At Gawker this morning, Max Read did a thorough job of explaining why Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who appears to have shown considerable disappointment in real life that he’s not attractive to some of his very young colleagues, is perhaps not the person best fit to decry Daniel Craig’s chiseled physique and to praise retro, older sex symbols like Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant as Cohen did his column yesterday. But reading through Cohen’s lament that ladies of roughly my age seem to dig Craig more than we do grizzled syndicated columnists, I think that Cohen, without intending to, is expressing an anxiety that’s worth examining. James Bond’s being treated like a Bond girl. The ascendance of young adult literature means that pop culture has more and more gorgeous young men who are offered up like a dessert tray for heroines’ pleasures. And as images of what makes a man attractive and successful as determined by female desires and standards proliferate in our culture, it makes sense that the guys watching at home would start to worry if they measure up, and to think about what would happen to them if they started facing ideals as rigid as those imposed on women.

That Cohen, whether he recognizes it or not, is not alone in his anxiety doesn’t exactly make his critique of James Bond in comparison to older, less athletic, but still super-rich and super-white guys thoughtful or incisive. Desirable masculinity, as Cohen outlines it, is a pretty great deal for men, or at least, men of a certain financial position and class upbringing. A world in which men can take the things they learned when they were young about how to “handle a maitre d’ as well as a commie assassin,” or about how to be the kind of man who “knows his martinis, but he also knows how to send out a suit for swift hotel cleaning,” buy some style along the way, and have beautiful women fall into their laps is one that doesn’t force those men to suffer much in the way of anxiety or upkeep. There’s no female gaze or female judgement here—nor any concern for female pleasure, the question of what those male bodies might be good for. Men present the standards for manhood, and women effortlessly—gratefully, really—accept them.

Cohen dismisses the current crop of sculpted hunks that Daniel Craig represents as “some marbleized man, an ersatz creation of some trainer,” but the standards for what makes a man sexy that he’s describing are no more natural or objective. And I’m curious if he’d identify the beauty of the women he cites in his column, like Ingrid Bergman and Mary Astor, as effortless and natural, rather than the product of beauty standards and the punishing regimes and restrictive clothes that helped women accomplish them. One of the earliest contradictions I understood as a young teenage girl reading fashion magazines was that I was supposed to look “natural” and “effortless,” but that it took an enormous amount of work and money to recreate the looks that I was told embodied those standards. I learned that my own lip color and texture was less natural than a glossy pink, that the blush of my unadorned cheek looked less vital than a layer of foundation, powder, and blush. I’m glad I had that education so I could see the distance and the contradiction, enjoy wearing bright red lipstick for its artificiality and sense of performance, not because I believed that my own hue was an error or imperfection. But it’s not an easy education to acquire, or to shake off in favor of truly discerning what I want to look like and feel, and I don’t envy someone like Cohen coming to his own version of it later in life, or reckoning with the work he’d have to do to meet the standards laid out for him. I feel a lot more concern, however, for teenage boys who are turning to steroids or working out more than is actually healthy to meet those standards

In a way, I think we’re at an interesting tipping point in our culture, but one that still involves men and women (when those are the parties to the conversation) talking past each other. What’s interesting to me about Daniel Craig’s body is less how it looks than in what he does with it as James Bond. The contrast between the force he’s able to exercise (as James Poulos put it on Twitter, “Soooo to be clear, CraigBond’s muscles are things you have to have if you are a blunt instrument. Get the causal arrows right.”) and the tenderness and sensuality Craig in particular shows women is what’s attractive about him. Watching him curl up under a running shower with Vesper or bowl her, laughing, over a hospital bed, the delicacy of the way he unbuttons Eve Moneypenny’s blouse, or the rough hurry with which he pushes his unnamed paramour up against a wall in their lean-to on the beach—these all speak to an attentiveness to and experience with women’s bodies that’s far more relevant to the question at hand than Bond’s ability to deal with a formally trained waiter, though in Casino Royale, he seems to navigate fancy restaurants just fine. While neither Edward Cullen nor Christian Grey does it for me, I can understand why those archetypes are so attractive to some of the women who consume them, and not just because they’re described as very handsome: these are men who are bringing considerable physical power or substantial sexual experience to bear in service of their partners’ pleasure*.

The question of how we want our bodies to look, and how we want other people to react to them, has long stood in for how we want them to feel, how we want them to be touched, and treated. This isn’t to say that looks don’t matter, but they’re intertwined with a set of issues we’re much less capable of having productive public conversations about. I’m glad, to a certain extent, that more men are coming to an understanding of how culture contributes to this nasty bit of sleight-of-hand for women, particularly after what’s felt like a particularly intense decade of Beauty And The Slob pairings. But this is a case when turnabout isn’t fair play for people on either end of the equation.

*More thoughts on this tomorrow.

I agree that Hollywood often does a rather sappy job when it tries to tell stories about people with disabilities, but unlike Ian Buckwalter, writing on The Sessions, which I reviewed in February (when it had a different title), I don’t actually think the answer is that our depictions of disability need to get more despairing:

There’s no rule that says the tougher film has to be the better one, but the problem with Intouchables and The Sessions is that they achieve their sunny dispositions by pulling punches. Any hint of difficulty is immediately tempered so as not to upset the lightly comedic tone of both films. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scene in The Sessions when a power outage causes a failure in the iron lung that allows Mark to breathe. While it’s in character for the devoutly Catholic Mark to greet potential death with the same beatific acceptance he carries through much of the rest of his life, that doesn’t mean the film can’t recognize the dire nature of the circumstances. This should be a tense moment, but The Sessions refuses to acknowledge highs and lows, tension and release. It flatlines from start to finish, even if Mark doesn’t.

Audiard strikes a better balance in Rust and Bone, demonstrating that one can take a pat inspirational story and infuse it with the hardship required to make that inspiration feel earned. Following the loss of her legs, Stéphanie is nearly as defeated as the stroke victim of Amour. As a whale trainer, she makes her living on her feet, and her character’s despair is palpable. More importantly, Audiard makes it impossible to turn away from that despair, unlike the glossed-over expository conversations in Intouchables and Sessions about how their characters dealt with that loss.

The thing is, there’s a difference between a story about someone learning to cope with a newly-acquired disability, and a story about someone with a disability doing something else, like having sex or falling in love. In that first category of story, the goal of the movie is presumably to communicate to a majority able-bodied audience that their negative expectations for what their lives would be like if they suddenly lost, say, the ability to walk, aren’t accurate or complete, and that joy, love, and physical pleasure are still possible. As much as I dislike the idea that movies about people with disabilities need be tragic, I understand why these categories of films include that register of emotions, because they’re a way of hooking in audiences who fear the idea of grave accidents or infections that suddenly change their capacities.

But I don’t think The Sessions is a movie about a man learning to cope with a disability—in fact, it’s a movie about a man who’s coped very well with the limitations in his mobility for years. The film explains those arrangements because it assumes that an able-bodied audience will be interested in how Mark gets around and makes a living. But it’s emphatically not about him coming to terms with the fact that he has to use an iron lung, or hire an aide, or even that in a power outage, Mark could be in considerable danger. Instead, The Sessions is a sex comedy with Mark’s experience with polio as the reason he never lost his virginity. It’s a more concrete explanation than The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and the tone is kinder and more emotionally attuned than that movie (Legit, which FX plans to put on its schedule at some point, has a pilot that is basically a glorious mashup of The Sessions and em>The 40-Year-Old Virgin). But it’s essentially a similar concept.

And I don’t see why a movie like that has to be dark, or despairing. In fact, way the arcs for a lot of the best sex stories work is that there’s a lot of anticipation, and then an anti-climax, rather than an enormous climb and an inspiring victory. The 40-Year-Old Virgin ends with relatively brief sex and a goofy sing-a-long: the emotional work’s done, the victory achieved. Rats Saw God, one of my favorite young adult novels, actually draws some wonderful drama from the main characters’ reactions to the first time they have sex: the fact that it isn’t a transformational experience leaves them feeling confused and somewhat alienated from each other. In The Sessions, the obstacles are Mark’s anxieties, premature ejaculation, his desire to give pleasure as well as to feel it. These are not the things of triumph-over-disability movies: they’re things that a lot of us experience, and Mark’s confinement to his iron lung is the particular thing that inflects his journey through them. But that doesn’t make these experiences and emotions unimportant—if anything, that Mark is concerned with giving pleasure even though it’s harder for him to, say, touch his partner, makes him a hero in comparison to less thoughtful people, whether they have physical limitations or none at all. Sex comedies shouldn’t have to automatically move into a tragic key because a person with a disability is involved in them. Rather, how persons with disabilities—not all of whom acquire those conditions dramatically or suddenly—navigate circumstances that they share with those of us who don’t have disabilities tells us about the universality of those experiences, rather than offering testaments to the resilience of the human spirit.

There’s something disquieting about the idea that the only uses of characters with disabilities should be to provide those testaments. As with, say, gay characters, telling stories about difference is only a first order accomplishment when it comes to diversity. By all means, tell stories about what it means to suddenly move into the ranks of people with disabilities, the legions of wheelchair users. But remember that people are born with disabilities too, and people who have disabilities do far more with their lives than accommodate themselves to the limitations and difficulties they face.

This is maybe the most delightful thing I have ever seen in my entire life: Pat Robertson discovering that some ladies like erotica through the world-conquering phenomenon that is Fifty Shades of Grey:

First, there’s the way that he asks his co-host, “You’re a sweet Christian girl. Lady. Do you see anything in porn that attracts you at all?” I imagine his intention is to provide her an opportunity to reaffirm her chastity, to come across as a little shocked and maybe even innocent. But it comes across as awfully prurient.

And that position of shock and presumption of innocence and purity is actually more revealing than the idea that “A third of the millions of Americans who watch porn are women.” If Robertson is shocked that E.L. James “the author, kind of a little house-wifey type, who doesn’t look like a glamor queen…this woman is kind of like a housewife in some little town” thinks about sex, he must be almost wholly unacquainted with the prospect of female desire. If you can’t reckon with the idea that women crave, enjoy, and think about how to make sex better, it actually makes sense that you’d have a hard time understanding why contraceptive coverage is important to women, or why it’s important to us to have final decision-making authority over our own bodies. Doesn’t make that befuddlement admirable. But it does help make sense of at least a segment of the tide of weird that’s enveloped us over the last year. It would be nice if Robertson, a late convert to the idea that marijuana should be legal and regulated, could get up to speed on this kind of thing in his old age as well.

Romola Garai, in the course of commenting on some of the regularly-discussed indignities of being larger than a size six in Hollywood, makes two very important points about what our skewed perceptions of beauty do to us:

“Everyone’s aware of it. It’s partly because fashion, film and television have become so interdependent. Increasingly, it’s actresses doing the big fashion advertising campaigns and now there’s no distinction between actresses and models. “There’s no way I could ring up a company that was lending me a red carpet dress and say, ‘Do you have it in a 10?’ Because all the press samples are an eight – I would say a small eight. If you want the profile, you have to lose the weight.”…

The actress conceded that men in the industry also feel pressure to lose weight, referring to a report that Jason Segel, the Hollywood actor, was told to lose 30 lbs for his role in a romantic comedy. She said: “Executives said it just wasn’t credible that anyone would want to have sex with him the way he was. “I think that is such a profound misreading of what people want out of sex and relationships. And I want no part of that. I wouldn’t want to sit in a room and have someone say to my face, ‘No-one is going to want to have sex with you’. No job is worth that.”

That conflation of actresses’ and models’ role is important because it provides a homogenous beauty standard. When there was a clear distinction between how models wore clothes on the runway, and how actresses wore clothes in their version of the real world, that created a continuum between models, actresses, and those of us whose bodies and faces are not our living. Forcing models and actresses to meet the same standards, even though a diversity of body types would make both industries more interesting (a point that’s illustrated to a certain extent by this slideshow of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show), creates a polarized dynamic rather than a range, a right body type and a wrong one rather than the sense that there are a lot of kinds of women who need to wear clothes and can look incredible them.

But even more important is her point about sex. The idea that having good sex is a matter of how you look rather than how comfortable you are in your body, how well you know your needs and desires, is one of the worst, most persistent misconceptions in our mass culture. Good sex is about sensation, about communication, about all kinds of things that are totally disconnected from how well you’re posed while you’re having sex, or how you look in clothes you take off prior to having sex. Denying that means we have worse sex than we deserve in our popular culture, and perhaps as a result, fewer ways to articulate what we want and what would make us feel good. It’s no mistake that Garai is a wonderfully engaged actress in her sex scenes in The Hour, which is back in a couple of weeks, and is terrific, and in The Crimson Petal And The White. Our pop culture would be better off if we had more actresses who thought–not to mention looked–like her, and more people who wanted to write and direct with these ideas in mind.

I wish I could say that I’m shocked that two female candidates for Senate got asked in a debate whether they’d read Fifty Shades of Grey, but sometimes, everything is weird and terrible and this kind of nonsense does come to pass:

I’m willing to give the moderators a pass for asking about culture in general, both because the questions were meant to warm up the debaters, and because I think that asking substantive questions about culture is an interesting way to get at what public figures value and the extent to which they’re inclined to pander. But asking a yes or no question about whether Kirsten Gillibrand and Wendy Long have read a book that, as of August, had sold more than 40 million copies, doesn’t actually reveal any meaningful information about their tastes that distinguishes them from other women.

The reason people think reading Fifty Shade of Grey indicates anything at all is because people think it’s weird for women to publicly admit to being interested in sex, much less in books that involve women figuring out what they like sexually. Fifty Shades of Grey isn’t actually a particularly good book if you want to have a discussion of sexual self-knowledge, given that it’s a big proponent of the idea that all women have magically effective vaginal orgasms, that if you haven’t had sex before that it will automatically be terrific as long as your partner is a charismatic and kinky industrial tycoon, and that its knowledge of BDSM and power dynamics in sex appears to have been gleaned from a vigorous read of Wikipedia. But it’s still treated as if it’s some sort of scandalous text—people literally write articles about how to avoid being caught reading Fifty Shades of Grey in public. Asking Gillibrand and Long whether they’d read the book isn’t a way to learn more about them, or to start a discussion about sexuality, or to see if they’re in synch with female readers, or to warm them up: it’s in part to catch them out on something that shouldn’t be a titter-worthy issue in the first place.

Beyonce is set to star in Clint Eastwood's remake of 'A Star Is Born.'

As a dedicated Beyonce fan, I’m excited to hear that she is apparently confirmed to headline the Super Bowl halftime show in February. It’s always a lot of fun to get to see performers roll out some of their most beloved material in an environment that gives them license for dramatic staging. But as much as I like Beyonce, and look forward to whether she can get a stadium of football fans grooving to “Single Ladies,” it’s not just her music that has me excited about Beyonce getting a chance to take that stage.

I’m frankly glad to see an African-American woman back on that stage as the headline performer (rather than Nicki Minaj’s guest stint) for the first time since Janet Jackson in 2004. I’ve always been disgusted by the way that performance, in which Justin Timberlake ripped off part of her costume, leaving her breast exposed, got reduced to a “wardrobe malfunction” and associated with Jackson, rather than with Timberlake’s actions. The image of her, shocked and covering herself up, with Timberlake beside her sporting a serious case of sexyface is upsetting and uncomfortable. In the years that followed, the Super Bowl defaulted to a heavy rotation of old, white dudes, though that didn’t exactly save the game from sexualized incidents like Bruce Springsteen’s camera crotch-bump. It took until 2011 for a woman to return to the halftime stage: Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas performed in a full-body Tron-inspired suit. She was followed the year after by Madonna, Nicki Minaj, and M.I.A. in cheerleader outfits with Cee-Lo Green present as, alternatively, a band-leader and in choir robes—hardly a figure to cause a disruption.

Now, nine years later, Beyonce’s being allowed on the halftime stage, not as part of a band, not as backup to a white woman whose sexualized antics are so familiar and tired that they’re amusing, but as her own fantastic, pop-culture dominating self. Hopefully they won’t saddle her with a stable of backup performers, unless her husband wants to drop by for a duet. And it would be nice if we could all recognize that network skittishness over the halftime show in the past decade is due to incidents that stem more from the actions of white guys than Janet Jackson.

When the broadcast television season began several weeks ago, one of the things that stood out most from network to networks was the ratings. NBC may have started to claw its way out of the ratings cellar with Revolution, one of the few bona fide hits of fall, but lots of its broadcast counterparts found themselves in trouble. CBS, normally top of the heap, saw two of its new entries, drama Made In Jersey and sitcom Partners, tank out of the gate. Fox renewed two new comedies, The Mindy Project and Ben and Kate, despite the fact that they debuted with half the audience their comedy block anchor, New Girl, started out with a year before. On Twitter, my fellow television critics mused that they’d always thought there was the potential for the bottom to fall out of the broadcast television model, but that they didn’t see it coming so soon. At the same time, cable shows like FX’s Sons of Anarchy were creeping up in the ratings, beating the networks in the core demographic of viewers if not in total viewers. Network television seems to have lost its sense of what it can do better than cable, and to be floundering in developing shows as a result.

But it would be great for network to get its groove back, and not just because it’s one of the few media that can create an ongoing mass cultural phenomenon. As demand grows for alternatives to bundled cable, it’s important for broadcast television to be a vigorous, vibrant alternative to cable networks so it’s in those cable networks’ interests to compete however they can for viewers. And for those of us who love great television, it would be fantastic to see the end of a race to the lowest common denominator, and to see good programming catch on. While there’s no guarantee that doing the right, creative thing will garner network audiences, here are four ideas for how broadcast television can rediscover what makes it unique.

1. Avoid Special Effects Arms Races: Subscription support means that HBO can afford to spend $60 million a season on Game of Thrones, building a complex fictional world that includes castles, dragons, and ice zombies. Network television, especially given declining viewership and correspondingly shrinking ad rates, won’t ever be able to keep up with that kind of investment. So it shouldn’t try, settling for shows that look bad, or that end up blowing their budgets on CGI dinosaurs rather than acting talent. I may not like NBC’s Revolution much, but when it comes to genre, it’s doing the right thing, building a post-apocalyptic society that is dense with forest rather than full of heavily made-up zombies or other magical creatures. Constraints can make for a lot of creativity. Network should accept its limitations, and build smart worlds within them.

2. Shorter Seasons: I’ve written about this repeatedly. But an obsessive focus on producing high numbers of episodes of shows is a great driver of mediocre concepts, and of overextending successful series like How I Met Your Mother. Miniseries and shorter seasons are a great way to attract excellent actors to television, whether it’s Sigourney Weaver in Political Animals, an effort I think was doomed by its time slot or Kevin Bacon, who will arrive on Fox this winter playing an alcoholic FBI agent in The Following. It would also be a way to fit stories to the number of episodes actually needed to tell them, one of the great strengths of British television. And shorter seasons and miniseries would also help solve one of television’s most pernicious scheduling problems: month-long hiatuses on shows that have just begun to hit their stride. The television season is an artificial construction and a not particularly logical one. It’s time to start experimenting with alternatives to it that serve stories and audiences instead.

3. Genuinely Family-Friendly Shows: The success of Downton Abbey is an illustration of a serious gap in the television market: programming that people of all ages can watch, enjoy, and discuss. So much of what’s on television is narrowly targeted or toned by age right now—a show like New Girl wouldn’t even be close to appropriate for a pre-teen audience, but its appeal has a cutoff well inside the target demographic. CBS’s Partners may be an attempt to speak to a younger generation whose friend groups have always included gay couples, but in tone and style, it’s aimed more at older viewers who are still getting used to the idea. Setting aside in-jokes or concepts that are targeted at certain demographics and trying for concepts and tones that are more universal could meet the needs of entire families. The 8 PM hour is considered a dead zone on broadcast television right now, which is too bad. There’s no reason to waste the hour after homework and before a reasonable bed time.

4. Innovate Around Sex And Violence: There’s an odd perception that much of cable television’s edge over broadcast is due to the fact that cable shows can depict sexual and violent situations that would be verboten—or at least risk drawing very heavy fines—on network television. Fox is attempting to chase cable standards with The Following, its extremely violent serial killer show, but across the board, I think that’s a mistake. Too often, cable’s taken its licenses as mandates, and produced sex and violence unmoored from narrative or emotional demands. Network could compete not by courting FCC censure, but by making the leadup to sex sensual and adult, and countering body-of-the-week callousness by making deaths real losses with devastating impact. You don’t have to see a character’s head get bashed in for their death to feel debilitating.

As Fifty Shades of Grey mania’s swept the country, film and television production companies have fallen all over themselves, first to snap up the rights to E.L. James’ erotic trilogy, and then to find the next Fifty Shades, whether it’s YA riff Beautiful Disaster (bought by Warner Brothers) or ABC’s efforts to develop Dress To Kill, an erotic mystery set in the fashion world, as a series. There’s just one problem: movies and television in particular are often terrible at depicting sex compellingly, even without the addition of floggers and sub-dom power dynamics to navigate and ratings systems to accommodate. But if television’s determined to get serious about sex, and networks want to compete with cable, which has far fewer restrictions on what it can show but still often demonstrates a basic cluelessness about what makes a scene genuinely erotically charged, here are five tips for how to shoot sex scenes that can pass Standards and Practices and still get viewers hot and bothered.

1. Leadup Matters: Short scenes in television often mean we see couples on a straight route from the front door to the bedroom. Hot and heavy’s fine, but it cuts out one of the most fun things about watching characters prepare to get it on, whether this is the first time they’re sleeping together, or whether they’re an established couple going to bed prepared to surprise each other all over again. Two instructive examples come from The Hour and Parenthood. The former spent its third hour on a number of plots, but the through line was rising sexual tension between Bel Rowley, the producer on the news magazine program The Hour, and Hector Madden, her married anchor. As they flirted on the drive up to London and wandered the halls of Madden’s wife’s palatial country home during a game of Sardines, watching Hector catch Bel’s hand or move in for an early kiss was as tense and thrilling as a full-on sex scene, and we didn’t even have to see them take off their clothes. In the second season of Parenthood, in the episode “Amazing Andy And His Wonderful World Of Bugs” Julia and Joel Graham end up delaying having sex until Julia is ovulating because they’re trying to get pregnant. Watching Joel lust after Julia is half the fun, in part because Sam Jaeger conveys longing so well. You don’t have to worry about what acts you can and can’t broadcast if you have actors who can plausibly sell desire even when they aren’t touching each other.

2. People Should Have Fun: Pop culture sex often looks so deadly serious, choreographed rather than spontaneous, attentive to the audience’s expectations rather than conveying the impression the people involved are actually enjoying themselves. The reason that the first sex scene in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair is so effective (once you get beyond the stair-sex, which no one will ever convince me could possibly less than extremely uncomfortable) is that the characters get to be silly, and enthusiastic, and awkward. They laugh, fall off things, vamp a little. It’s actually plausible that they’re all wrapped up in each other, rather than thinking ahead to what they’ll look like when the editing bay gets done with them.
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I was talking to a friend last week about director Nick Cassavetes’ defense of his new movie Yellow, which is about a brother and sister who have a love affair, at the Toronto Film Festival. “I’m not saying this is an absolute but in a way, if you’re not having kids – who gives a damn?” he told The Wrap. “Love who you want. Isn’t that what we say? Gay marriage – love who you want? If it’s your brother or sister it’s super-weird, but if you look at it, you’re not hurting anybody except every single person who freaks out because you’re in love with one another.” It’s not quite the attitude of the many, many other artists who have turned to incest recently to juice their television shows, seeking shock instead of Cassavetes’ plea for compassion. But it may be impossible for him to escape being lumped in with a larger trend: in Hollywood, incest is suddenly so wide-spread that it’s practically the new vampirism.

Over the last season of Dexter, the titular serial killer’s adoptive sister Debra Morgan (Jennifer Morgan) came to realize that she loved her brother—and not merely in a fraternal way. Her rush of romantic feeling for Dexter (Michael C. Hall) was rudely interrupted when, on her way to confess it to him, Deb found Dexter in the midst of killing his latest victim. In the season premiere of Dexter this Sunday, Dexter will try to manage Deb’s understanding of what she’s just seen. But I have to imagine that the possibility of being accepted and loved for who he really is, as opposed to for his ability to pretend to be a family man, as Dexter did with his wife Rita, could be powerfully appealing to Dexter. The breach of the incest taboo here may not be formally, because Dexter and Deb are not related by blood. But flirting with it is a way for Dexter, a show that’s made a serial killer its main character and hero, to contemplate leveling up to a new level of deviance.

Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones, by contrast, barreled right past playing with the idea of incest to show it happening. Last season on Boardwalk Empire, we learned that Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) and his mother Gillian (Gretchen Mol) had slept together, an incident that left lingering wounds in Jimmy’s psyche. This year, Gillian’s moved in on Jimmy’s son, claiming him as her own child rather than as her gradson. Her “I’m your mother now, remember?” has poison in its sickly sweetness, its reminder that Gillian has been constrained by the roles assigned to her by biology and societal expectation. Herself the victim of a boundary-crossing sexual assault that left her pregnant at 13, Gillian’s responded not by reinforcing rules and boundaries, but by becoming a predator herself.

Incest acts as a way to communicate Gillian’s monstrousness in Boardwalk Empire, and it begins that way in Game of Thrones, when Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) pushes a child out of a tower with the intent of killing him when that child discovers him having sex with his sister Cersei (Lena Headey), who also happens to be queen of Westeros. But substantial plot mechanics of the show and the books on which they’re based depend on that incestuous relationship. And in the novels, which are ahead of the books at this point, our perspectives on both of those characters shift such that we understand their incestuous relationship is at least in part a product of the substantial damage that’s been done to Jamie and Cersei by their rigid father, and by Cersei’s abusive husband. The incest story is shocking, but it’s to a purpose other than to produce a series of ephemeral, horrified gasps.

The L.A. Complex did something similar in its two-part season finale this year. This season, Connor Lake (Jonathan Patrick Moore), a troubled television star, got involved with the Church of Scienetics, a thinly-veiled version of the Church of Scientology, on the advice of his long-lost sister, a member of the faith. As they bonded, Connor told his sister that he loved her and felt close to her. And she responded by planting a not-so-sisterly kiss on him. When Connor panicked, so did she, and so did the Church, which shipped her off to a remote facility. The point was less to titillate us with the prospect of an incestuous relationship but to provide an event shocking enough that it could trigger the darkest practices of Scienetics.

There’s no question that incest storylines can be powerful and meaningful, but when this many shows are turning towards incest to juice their storytelling, it feels more like they’re piling on a trend that moving on the strength of their own speed. An obsession with incest comes at times when a lot of television shows don’t seem to know how to gin up sexual chemistry between their characters who are legal, consenting adults who aren’t related to each other. If you’re dipping into a well of deviance not because you have something to say about the trope you’re adopting, but because it’s simply a means to heighten an already tense environment, it’s time to reevaluate your storytelling values. Shock, disgust, and titillation aren’t the only ways to produce dramatic tension or release.