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.

The killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Libya last month, and the protests that swept the region afterwards, were an illustration of the profound difficulties the Middle East faces in the phase of its history that followed the Arab Spring. The television shows that started airing last week were in development long before those tragic events, and couldn’t have anticipated them, but in a sense, that makes them more forward-looking. A profound sense of anxiety about America’s foreign policy in the Middle East is showing up on both network and cable television this fall, on issues ranging from America’s relationship with Israel and Iran, to the quality of decision-making in the chain of command, to our ability to project power to prevent genocide.

Showtime’s Homeland returned this season with its characters operating in an environment where Israel had bombed Iran’s nuclear sites in an effort to prevent that nation from successfully developing an atomic weapon. It’s a somewhat more realistic scenario than one in which an American prisoner of war returned to the United States and became close enough to the Vice President of the United States to have a serious shot at assassinating him, and a storyline that could give Carrie Mathison and Saul Berenson work to do even if Nicholas Brody were to be removed as the series’ primary antagonist. A strike on Iran may be a nightmare possibility, but it’s one that emerges from the region’s history and the public imagination rather than the fevered brains occupying a writers’ room.

It’s also a device that, unlike the drone strike that provided a background for the action of the first season of the show, portrays the United States as more drawn into a conflict than instigating it. We learn about the strike from a news report that doesn’t discuss whether the United States supported it, or whether it’s caused tensions between the United States and Israel. Future episodes suggest at least some Americans support the attack, or at least want to intervene to clean up the messy aftermath of it. But through the three episodes I’ve seen, the strike provides an atmosphere of tension more than an actual driver of plot for Homeland‘s second season. The theme of American complicity and blowback have receded, and I miss the narrative propulsion and moral engagement of the drone strikes debate from the first season.

Homeland‘s creators Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon told me when I spoke to them in August that the other frame narrative they’d considered for their show’s second season involved Pakistan’s growing instability and nuclear weapons. Their decision to go in another direction means they aren’t overlapping with Last Resort, about the crew of a nuclear submarine who become enemies of the state when they question orders to launch a nuclear weapon at Pakistan. That chain of events is a less literal thought experiment than Israel’s strikes in Homeland, given that nuclear disaster in Pakistan is more likely to result from weapons insecurity or the instigation of a war between India and Pakistan than offensive action by the United States.
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The Directors Guild of America has released its annual report on who directs television series, and the results are not exactly promising—and they illustrate one reason it’s hard for women and people of color to make gains in the industry. The percentage of episodes of television in the 2011-2012 television season directed by white men rose from 72 percent to 73 percent. White women directed 11 percent of episodes, the same as last year. And women of color and men of color basically traded work: men of color directed 13 percent of episodes, down from 14 percent last year. And women of color directed 4 percent of episodes, up from 3 percent in the previous season. In other words, the amount of work available to white men is relatively secure. And men and women of color aren’t making gains relative to the whole: they’re trading off gains with each other.

But it’s also worth noting which shows are doing better than average, some of which are predictable, and some of which are not. The Game, created by Mara Brock Akil, had 100 percent of its episodes directed by women or people of color, as did Single Ladies, which was created by Stacy Littlejohn, and produced by Queen Latifah’s Flavor Unit company. Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal clocked in with 67 percent female or minority directors, Nurse Jackie with 60, Girls with 44 percent, and Don’t Trust The B—- In Apartment with 23 percent. If male showrunners are having trouble finding women and people of color to direct their television shows, they might do well to ask the women around them who are creating television shows who they hire.

But it’s not only shows created by and about women who have done well hiring women and people of color to direct episodes. 36 percent of the last season’s episodes of Sons of Anarchy, a show created by Kurt Sutter, himself a white guy, were directed by women like Gwyneth Horder-Payton, a veteran of The Shield, Paris Barclay, who won two Emmys for NYPD Blue, and Mario Van Peebles. Grimm, created by three men, had women and people of color behind the camera for 48 percent of its first-season episodes. And The Walking Dead, the bloody zombie show based on the comic books by Robert Kirkman, had 53 percent of its episodes directed by women and minorities under the leadership of Gale Anne Hurd in its second season after Frank Darabont left the show. Being a lady doesn’t mean you can handle veiled autobiography, or stories about dating and sex. Women can do the tough stuff, too. And some men seem to recognize it.

I quite like Emily Nussbaum’s deconstruction of Scandal in this week’s New Yorker, which is really a way for her to discuss the various uses television shows make of race and colorblindness. But I wanted to highlight a different part of the review which explores something that I think can be a real straightjacket for shows: the need for female characters in general, and Olivia Pope in particular to be either good or evil, to embody an entirely different kind of black-white divide. Scandal is increasingly dull, Emily says, because Olivia Pope’s theoretical flaws all turn out to reinforce her status as a paragon:

Thirty-eight years have passed, but, in certain ways, little has changed. Shonda Rhimes, who created “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice,” is still the sole prominent black female showrunner in television. (The most powerful black male showrunner is Tyler Perry, on TBS.) Although the heroine of “Scandal,” Olivia Pope, would never go in for Christie Love’s salty back talk, the two do share some qualities: they are incorruptible superprofessionals, worshipped and desired by everyone around them. Pope, once the President’s most trusted aide and, for a while, his secret mistress, is now the biggest fixer in Washington. (Her career is based on that of a real person: Judy Smith, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney and deputy press secretary in George H. W. Bush’s White House.) In other political narratives, the fixer might be a cynical alcoholic, or a gleeful player like Gloria Allred. Not Pope. She’s the BlackBerry-wielding flack as avenging angel. Her employees, each of whom she’s rescued from rock bottom, describe themselves as “gladiators in suits”; they say that their boss “wears the white hat.” Despite, or perhaps because of, these dollops of praise, Pope comes off as a bit of a buzzkill, all glares and Sorkinesque lectures, eyes welling with righteousness…Olivia Pope’s greatest character defect is her sexual history with the President, but that just suggests she’s a woman worth risking the White House for.

An even better example of this, I think, was the incident a couple of episodes ago when Olivia asks Huck (Guillermo Díaz), a former CIA operative with what seems like a serious case of PTSD, to torture one of his former employees. It’s a totally horrific thing for her to ask, and the scene that follows is shocking, Huck relapsing like, as he describes himself, an addict, the whir of a drill, a man screaming, bleeding onto sheet plastic. It’s a doubly awful thing she’s done here, not just ordering someone tortured, but asking Huck to do something she knows will damage his already flimsy soul. And there’s no indication that she needed to do it at all to get the information she needs (the show reinforces the misconception that torture produces accurate intelligence)—a reporter for a Washington paper even beats Olivia to the killer’s identity simply by using the tools of his trade. The show just seemed to expect that we’ll trust that Olivia is On the Side of Right rather than wondering how far this woman’s self-righteousness will lead her, how willing she is to crush people to fulfill her aims.

A story about a Washington woman who is an amoral fixer would be pretty interesting, and Scandal has the ingredients to be an interesting anti-heroine show. Scandal’s at its best when it’s a story about people who are channeling their worst tendencies, whether it’s womanizing or a talent for snooping, towards good projects, when Olivia’s firm functions as a form of rehab. And with the other characters in the show, Shonda Rhimes seems relatively comfortable portraying them as broken or fallen in a way that makes them more interesting. Olivia, by contrast, is less a gladiator in a suit than a ruler-wielding Mother Superior whose authority is unimpeachable. She’s not to blame for ordering torture because her cause is just. She’s not doing anything wrong by schtupping the president because he started it, and besides, his wife is the worst.

What makes anti-heroes fascinating when they work is that they make decisions are reprehensible, but that we can understand and even sympathize with given the framework and worldview those characters are operating within. The fact that unlike Walter White or Jimmy McNulty, Olivia’s always in the right actually means that she her and the show she’s operating within are more potentially amoral: her permanent correctness means a moral reckoning isn’t necessary. I can’t help but thinking of Patty Hewes, the lawyer on Damages who makes Olivia’s so-called Gladiator in a Suit look like a fluffy baby duck. She is a wretched mother, a deeply unpredictable mentor, a person who does overwhelming harm to the lives of people she encounters. But unlike Olivia, Patty appears to know who and what she is. It would be nice if Scandal developed the self-confidence to give Olivia the same kind of self-awareness.

In the wake of George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, Fox pulled some advertising for its upcoming comedy Neighborhood Watch, in which some overly-vigilant patrolees discover they’ve got an alien invasion on their hands. Now, they’ve changed the movie’s name to The Watch, and released a trailer that suggests the movie is more R-rated comedy than an affirmation of a power grab:

I tend to think movies like these are always somewhat dicey, since they’re built on the proposition that things that in the real world would be extremely dangerous or morally compromised—like getting overly zealous about guarding your neighborhood to the point that you start treating people in threats in ways that can escalate, or, say, torturing people—end up getting the results you want, whether it’s beating the bad guys or eliciting accurate information, both outcomes that in those cases would be rather unlikely. I thought it was problematic, for example, that in last week’s episode of Scandal, Olivia asks one of her employees to torture a suspect, aggravating what appears to be a severe case of PTSD, and then was rewarded for asking him to do this terrible thing by getting the information that she wanted. One bad message, that torture works, was wrapped inside a better one, that asking people on our side to do terrible things harms their humanity.

The Watch could end up validating macho nonsense that does real harm off-screen. Or it could end up arguing that most of the time, the people we assess as threats are no danger to us, and in fact are common allies in larger projects, the people we need to help make our communities better rather than the people we need to fear.

I’ve been enjoying Scandal, ABC’s Washington drama from Shonda Rhimes about a crisis manager named Olivia Pope (a nicely steely Kerry Washington) modeled on Judy Smith, who worked with figures like Monica Lewinsky and Gary Condit. Scandal is a deeply silly show without much to say about the way that Washington actually works, though its politics are in the right place. In its second episode, Olivia protected DC’s finest madam, a nice bit of pop culture rehabilitation for Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the actual DC madam who committed suicide before she could begin serving a prison sentence. And last night, Olivia convinced a powerful woman to turn in her son on a rape charge rather than continuing to protect him. But the most Washington thing about the show—though not in a contemporary sense—might actually be Olivia Pope’s romantic relationship with the President of the United States himself.

Willa Paskin’s written about how that relationship fits into Rhimes’ larger pattern of telling stories from the perspective of mistresses. And while Scandal may fit Rhimes’ ouvre, it’s also haunted by a pair of historical ghosts: President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a slave who came into Jefferson’s possession through his wife. Now, I’m not saying they’re the same thing. Olivia is obviously a free woman. She didn’t start her relationship with the president as a young teenager. And she isn’t continuing her relationship with him in part as a way to guarantee that her children will be freed later.

But there is still a power imbalance between them: Olivia seems unable to resist him or break away from him entirely, he views his relationship with her as kind of a reward for his goodness in other areas (an awfully Clintonian justification for sexual misconduct), and as it turns out, his wife condones the relationship at least to a limited extent. When the president gets insomnia, she makes sure Olivia will show up at a state dinner so he can get his fix, and go back to the work of running the country. I tend to appreciate Shonda Rhimes’ race-neutral casting and mixed-race relationships, but there’s something weird about not acknowledging that this is a case where a white president in love with a black woman would have particular repercussions. The country’s behaved insanely enough in response to the election of a black president. Something like this—or, god forbid, the revelation that Obama had an affair with a white woman—would expose a whole other level of ugly, and I think that’s worth acknowledging in some way. It’s one thing to have race-neutral writing in situations that aren’t inflected by race. It’s another to have race-neutral casting in situations that would necessarily be racially inflected.

One of the reasons the Obamas are so compelling to the country, I think, is that they’re a tonic to the sexual anxiety and humiliation of the Clinton years, a good-looking couple who to all outward appearances are just nuts about each other. It’s a situation that lets us acknowledge the sexual appeal of the presidency without attaching a whiff of scandal or disgust to that acknowledge. With Scandal, Rhimes brought us back to a moment of national confusion and embarrassment, and injected an interracial relationship into the mix. What she intends to do with that brew seems considerably up in the air. But in the interim, the results are enjoyably trashy.

After one of the most memorably ridiculous weeks in politics, whether it’s the state senator who declared that ladies just don’t care about money that much in comparison to gentlemen, or the Fox outlet that referred to a group of Florida neo-Nazis as “a civil rights group,” I was perfectly primed for this observation from Carina Chocano’s exceedingly fun profile of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who is playing Vice President Selina Meyer in HBO’s upcoming political comedy Veep:

Every decade gets the political show it deserves, or thinks it deserves, though some decades are pretty disingenuous. “The West Wing” gave us an idealized account of the Clinton era, with a saintly president and high-minded pols. In the ’00s, “24” offered an ultraparanoid version of the Bush era that legitimized torture as the primary means of dealing with a world in a constant state of crisis.

“Veep,” by contrast, comes not to justify Caesar but to goose him. It captures our post-Reagan, post-Clinton, post-Bush, 24-hour tabloid news and Internet-haterade dystopia, and reflects our collective queasy ambivalence toward a political system that we fear simply reflects our own shallowness back at us. If “The West Wing” was a fantasy of hyper-competence, “Veep” is its opposite: a black-humor vision of politics at its bleakest, in which both sides have been co-opted by money and special interests and are reduced to posturing, subterfuge, grandstanding and photo ops. Naturally, it’s hilarious.

This is true—I’ve seen the pilot for Veep—and it’s uproarious. But it’s not the only show that gets this, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Last night’s Scandal ended with an uproarious parody of the idea that if we got lawmakers of both parties in the room and talked things over sensibly, that Reason Would Prevail and everything would be all right. Faced with a Supreme Court nominee who was facing a prostitution scandal (the hooker he’s patronized turned out to be his wife), gladiator-in-a-suit crisis fixer Olivia Pope combed a DC madam’s records, figured out which Senators had also been her clients, had her minions seek out said men and drop the code words for the sex acts they’d been ordering up all those years, and blackmailed them into keeping their traps shut. It’s an utterly nonsensical scenario, but not actually more nonsensical than the idea that our politicians are people of good will we can just pull together and everything will be all right.

It remains to be seen if USA’s Political Animals, about a First Lady-turned-Secretary of State and her dysfunctional family, and NBC’s 1600 Penn, which will be out this fall, take the same tack. And it’s true that we don’t lack a serious show in the vein of 24, though Homeland‘s paranoia’s aimed more at the national security bureaucracy than at proving we should have all means at our disposal to wring information out of terrorists. But is interesting that a truly idealistic show hasn’t thrived in the age of Obama. Maybe it’s the the ridiculousness of our politics has consequences bigger than the President’s sex life this time around, and idealism would actually be kind of a downer.

It’s not exactly surprising that there’d be a lot of interest in politics in a presidential election year, but even given that, the heavy investment by networks in political shows feels unusual. And it’s even more unusual that all the political or Washington shows coming down the pike sound—or are, given what I’ve seen of them—surprisingly smart and fun.

What’s making this an official trend is USA’s announcement that it’s picked up a series called Political Animals. The network’s other Washington show, Covert Affairs, can be a little silly about Washington geography and what kind of shoes Washington women can afford on civil service salaries, but it had a decent sense of the relationship between the press and the administration and of tension over leaks. So I’m not shocked that USA’s first real political drama is doing something intelligent in focusing on a main character who is a not-so-thinly-veiled version of Hillary Rodham Clinton: a former First Lady who is now Secretary of State. The civil service geek in me is pretty excited about this and Kal Penn’s workplace drama set at the UN, both of which are a welcome expansion beyond the White House and spies for subject matter. And I think it’s smart to get out of the legislative process, which by this point is fairly well-worn dramatic territory, and into diplomacy and the press—the main character’s best friend will be a reporter. I don’t exactly count on this to be an accurate depiction of diplomacy any more than I expect Royal Pains to be a penetrating look at the Hamptons, but the concept is savvy, and should provide a couple of good roles for non-twenty-something women.

As does Veep, HBO’s terrific comedy about a female Vice President dealing with needy staffers, a president who ignores her, and a press corps that picks up on her every misstep. The sitcom, which premieres April 22, certainly is heightened and ridiculous, but the pilot nails the rhythms of speech and attitudes in Washington, along with the obnoxious and prickly gatekeepers and the minor screw-ups that become major catastrophes. “I want it to be right. I want it to be accurate,” creator Armando Iannucci, the force behind In the Thick of It and In the Loop, told me at the Television Critics Association press tour. “I want to know the dull stuff. What time do people get in in the morning? Who do they sit next to? If someone calls from a newspaper or a television show, who takes the call? How do they issue a retraction?” He and star Julia Louis-Dreyfus told me that they continue to consult with advisors on both sides of the aisle in the city, and from what I’ve seen of the show, that care and attention pay off. When a prominent and aged Senator dies, the Vice President muses about the last time she saw him: “He was full of bourbon, and he grabbed my left tit.” Later, when Amy (Anna Chlumsky, who appears to be Iannucci’s current muse), her chief of staff signs her own name to a condolence card for the man instead of the Veep’s, she moans of the screwup “it’s going to look like the Veep couldn’t be bothered to sign a condolence card for one of the most celebrated perverts on the senate.” And the show mines a lot of humor out of the Veep’s lame attempts at humor, a perfect example of official Washington squareness. “I have stepped into the president’s shoes this evening and who knew he wore kitten heels,” the Veep says to kick off a speech. ” Just kidding. He’s more of a stilettos guy.” Sometimes, politics is both small, and small-minded (as is also the case with Hulu’s first original scripted series Battleground, about campaign workers in a Wisconsin Senate race).

And then there’s Scandal, which is essentially Revenge for the Washington set. Based on the experiences of Judy Smith, the Washington crisis manager, the show is soapy as hell. The president is sexy and straying! The cases handled by Kerry Washington’s PR firm are totally over the top. The real estate is improbably gorgeous. But if you can appreciate it for what it is, Scandal is a wonderfully entertaining funhouse look at Washington from Hollywood’s perspective—it’s Hollywood for ugly people with the ugly people subbed out. I imagine it’ll drive real politicos nuts, but if you can suspend disbelief and just enjoy it, Scandal is going to be awfully diverting.

Which is good. Even political junkies need a break from what will undoubtedly be a bruising campaign. And if we can only downshift to political shows, rather than to something entirely off-topic and escapist, it’s nice to know that there will be diverting alternatives to dusting off our West Wing DVDs.

Given the press attention given to representatives who share group houses in Washington, I’m actually sort of shocked that no one’s greenlit a movie or television show along those lines. Until now: Arianna Huffington*, seizing yet another obvious opportunity, has sold a show based on a group of lawmakers rooming together to ABC.

This is the second political show ABC’s investing in. The first, Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, which I’d describe as Revenge set in Washington, premieres this spring, and from the episodes I’ve seen, is soapy and dramatic and, despite its inaccuracies, really fun. Given that Greg Malins, who’s the executive producer for How I Met Your Mother, is working with Huffington on this, I’d expect that this show will be a little less over the top, though he is saying things like, “There is no better time to do a show about Washington,” Malinssaid. “It’s such a dynamic place right now, it’s the coolest placein the universe,” and apparently of the three main characters, “One is swept up in the movement of change and goes to D.C. to make a difference; one has been in politics for a long time; and one is a master of the media and sound bites.”

While these are cliches, I think the set-up has the potential to do something important: look at legislators as people. Ideology and policy are important, and I certainly spend a lot of my time complaining about shows that are afraid to name lawmakers’ political parties, or that focus on rhetoric instead of substance. But being a legislator is a deeply weird thing. You’re away from your family and the people you represent for a lot of the time. You live a deeply managed existence, one in which there’s always more information than you can possibly consume and process in a reasonable way coming at you. This is not a good setup to produce sane, balanced people, much less sane, balanced legislation, and that’s worth examining. Plus, Washington is full of super-wacky people who would make for a great sitcom. If one of these lawmakers ends up being based on Barney Frank, I will be so happy.

*I keep forgetting her ex-husband Michael is a movie producer. I saw Save the Date, which his company put out, at Sundance. Review to come.

We’ve had a lot of conversations recently about how men are represented in pop culture these days, so I’ve been spending some of my time at the Television Critics Association asking some questions about new male characters that will form a series of posts over the next couple of days.

Shonda Rhimes’ new show Scandal stars a women: Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope, a fictional version of Washington, DC fixer Judy Smith (she represented Monica Lewinsky and Chandra Levy’s family), who is an executive producer on the show. But it’s also about that woman’s relationship with a powerful man, in fact, the powerful man. Olivia’s former boss is the president of the United States, and apparently he’s a single man, who isn’t quite ready to let her go even though she’s returned to private practice. In real life, it’s impossible to imagine a president of the United States who isn’t married. It’s difficult to believe that a man who had never been married or a single divorced man would be able to get over questions around his personal life, though a widower might manage it. But I asked Rhimes if she thought that despite that conception, Americans long for a sexier vision of the president.

” I don’t know if America wants a sexier president” in the real world, she said. “I know when I was working on the show, it was delightful to have a sexier president, to imagine the president as a man as well as a leader of the free world.” She noted later that she hoped the show wouldn’t be pigeon-holed, noting, “I don’t think this is a show about relationships.”

It’s a dichotomy that raises some interesting issues. I don’t know that we’re always very good at letting men express yearning or desire in popular culture, even though we’re at a place where we’re getting more comfortable watching women objectify men on-screen, and presenting men to be objectified by women in the audience. I wonder if it has something to do with a dynamic we see play out repeatedly in American politics, where we constantly downgrade a politician’s power (particularly the president) any time he compromises or doesn’t get everything he wants. Of course, we accept the inevitability of compromise and disappointment in ordinary people’s lives. But it’s hard to imagine someone being both a forceful chief executive and not getting the girl, or getting the girl and then getting dumped. It’s why action stars never have interesting romances: the only outcomes are success, the hero leaving the girl, or the girl dying through the machinations of the villain.