarterbacking of the last episode of Mad Men, a show which has given rise to an important and difficult discussion about two questions. First, what do the arcs of characters’ individual growth have to look like for us to invest in them? And second, what stories can we tell about characters who have significantly stagnated, as Don Draper seems to have at the beginning of the sixth season of the show substantially about him, which is scheduled to run for at least seven in total?

The television writer Ken Levine asked this question in a post exploring his reaction to Don Draper, in which he also touched on the way that Girls has doubled down on the unlikability of its characters in that sitcom’s second season. He wrote:

The hope was always that he’d figure it out, finally be comfortable in his own skin, and that all of his good qualities would rise to the surface and he’d become a better father, husband, employer, and stop wearing hats already in 1968. And if he slipped up a little, well – he’s only human and we’ve come to expect that. Betty is trying to throw Hansel & Gretel in an oven, she’s a lost cause. But there was still hope for Don.

Until this season. Now he has a loving wife, a wildly successful career, and he has become television’s biggest prick. It’s not enough he’s cheating on Megan, but he’s doing it with another woman in his building and he’s all buddy-buddy with her husband. They socialize together. He invites the guy to the office. What a fucking asshole! Meanwhile, he tries to destroy his wife’s dreams simply because they inconvenience him. He never talks to his children, even on Christmas. And he’s a cold distant boss to all his employees while still demanding total loyalty from them. Why should I care anymore about this miserable soul? Because he gets to his front door, slumps down to the ground, and feels sad?

And Ryan McGee, in a post about epochs of television that I don’t necessarily agree with otherwise, nailed this point:

That type of growth isn’t always linear, and it isn’t always pretty, and it quite often looks like defeat. Anyone rooting for Carrie and Brody to continue being the only sane thing in an insane world would have a hard time seeing the end of “Homeland”’s second two as progress. But it was still necessary for that to happen, not just for the storytelling of the show but also their growth as individuals. Hannah slipped something fierce after telling Joshua that she actually wanted to be happy, but that doesn’t mean her reunion with Adam at the end of the season was the end point to her ultimate journey. Boyd Crowder sees his dreams apparently squashed at the end of the fourth season of “Justified,” but neither he nor Raylan Givens traverse in pure misery. Both see a light at the end of the tunnel. They just are fantastically good at tripping themselves up on the way towards it.

Read more

Not that I don’t love Parks and Recreation enough already, but after a season that articulated a difficult point—that it’s actually very hard for the old-fashioned values we profess to admire in politics to win out—beautifully, I’ve been very excited to see how the show is going to make a difficult transition. Moving Leslie to City Council, Ben to Washington, and Andy, potentially, to the police department were all probably necessary both to grow the characters, and to widen the show’s aperture beyond the Parks Department, which could risk becoming a cliche. And watching this preview clip for next week’s episode, which follows Leslie and Andy to Washington, makes me especially optimistic, for three reasons:

1. It’s giving Leslie a larger stage. Taking Leslie to City Council was always going to give her a chance to do more than organized Harvest Festivals, and us an opportunity to get to know her new colleagues more extensively than Leslie’s meet-cutes with Councilman Hauser ever allowed. But I like the idea of her going to Washington, even glancingly. Leslie was always headed for bigger things, no matter how much she loved the Parks Department. And if the first phase of the show set up her move from a civil service position to elected office, as Parks and Recreation enters what could be its final season, it makes sense that show sets up a promise for an end-game: Leslie leaving Pawnee altogether for a brighter future, and a chance to make a bigger impact

2. And through it, bringing the Parks and Recreation touch to the federal government. That said, having conquered Pawnee, it makes sense that Leslie gets a new test for her optimism. I love the idea of Leslie lobbying for federal funds—and the prospect of her testing out her commitment and cheer in an environment vastly more cynical than Pawnee and dysfunctional on a scale Leslie can’t even begin to imagine. I don’t want to see Washington break Leslie Knope. But sending her there is good preparation for her new job at City Council.

3. The show is giving April some challenges, and a chance to figure out what she likes. I know there are some people who would love for April to stay her cranky, aggressively disinterested self forever, mourning the loss of a unique female character to adulthood. But April shouldn’t be denied the chance to grow up, and the best B arc in Parks and Recreation last season was watching her start to feel the stirrings of passion. Ben’s decision to take April to Washington gives her a little space from her marriage to Andy, and her mentorship by Ron, to develop other skills and attachments. Ron and April were a fantastic fit initially, given their shared desire not to get anything done. But it’s been good to see her work with Chris, who shoved her into enthusiasm. And now it’ll be a further development to let her work for Ben, closer to a peer, who can help develop the flares of initiative she’s shown on projects like the pet drive.

As much as I’m not enjoying The Newsroom, recapping it for Press Play has actually helped me clarify some things that I care about in progressive television. I don’t just want to see progressives or progressive-coded characters win because they’re factually or morally correct, or because they do the right thing against the odds. I want to see clear explanations of systems, and to see the characters work through them. As I explained in this week’s recap, that’s part of why Don is becoming my favorite character on the show, because he’s all muddled up in the gears:

After Will’s epic on-air apology for falling down on the job, Don sits down to have a heart-to-heart with Jim, who has effectively replaced him. “I would have loved to be part of that. I could have done the show you guys want to do. I’m equipped for that,” he confesses. “You’ve got a mandate. Bring viewers to ten o’clock. I don’t . . . I have to cover Natalee Holloway. And you guys set me up to look like an asshole before I even got started.” Don is like Will, to a certain extent, a talented man who succumbed to the pressure to put on a show that was likable rather than substantive. But unlike Will, he’s relatively anonymous. He could be fired and Elliot’s show would keep ticking on without him. If Don is going to live in hopes of being able to make the kind of show that Jim and MacKenzie are making for Will, he has to keep his job. And that means kowtowing to a lot of unattractive people’s unattractive senses of what counts as news…

And I’m not even sure Jim gets the message later when Maggie, in one of the few moments in The Newsroom where a woman gets to explain something to a man, tells Jim that Don’s failure has more complex roots than Jim acknowledges. “Don’s hands are tied,” Maggie says. “He got marching orders to get the ratings up at ten. And he’s driving a different car than McAvoy. Elliot’s smart, but he can’t do what McAvoy does. Plus, his salary’s tied to ratings.” That, not a studied, cowardly commitment to blandness for its own sake, is the reality of cable news—and the actual source of journalism’s problems.

The show just seems to me like it’s giving up an enormous amount of dramatic potential in having characters spend most of the show making speeches, on air or to each other, dealing with their personal lives, and then, throwing us five minutes of people pulling together the guests who will appear on air or Charlie negotiating with Leona and Reese. Sorkin wants us to think his characters are Interesting Hero Journalists but we essentially never see them doing actual journalism, so we don’t get a sense that Maggie is great at weeding out idiots, or that Jim is terrific at developing relationships with sources, or that Neal is unbelievably good at sorting through documents, something that would have been particularly useful in this last week’s episode in documenting the Koch brothers’ funding of Tea Party operations.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: the most important thing in news, cable or otherwise, is not what Will McAvoy says on air. It’s what his staff has the resources to dig up. It’s what kinds of pressures producers like Don are under, and what they can negotiate to broadcast. State of Play did a particularly nice job of this in the scene where Bill Nighy’s editor went to meet with a suit who laid out the specific issues at stake in their negotiations with the government over broadcast licenses, and then capped the budget for a big scandal story the reporters were working on. The miniseries spent serious time negotiating with editors over content, whether they’d proved a story well enough, whether they were at risk of getting sued. By the time something gets to someone like Will McAvoy, or to the front page of the paper, most of the pressure’s already been exerted on the information. We get flashes of that with Don. But The Newsroom can only get better the more it focuses on actual process and on actual journalism, not on telling Will, or anyone in the audience, that we’re good people because we have certain facts at our disposal and hold certain opinions.

In a game of TV critic merry-go-round, Time’s James Poniewozik catches something interesting in an interview Huffington Post’s Maureen Ryan did with Parks & Recreation producer Mike Schur:

Another tidbit from the interview that struck me was Schur’s saying—prompted by a question from Ryan—that the show would love to be a kind of comedy version of The Wire. I don’t want to overplay that quote; he doesn’t seem to be inflating the show so much as saying that The Wire is a standard to aspire to, and maybe that Parks would like to create the same kind of broad civic world, within the context of a less realistic network comedy. And Parks, as Ryan says, has a much more optimistic outlook than The Wire.

But it’s interesting to see that in the light of our discussion yesterday of David Simon’s disappointment about The Wire’s reception since it’s gone off the air: that it seems to be remembered more as an entertainment than for its specific view of social institutions and the drug war. It’s pretty plain that The Wire did not change American drug and policing policy, but this is also a little reminder that there’s more than one way for a show to be influential. If a show like The Wire has made a little NBC sitcom slightly more thoughtful about how institutions and communities work—that’s not exactly changing the world, but it’s something to be happy about, anyway.

I agree that would be a legacy that’s both entertaining and constructive, especially if it means that more shows look for the realistic drama in existing institutions. Parks & Recreation is different from most shows in that it draws its comedy from lowering stakes rather than artificially jacking them up. The first major conflict the show dealt with was trying to fill in a hole. One of the biggest collective tragedies the characters have experienced was the death of a mini horse. The show doesn’t make fun of the characters for investing so much in relatively small things. Instead, it respects them, and the show’s signature mix of comedy and kindness comes from that framing. If part of Schur’s goal is to use the show to explore more of Pawnee’s bureaucracy and institutions, that’s also a good argument for Leslie winning the City Council race so we can see more of city government.

It’ll be an interesting question whether other shows start drawing the same realistic drama from existing institutional imperatives. That’s probably an easier thing for comedies to do than dramas, if only because the networks have conditioned us to expect such big stakes in the latter. If the President’s mistress isn’t knocked up a la Scandal, a small child isn’t in horrible danger, or the world isn’t at risk, shows seem to feel they’re not doing their duty. I’ll be curious to see what comes of the show that The Wire’s Ed Burns and Amber Tamblyn are supposed to be working on about a school: it’s not in the pilot cycle this year, so we’ll have to see what happens. But one of the consequences of The Wire having a lot of journalists and novelists writing episodes (in additional to the different perspective they brought) is that it’s not like the show spun off a huge number of TV writers who are now selling shows of their own. Its creative influence might be less clear to trace, but Schur can’t be the only one who’s looking to The Wire as an influence, and interpreting that influence in clever and surprising ways.

Now that I’m charging through the first season of The X-Files, I’m finding that I can’t help but compare that show’s FBI doctor who did her residency in forensic medicine, Special Agent Dana Scully, with everybody’s favorite federally-employed forensic anthropologist, Temperance Brennan. They’re both fascinating — and at the beginning of each show, single — female scientists who go by their last names and with partners who can be more spiritual than rational. And it’s interesting to see how each show handles a very smart woman who’s in conflict both with an institutionalized bureaucracy and a competing worldview. So, this far in my viewing, how do Scully and Bones stack up?

Style

Scully may be the only woman in the universe who can make a ’90s pantsuit look good. Perfectly coiffed and preternaturally composed (Gillian Anderson was just 24 when she got the role), if Scully’s hair goes up, as it does when she’s investigating a creepy Arctic emotion-manipulating tapeworm, or her clothes get mussed, as they do on her first case with Mulder, you know something serious is going down. Rocks pretty seriously ’90s lace on a date she’s set up on. Her apartment, at least what we’ve seen of it, tends towards minimalist and has an enormous bathroom. Brennan, by contrast, opts for jeans and blazers, accented with funky jewelry she picks up on her world travels. Lots of smokey eye makeup, too. And lab coats. Scully may have to deal with weird things, but Brennan has to handle grosser ones. Her apartment is similarly full of artifacts from her travels, one of which her father used to murder a corrupt FBI agent; tribal music; and a refrigerator that’s occasionally rigged to explode.

Partners

Man, is Fox Mulder annoying. A conspiracy theorist since the disappearance of his sister during their childhood, Mulder’s perpetually in trouble with authority, hectors Scully to question her assumptions when he isn’t turning on the charm — and frustratingly, is almost always right. The show, at least what I’ve seen of it so far, seems like it might be better if he was wrong sometimes. It’s more interesting if the road to the truth is genuinely hidden, and if it takes some work to find it. And if there’s some actual tension between Mulder’s gonzo tendency to sneak onto crash sites, commission computer viruses, and sleep in alleys, and Scully’s tendency towards straightforward investigation. But despite the fact that he’s kind of irritating, I get the early sexual tension. That scene in the pilot where Scully has Mulder check her for alien probes that turn out to be mosquito bites? Total sparks-flying moment.

Seeley Booth, by contrast, believes in something he can’t prove, one way or another: God. But this hunky FBI agent’s quarrel with his partner isn’t really about the existence of another world. It’s about whether she’s cutting herself off from certain experiences. Over the course of the show, as Brennan and Booth grow closer together, she becomes more open to the idea that everyone has their own way to grace, and he learns that the way she sees the world is miraculous even if it’s not divine. And he learns more respect for scientific inquiry, while she becomes more open about her empathy for victims. Also, they’re going to have what one assumes will be a pretty adorable kid. That’s not an alien implant.
Read more

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.

I agree with most of Ned Resnikoff’s post on what the DC Comics reboot means for the miserable, tortured lives of superheroes. There’s something odd about the fact that we like seeing superpowered people suffer dreadfully ad infinitum (though as a side note, I’d love to see Bane cripple Batman so we could have major tentpole picture engage with disability — that’s a possibility in a First Class sequel, too, but it looks like they might gloss over it a bit). But I think it actually illustrates a larger problem with our superhero stories: the stakes have gotten too high.

Y’all will probably get sick of me mentioning the Superhuman Law She-Hulk arc, for which I apologize in advance. But it gets a ton of milage out of fairly low-level conflicts. How do you handle a new superhero’s workman’s comp claim? What happens if Spider-Man sues J. Jonah Jameson for libel? What’s it like to go to bed with a guy as a green goddess and wake up a nerdy lawyer? In a world that’s actually nudging up against apocalypse fatigue, those stories feel creative and fresh. Similarly, one of the things I dug about The Unusuals, an extremely short-lived ABC cop show starring Jeremy Renner and Amber Tamblyn, was the fact that while the squad did investigate murders (often in strange comic circumstances), they also dealt with smaller-bore violations of the law, whether they were jewelry-store robberies or reports of a zombie that turn out to be an Alzheimer’s patient. These stories are interesting too, even if no one ends up dead, and they require different investigative techniques, result in different dynamics. Investigating cannibalistic method-acting fake cabbies for hotel bludgeoning deaths is not actually the bar you have to clear to snag an audience’s attention.

I think on television, we’re getting better explorations of the real dilemmas of superheroism, with things like the adaptations of Powers and SyFy‘s Alphas, of which I got screeners in the mail this week. But it would be good to step back from the assumption that angst and agony are the most powerful reader emotions to engage when we’re telling superhero stories, and on a larger scale, procedural stories. There’s more to life, and to making the world a better place.