“This isn’t happening for a reason.” -The Boy, Game of Thrones

“They were real.” -Huck, Scandal

“You don’t want to be the last one caught holding a dog collar.” -Dan, Zero Dark Thirty

When Fox announced that it was bringing back 24, its serialized drama about counterterrorist federal agent Jack Bauer that finished its initial run in 2010, as a limited-episode special event in 2014, much of the commentary about the news focused on questions of structure, rather than content. Time Magazine television critic James Poniewozik argued that 24′s resurrection was part of an exciting move by Fox to make more limited series and more special events, a strategy that includes a shorter run for its serial killer hit The Following, a move that both was meant to accomodate star Kevin Bacon’s schedule and to ape the success of dark cable dramas with shorter runs, and an order of limited-run series Wayward Pines. Others saw it as part of Fox’s decision to walk away from a focus on female-focused comedies and return to an old, reliable—and male-centered—hit from its past. But I’m curious about another question. How is Jack Bauer, whose use of torture, as reported by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, prompted U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan to meet with the producers of 24 to talk to them about how the show was affecting American soldiers, going to play in a world where pop culture has become more thoughtful and searing about the impact of these tactics on both both the tortured and torturers themselves?

One of the most painful depictions of torture presently airing appears on HBO’s medieval fantasy Game of Thrones, where the destruction of Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), formerly a spoiled ward of the Stark family, and now the prisoner of a man who appears to be systematically remolding him according to a monstrous blueprint. It’s a storyline that’s been so grotesque and emotionally agonizing that it’s turned off some critics like The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr, who have found themselves exhausted by what they see as an exploitative element to the proceedings, which are presented only in flashbacks in the novels on which the show is based.

But the relentless return to Theon’s cell, to his crucifixion, flaying, hooding, starvation, sexual manipulation, and last week, emasculation, seems precisely like the point, even if it’s so unpleasant to watch that I’ve taken to peeking at those scenes through my fingers on the first go-round and leaving the room for the second. Theon can’t escape his torture, and neither can we. His lead torturer tells him that “this isn’t happening for a reason,” and in point of fact in the narrative, it’s mostly not. The only new information Theon reveals, that he has not actually murdered the heirs to Winterfell, a Northern stronghold, doesn’t defuse a ticking time bomb scenario, but gets filed away for reference. “You’ve already told me everything, remember? Your daddy was mean to you. The Starks didn’t appreciate you. One good bit, though. The Stark boys. They’re still alive. Wouldn’t that be a hunt to remember?” the mysterious man reflects menacingly. When Theon asks “Where am I? Who are you? What do you want?” one of that man’s henchmen replies, “I want to do this.” Torture is arbitrary and endless, a manifestation of insanity, whether that madness is innate or simply the logical place men arrive at during an endless war.
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My friend Willa Paskin, Salon’s TV critic, has a very interesting profile of Shonda Rhimes, the creator of Scandal, a show in which “America is run by an African-American spin expert, a scheming first lady and a mercenary gay guy who also happens to be in one of the sexiest homosexual marriages on television,” in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. There’s a lot to chew over here, including how Rhimes built a hit factor by writing shows about ambitious women, and by embracing soap opera tropes and insisting on diverse casts, or the fact that she wants to make a spy show. But I wanted to pull out this section of the piece on writing race in television, since it’s obviously a subject that’s been on my mind a great deal lately:

While race on Rhimes’s shows is omnipresent, it is not often discussed explicitly. This has led to a second-order critique of her shows: that they are colorblind, diverse in a superficial way, with the characters’ races rarely informing their choices or conversations. Rhimes, obviously, disagrees. “When people who aren’t of color create a show and they have one character of color on their show, that character spends all their time talking about the world as ‘I’m a black man blah, blah, blah,’ ” she says. “That’s not how the world works. I’m a black woman every day, and I’m not confused about that. I’m not worried about that. I don’t need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman, because I don’t feel disempowered as a black woman.”

This is a framework for handling race on television that sounds absolutely terrible, narratively and otherwise. Any writer, of any color, who writes for a character of color and can only come up with things to say about that characters’ race hasn’t done the work of thinking through who this character is as a full person. Race matters, but gender, class, geography, faith, sexual orientation, and cultural affiliations do too. A well-designed character should have idiosyncrasies because actual humans do, and multiple interests, because ditto, and be precise in their perspectives because we’re not handed talking points at birth but develop them over time and filter them through our personal experiences.

But I’d also have been curious for the story to spend more time on Rhimes’ argument that “I don’t need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman, because I don’t feel disempowered as a black woman.” Does she mean that being equal means that her race can be treated as a neutral default, much like whiteness? Does she think that the only narratives African-Americans are given on television are drawn from disadvantage, and she doesn’t want to write those? I wouldn’t blame her for that, but it seems like a oddly limited perspective on what people get from their racial or ethnic heritage that can be portrayed on screen, which is why I’d find that interpretation somewhat confusing. Or does she mean that she doesn’t want to have to stand in for black women everywhere, and doesn’t want her characters to have to either? Again, I wouldn’t disagree with her at all for wanting to avoid that fate. But I’m not sure not talking about race in text (her argument that her characters don’t have to talk explicitly about race because “The discussion is right in front of your face,” in their actions is more convincing) is the only writerly solution to the problem she’s putting forward. In any case, I recognize the irritation of wanting to parse a subject Rhimes thinks is overplayed. But I’d be curious what writing lessons she has to offer to those white writers she complains about.

Veep returned to HBO this season a much-improved show. Where last season, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) seemed like a talentless flake with nothing but contempt for public service, this year, the show seems to have followed the same path as NBC’s Parks and Recreation, which began by portraying its main character, Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) as an incompetent object of ridicule but found that a more efficient means of ridiculing the problems of government was to make her a champion of right in a blinkered system. This year, Selina turns out to be pretty good at a process she thinks little of, stumping for candidates in an otherwise hopeless midterm election, and that success wins her some real influence in a policy area. And Veep‘s satire is sharper for having a wider target area than the Veep herself.

I’m glad to see the show appears to be hitting its stride, but Veep‘s return also raises a larger question. Given that the presidency is the highest office in the land, the seat of the greatest political and moral dilemmas, and the job that places the most strain and restrictions on the personal life and the family of the person who holds it, why are our contemporary political shows so fixated on the Vice Presidency, a comparatively minor office, instead?

This obsession stretches across comedy and drama. In Veep, the invisibility of the president has become a running, Waiting For Godot-like joke. Parks and Recreation snagged a guest appearance from Vice President Joe Biden, and made it out to seem like Leslie Knope was even more floored by the prospect of meeting him than she might have been to be in touch with President Obama himself. Scandal, the rare show that has the president as a main character, also spends substantial time on his vice president, a social conservative and devout Christian who effectively stages a coup while the president himself recovers from an assassination attempt. And House of Cards featured as its narrative endgame disgruntled Democratic Congressman Frank Underwood manipulating the Vice President into resigning so he could run for his old job as governor of Pennsylvania so he could then maneuver a himself into being appointed Vice President, a job that the show has suggested comes with little real power or influence, and would require Frank to work closely with the President, who Frank has come to despise after he reneged on a promise to appoint Frank Secretary of State. So what is it about this significantly symbolic job that’s made pop culture more interested in it than even the presidency?

For one thing, the Vice Presidency is an interesting place to explore the resentments of people who have finished in second place in the running for their party’s nomination, and the difficulties of building a coalition government within the White House itself. On Scandal, Vice President Sally Langston (Kate Burton) is a religious conservative who has tethered her career to the presidency of a man who is significantly more moderate than she is, to the point that she finds some of his policies distasteful, and finds herself choking down bile in an attempt to wait out the Fitzgerald Grant administration in the hopes of an endorsement when she tries to run again. When Grant was incapacitated by an assassination attempt and Sally became acting president, she functionally organized a coup, acting as if Grant was dead and she’d be occupying the presidency permanently. It was a dark take on the idea that the president’s most difficult foes might actually be in his own party, and an interesting one, given the positive relationship that President Obama and his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton built after an exceptionally bitter primary campaign. But if you’re writing a soap opera, it’s easier to get drama out of continued bitterness and clashing ambition than out of growing mutual respect and comity.
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The Writers Guild of America West 2013 TV Staffing Brief, the organization’s analysis of who was hired to write American television shows during the 2011-2012 season, is out, and as usual, the results for women and people of color are not encouraging. Of 1722 writers who wrote for 190 shows, 519 or 30.5 percent of them were women, and 269 of them were people of color. For women, those numbers are up 5 percent from the 1999-2000 television season—as the report put it, “At this rate of increase, it would be another 42 years before women —roughly half of the U.S. population – reach proportionate representation in television staff employment.” And for people of color, the rate of increase is more mixed: the percentage of Asian and Latino writers has risen 2.9 percent since 1999-2000, but the number of African-American television writers has grown much more slowly in the same time period, rising from 5.8 percent to 6.5 percent of overall writers. If the percentage of African-American writers is going to rise just .063 percent, it will take 87 years for black television writers to reach proportional representation in their industry relative to their current presence in the U.S. population.

Part of the reason these numbers are so frustrating to see again and again is that it only takes a few shows to make a difference. As the report points out, “until the recent rise of multicultural dramas like ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal,”—both shows created by Shonda Rhimes— “there had been no successful television dramas that featured a critical mass of minority leading roles or writers.” If all of the 55 shows that hired no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season hired just one person of color to write for them, the representation of writers of color in television would rise three percent. And the examples of a few networks show that it’s not impossible to find women and people of color to hire for all kinds of positions. 50 percent of MTV’s executive producers, 43.5 of the CW’s executive producers, and 38.5 percent of ABC Family’s executive producers are women. 13.3 percent of the executive producers on ABC are people of color, a number likely significantly driven, again, by Shonda Rhimes. 55 percent of BET’s writers are women, and 95 percent of them are people of color. Clearly, there are women and people of color available and eager to work in television, if only someone would think to ask.

Or, as Marlo Thomas put it when I asked her how she found female writers for That Girl, back at a time when television was even more male and white, “Well, you looked for them. You called agents and said ‘What comedy writers do you have that are women? We’re looking for women to write for That Girl’ We’d go to the writers’ agents. Someone would see a name on somebody else’s show and say this stuff’s really good. But when you put out a call like that to agents, agents can’t wait to get jobs for their writers.”

It’s an instruction that the 19 shows that hired no women writers in the 2011-2012 season, and the 55 shows that hired no writers of color during that same time period might take to heart. It’s worth noting that these shows’ lack of diversity doesn’t define all of them. Mike White, who wrote all of the episodes of the first season of Enlightened himself, turned in one of the most complex, sympathetic portrayals of a woman anywhere on television. And Breaking Bad, which employed no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season, produced one of the most nuanced roles for a man of color to appear on screen in the last decade. But just because white men can get it right about women and people of color doesn’t render women and people of color irrelevant—it just means that the standards for white men who are writing female characters or characters of color should be higher. The list of shows that didn’t hire women writers or writers of color in the 2011-2012 season should provide a pretty clear guide to which writers are rising above their own life experiences—and which ones are badly in need of new perspectives in their writers’ rooms:

Television Shows That Hired No Women Writers During The 2011-2012 Season

America’s Funniest Home Videos
Big Time Rush
Californication
Comedy Bang! Bang!
Dancing With The Stars
Eagleheart
Enlightened (Creator Mike White wrote all the episodes)
Futurama
Geniuses
Gurland On Gurland
The Insider
Kickin’ It
Locke & Key
Magic City
Psych
Teen Wolf
Veep
Workaholics I
Workaholics II
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A new study from Nielsen and Social Guide confirms what already seems fairly obvious: Twitter can help boost the ratings for television shows. According to the survey:

The recent Nielsen/SocialGuide study confirmed that increases in Twitter volume correlate to increases in TV ratings for varying age groups, revealing a stronger correlation for younger audiences. Specifically, the study found that for 18-34 year olds, an 8.5% increase in Twitter volume corresponds to a 1% increase in TV ratings for premiere episodes, and a 4.2% increase in Twitter volume corresponds with a 1% increase in ratings for midseason episodes. Additionally, a 14.0% increase in Twitter volume is associated with a 1% increase in TV program ratings for 35-49 year olds, reflecting a stronger relationship between Twitter and TV for younger audiences.

Further, the study found that the correlation between Tweets and TV ratings strengthens for midseason episodes for both age groups. An increase in Twitter volume of 4.2% and 8.4% is associated with a 1% increase in ratings for 18-34 year olds and 35-49 year olds, respectively. Moreover, by midseason Twitter was responsible for more of the variance in ratings for 18-34 year olds than advertising spend.

There have been a great many attempts to incentivize viewers to watch television in the time slot. The traditional water-cooler approach assumed that viewers would want to talk about must-see TV with their colleagues. The recap made the water-cooler virtual, giving viewers who didn’t have friends and co-workers who were watching the same shows as they were access to a community of like-minded viewers with whom to dissect episodes. But if you want to wait a couple of days to watch an episode, or even a year, the recaps will still be there. The experience of reading a recap is ultimately a solitary pursuit, even if delaying it means you’re late diving into comment threads.

But Twitter comes closer than anything else to making it mandatory to watch a show live. Reading a Twitter stream after the fact, even if it’s synched up to an episode through a service like Zeebox, simply isn’t the same thing as experiencing it in real-time. The stream may be flowing next to the show, but it’s static—you can’t jump in and participate yourself the way you can with a comment thread. And if the conversation around a show is good, you want to be able to participate in it live. The best example of a show for which this has worked this way is Scandal, a show where the entertaining nature of the commentary and the quality of the critiques carried me through an early period of dislike. Smart shows are taking advantage of that conversation, and including their own stars and producers in it. It turns out the secret isn’t to replicate the water cooler online. It’s to replicate the living room.

New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum and I got together for a Bloggingheads episode about Scandal and House of Cards, and towards the end of it, Emily made a critically important point that I hadn’t considered before: we’re really at the first moment, post-West Wing, when political shows are emerging as their own form of procedural that can operate in both comedy and drama.

Political shows are everywhere, in all media, and part of what’s striking about them is how varied they are in setting and form. Parks and Recreation, which follows a local city councilwoman and employees of a small-town public works agency, seems likely to get a sixth season, given NBC’s ratings woes. The network took another stab at political comedy with 1600 Penn, a family comedy that happens to be set in the White House. ABC’s Nashville featured a municipal mayoral race prominently in its first season, though it’s an open question whether that plot will remain a significant part of the show, and the network has ridden to ratings success with Scandal, which makes the president an object of sexual desire, and explores the desire of his family, staff, and lover to possess both him and the power that he embodies. CBS is bringing politics into the police procedural with Golden Boy, which tracks the rise of an ambitious young cop to the police commissioner’s office. Starz recently ended its dark political drama Boss, but HBO’s sitcom Veep, which takes a similarly biting perspective on people in power, but from a mocking rather than a grand angle, is returning for its second season this spring. And new media outlets have their own spins on political procedurals as well: Netflix made a big push around its glossy, expensive adaptation of the British miniseries House of Cards, while last year, Hulu debuted a low-budget story about the staff of a midwestern political campaign, Battleground.

Precisely because this is an emerging space, it means that the conventions and values of political procedurals are very much up for grabs. What will the stock cast of characters in political procedurals be? So far, the formula of the West Wing seems to have stuck, with shows focusing on a politician and the relationships of (mostly) his staff and surrogates to that figure. The tone varies: the candidate was more of a distant figure in Battleground than in other shows, and the president is alternately warm and fuzzy in 1600 Penn and an object of intense sexual passion in Scandal. In Veep, the Vice President is risible, in Parks and Recreation, Leslie Knope is kooky but irresistible, and in Boss, Tom Kane was an almost demonic force, as is Frank Underwood on House of Cards. Interestingly, most of these shows have spent more time on governance than on campaigns: campaigns make for a great season structure and allow for a certain number of shenanigans on the trail, but you can’t do them often. Governance stories are harder to pull off, but they can be a way to bring in more characters and set up more complex long arcs, as has been the case with Leslie’s five-years-long fight for Pawnee Commons.

But even though a lot of these shows are spending time on the work of government rather than the process of getting into it, it’s far from clear what their views on government are. In House of Cards, Frank Underwood has no particular attachment to any ideology or policy—the federal government is basically a chew toy for him in his pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Veep wants to satirize the meaninglessness of political ritual in Washington, but spends much more time treating its titular Vice President as an eager flake. In both Scandal and Nashville, the president and the mayor, respectively, are underqualified, pretty-boy stalking horses for other interests. Parks and Recreation is unique in that it’s able to both recognize both the ludicrousness of political ritual and still believe that government can do a lot to make people’s lives better.

As a critic, I often think I’m harder on shows that wade into politics than those that don’t even bother, in part because it’s what I know and what I prioritize, I want badly for those shows to get politics right, and it’s easier for me to spot errors of logic and procedure. I might have graded Golden Boy higher, for example, if it was just a standard police procedural rather than a story about how a rising police commissioner decided what his values as a cop were. But thinking about political shows as an emerging genre makes me want to fight even harder for them to be smart, and to ask good and interesting questions (which is not to say they have to be inherently progressive to work). It would be an awful shame if the conventions of a new style of procedural were getting set and they turned out to be as lazy and cliche as some of what’s on offer today.

Emily Nussbaum, in this week’s New Yorker, argues that ABC’s Scandal, an evening soap opera by Shonda Rhimes about the inner circle of a moderate Republican president, is the more compelling show about politics than Netflix’s remake of the British classic series House of Cards, which follows the machinations of an apolitical but Democratic Majority Whip. “Like much genre fiction, ‘Scandal’ uses its freedom to indulge in crazy what-ifs,” she writes. “What if everyone but the President knew that the election was fixed? What if the President tried to divorce his pregnant wife?”

What she doesn’t say, but what her piece helped clarify for me, is the what-ifs that make all the difference. House of Cards asks us to imagine a tired question: what if the people who run things in Washington were amoral manipulators interested only in the accumulation of their own power? It’s a scenario we’ve considered before, and the results are the same: the show’s conviction that its come to new and enlightening conclusions mostly seems smug. Scandal‘s big what-if, by contrast, is genuinely fresh, and actually advanced by the utterly bonkers conspiracy theory at the heart of the second season. As it’s emerged that President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn) is the beneficiary of the decision by his wife Mellie (a tremendous Bellamy Young) and his top aides, including his now-chief-of-staff Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry) and his sometimes-lover Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), to steal the election in collaboration with a nefarious billionaire manufacturer of voting machines, Scandal‘s asked, over and over again, what makes someone a good vessel for the talents and ambitions of other people, not what makes a man a great leader in and of himself. It’s a terrific question, and one that exposes the central lie of the presidency, that someone can do it alone and do it well, and that the person who sits in the Oval Office actually has the full capacities to make decisions for the country.

It’s a question that presents a problem for the show, because its main character, Olivia, a fixer of Washington scandals, has no particular political ambitions, or policy convictions—she appears to not have been of Grant’s party, but was talked into working for him—and the main reason she is so passionate about Grant’s ascendency was that she fell for him. Scandal began as a problem-of-the-week show in which Olivia’s genius helped all manner of unsavory Washington types get themselves out of trouble, and occasionally caused justice to be done. But as the show’s become a much more serialized drama, and the problems have moved out of Olivia’s office, she’s become less interesting, even less necessary, to the show that was ostensibly built around her.

But it’s in the supporting cast that the answers to that question of why Fitz, a man with a great head of hair and a corrosive relationship with his politician father, but no particularly discernible mind for politics and a tendency to get distracted by his emotions, is worth supporting even to the point of criminality and utter moral compromise, get truly fascinating. Cyrus, who is gay, believes that living his life openly and honestly with his husband James means that he never could have fully exercised his political talents fully. “I was not made to be chief of staff,” he told James in an agonizing scene in which he confessed to stealing the election. “I was made to be the president.” Fitz’s emptiness, even his distraction by his affair with Olivia, were part of what made him perfect for Cyrus to attach himself to. His lack of interest in policy or judgement in matters of foreign affairs made Cyrus essential to Fitz. It wasn’t merely that Cyrus could ride Fitz’s coattails to the White House—it was that he would have something to do when he got there.
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Going into the Television Critics Association press tour, one of the shows I was most excited to see shake out was a procedural called Deception, about an African-American police officer, played by Meagan Good, who returns to the white, wealthy family she grew up with because her mother worked for them as a housekeeper to investigate the murder of her childhood best friend. It wasn’t that the show was revolutionary, in fact the reverse: it’s a mashup of ABC soaps like Revenge and Scandal, with a hint of Damages, thanks to the presence of Tate Donovan as the murder victim’s older brother.

But the show operated at the intersection of race and class at a way I thought was fascinating and promising. Good’s Detective Joanna Locasto, only the second woman of color to be the main character on a currently-airing television show, was returning to a setting where she’d grown up on the wrong side of the class divide, not with more money, but with the power of the state on her side. And she and her boss, Will Moreno (Laz Alonso) were in a position that strikes me as almost unprecedented in popular culture: as people of color with substantive power, and particularly police power, who were tasked with investigating and—and personally judging—a decadent and corrupted white family, and with whom the audience is intended to sympathize with absolutely.

That’s an extraordinarily rich scenario, particularly for a network television show. And it’s one that came about in part, as NBC Entertainment President Jennifer Salke explained in NBC’s executive session yesterday morning, “That was a family that was conceived and cast began to be cast as a white family. And we insisted that there be a diverse woman in that role.” I was excited to discuss that scenario and all of its potential with Deception‘s co-creators Gail Berman and Liz Heldens. And so it was disconcerting to see them retreat from the idea that they’d discuss race at all, and to do it as quickly as possible.

“It is a way to sort of deal with race without actually having to talk about it,” Heldens said when I asked her about their plans for dealing with the intersection of race and class issues. “But it’s not really something we talk about too much in the writers’ room.” When Hitfix critic Daniel Fienberg pushed her on it further, citing her experience working on Friday Night Lights, a show that was both diverse and explicitly conscious of racial issues, she retreated even further. “Why it’s not a discussion? I don’t know,” she told him. “I just think it’s sort of there, and, you know, whenever you’re writing a script, you’re always trying to get your page count down so they can shoot it.”
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Coming to the end of my day of writing on Monday, I realized something: I was exhausted by my last several days of watching television. It’s not just that Sunday has become so jam-packed with strong, interesting shows that my weekends feel more like a build-up to my craziest work day than a chance to relax, or the fact that I’m in the middle of a barrage of mid-season finales. It’s that that almost all television now, particularly in drama, seems to be operating in a sphere so intense that it’s impossible to relax—and sometimes impossible to watch, or even to follow what’s happening on-screen. Every show has a conspiracy. Shocking violence has become the norm, and seems to be escalating quickly. The stakes are constantly so high in every episode of television that plot is often swamping strong character dynamics. It made me wonder if our television needs to take a chill pill for a while, if only so we can start thinking more carefully about what kinds of storytelling tools are most effective.

The shows that got me thinking about this phenomenon were Scandal and Homeland, two shows that purport to operate in very different environments, network and cable, soap and anti-hero drama, but this week had a plot element in common. It’s not as if political assassination attempts are taboo on television: West Wing shot President Bartlet in its “In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen” episode, though the show made clear relatively quickly that the President himself would survive, and drew much of its drama from the grave threat to the life of one of his chief aides. But in that case, it felt like assassination was reserved for a moment of extreme gravity in the narrative arc of the show. In four days last week, we had two shows that had as their plot points attempts to kill a high official of the United States government. On last Thursday’s episode of Scandal, President Fitzgerald Grant was shot on the way to his birthday party, in what seems to have been a plot set in motion by his wife—it was the presidency as soap opera subject. And then on Sunday’s episode of Homeland, former prisoner of war Nicholas Brody, who has declined to murder a bunker full of government officials, got a chance to kill just one, the Vice President of the United States, the man responsible for the drone strike that killed Brody’s surrogate son and the biological son of the super-terrorist Abu Nazir. Last year, Brody’s decision not to commit an assassination was one of the most exciting episodes of television on any network.

It’s not only that more than one show is now fantasizing about killing high officials, a highly sensitive subject, that diminished the power of Homeland. It’s that the conspiracy around Brody has gotten significantly more complex. There are more people in play on the ground, journalist Roya Hamad, a munitions expert and his team, Abu Nazir himself, who seems to have strolled over the border. The scheme is grander, an attack on a welcome home ceremony for Marines, in front of Roya’s camera crew. The shock of Brody’s true nature would be even bigger now that he’s a Congressman. All of these elements amp up the magnitude of the plot against America. But they also introduce the possibility of inconsistency, implausibility, of error, and of emotional discontinuity, or losing track of characterization. And yet people continually seem to think these sorts of escalations are worth it, to believe that plausible character development and the emotional stakes that come along with being a human in a high-pressure situation aren’t actually enough to sustain our interest, and there has to be a giant conspiracy (as was the case with Lost Resort and remains the case with Revenge) or mystery or the promise of bloody destruction to keep us in our seats. It’s too bad, because some of my favorite shows—Sons of Anarchy with the cartels and the Irish, Homeland with Nazir, and Revenge with its shadowy initiative—have spent a lot more time on conspiracies that seem like they must eventually be dissolved or dismantled than on their main characters emotions, and have done so at moments when the actors on each shows are hitting high-water marks.

And it’s not just complicated serialized storytelling that can be getting in the way of experiencing genuine emotion on shows. One of the things that’s marked the search for increased intensity in our television watching is increasingly escalating violence, disgustingness as a signpost of how serious a situation. In 18 hours yesterday, I saw two of the grossest things I’ve ever watched on television, Glenn yanking an arm bone out of a zombie’s rotting flesh on the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead (I couldn’t make it through the rest of the episode) and a scene from an upcoming episode of television that was much more viscerally upsetting for taking place in a non-genre setting. This is not to say that grotesque violence can’t be powerful signposting: the latter incident is so powerful and so keeping in character that I’m still having a physical reaction to my revulsion hours later. And for those of you who know what’s coming in the Song of Fire and Ice universe, I’m bracing myself for some truly horrific things coming down the pike in Game of Thrones that will literally test my ability to keep my eyes on the screen as they occur. But I’m curious about the extent to which it’s actually necessary to holding mass interest.
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The good people at The Daily Beast were kind enough to ask me to do some thinking about Scandal, a show I first though I would love, then got irritated by, and now am slowly becoming addicted to again, in the context of the election and the Petraeus email kerfuffle. I appreciated the assignment, in part because it let me get to the bottom of my frustration with Shonda Rhimes’ portrait of a Washington fixer who ought to be a female power fantasy: as a whole, the show limits the role of women in Washington to their ability to destroy or support a powerful man. I explained:

When Olivia’s firm takes on clients, they are often women with that same ability to destroy the reputations of powerful men, or, as Olivia puts it, “These girls, they come here thinking they’re going to change the world and then they get involved with some man.” She takes care of Amanda Tanner, a young woman who, like Olivia herself, has had an affair with President Grant, and believes herself pregnant by him. Her team helps steal the records of Sharon Marquette, an influential madam who is trying to keep her client list private. She represents a rapist against a victim who is attempting to make sure he goes to jail for an earlier attack on a dear friend. She helps get justice for a wild young woman murdered by an arrogant diplomat. Olivia and her team even reconcile the wife of a famous civil-rights leader and the mistress the man was having sex with when he died suddenly. Women may not run themselves into much trouble in Washington as Rhimes understands it. But they also remain off to the side much of the time, pulled into the great debates of the day when they have the capacity to humiliate the men who actually participate in them.

Even Olivia, for all that she has President Grant’s ear, does so because she’s both the source of his own potential bombshell—they became lovers on the campaign trail, and he continues to seek her out for late-night conversations, for stolen kisses in the Oval Office and country retreats—and of advice on how to handle sticky situations, to project power, even how to manage his own wife. And even there, Olivia is curiously removed from the actual debates of the day. Though there’s some suggestion that she and Grant have differing political views, the advice she offers him, and the influence she wields, is solely strategic. Like Dick Morris, the political animal in Olivia is a creature solely of the news cycle. She appears to hold no passionate perspectives on the issues, to be animated by no cause other than the call of her own gut and her undeniable attraction to Grant.

Women, believe it or not, have passions and authorities in Washington that don’t concern their intimate relationships with men, or that don’t even primarily address women’s issues. Part of the set up for the show means that Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), the show’s fixer protagonist, almost always has more official or implied power than whatever woman she’s dealing with, even though she has less formal power than almost all of the men. It’s be nice to see her have to help another woman who isn’t the mistress or the screw-up or the cause of disaster for a change, and give some crisis management assistance to a woman whose role in Washington has nothing to do with who she’s sleeping with, but has gotten herself in trouble the same way powerful men seem to, over and over again.