On Friday, Showtime announced that it had picked up a new show called The Affair, which would tell the stories of a relationship that interrupts two marriages, splitting up the episodes to explore the perspectives of the men and women involved separately. It was a decision that, along with the forthcoming Masters of Sex, a historical drama bout the sex researchers Masters and Johnson, and Ray Donovan, which follows a Los Angeles fixer who is also dealing with the consequences of childhood sexual abuse in his family, that furthered a brand that underlies a great deal of Showtime’s work, and that makes the network unusual among its peers. Showtime increasingly as interested in exploring sex as it is violence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deadline reported yesterday morning that Showtime is considering a show from Ron Howard that would tell the story of Hernan Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who scuttled his own ships so he’d have no option to retreat and eventually took the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán by siege. It’s not a story without risks—without making this a contest of equals and a genuine clash of sophisticated civilizations, such a show could devolve into a dull celebration of imperialism. But done right, it’s the kind of project that could provide great roles for people of color, and for women, including La Malinche, a woman born on the border between the Mayan and Aztec Empires, sold as a slave, given to Cortés as a gift, and who became his interpreter in Mayan and Nahuatl, and eventually the mother of his child.

Showtime president David Nevins, asked about the project, offered an explanation that was more non-commital than Deadline’s report—but in certain significant ways, intriguing:

I think there’s a very interesting show to be done about that has genre elements, has elements of supernatural and horror, really frightening, gruesome stuff, which is about the sort of encounter between these two very different cultures but were in a premodern time where magic and mysticism, I think, is in the core in the core of the belief system of the Spanish Catholics and the Aztecs. And it’s a very advanced civilization in a lot of ways, the Aztec civilization, advanced mathematics and science, but also really brutal and violent. So I think it’s got a mix. And it’s a kind of a period show that no one has done. So I’m always looking for something that feels like fresh territory. One of the reasons I hate talking about it is because other people can get the idea. But I think it’s it’s loaded with potential.

If Nevins wants to do a period drama with genre elements, he might consider eliminating the conquistadors from the equation. Showtime could adapt Clare Bell’s The Jaguar Princess, a fantasy about Aztec client states that involves a woman who can shape shift into a great cat, which the network could pitch as a mashup of Game of Thrones‘ feudal politics and True Blood‘s sex and magic. I don’t think Gary Jennings Aztec novels, in which Catholic invaders misread the civilization they were determined to destroy by sword and cross, have ever been adapted, and they could be rich territory as well. Ultimately, I doubt Showtime would ever ditch the conquistadors—a show this expensive would probably think it needs a Sean Bean-like famous-but-not-too-expensive white guy as a hook for an audience. But it would be nice to see a show about native peoples in the Americas that has the guts to treat its invading European as a villain rather than a hero, and to turn Aztec characters into rich and complex anti-heroes.

Two shows doesn’t quite constitute a trend, but I was curious to note that both AMC and Showtime are developing shows about Native Americans. AMC’s working on a show about the football team at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which recruited students from what was then the Dakota Territory starting in 1879. Among its students? Jim Thorpe, the Olympian and football, basketball and baseball player who some people consider the greatest all-around athlete who ever lived. And Showtime is working on a contemporary show from Alexander Payne about the opening of an Indian casino in the Midwest.

These shows may not be perfect. Both come from white creators. And the AMC show seems likely to focus on Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the school and coached the team, which means it would have a white star (Tommy Lee Jones may direct the pilot). But that does, unfortunately, tend to be the way that marginalized people begin to move to the center of the frame. And in between these efforts, and the news that Robin McLeavy, the Australian actress who plays the most fully-realized part-Native American character in AMC’s Western drama Hell on Wheels, will become a series regular rather than a supporting character, we’ve got some movement in that direction. It’ll be a while before we know if these projects are worth their while, but I’m glad to see networks recognizing that there are interesting stories to be told in some of the diversity of Native American experience.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that New Regency’s just signed a deal that lets it have first crack at content coming out of one of Israel’s biggest production companies. Israeli shows are never going to translate directly the way British ones do—you can’t just slap a Hebrew-language show on PBS or Hulu and expect that it’ll find a well-established audience like the one that’s willing to give almost any BBC content a shot. But Israeli shows have been the basis for programs like In Treatment, part of the second wave of well-regarded HBO shows, Homeland, which is helping Showtime steal a match on HBO, and Who’s Still Standing?, an NBC quiz show that’s helping the struggling network fill hours.

Obviously, this sampling of shows is a bit too small to use to draw conclusions about what American and Israeli audiences have in common, or why Israeli story templates work here. Americans have complicated relationships to and feelings about Israel, but none that translate into pop culture as easily as thinking that British people and their accents are inherently cool, that MI-6 makes for an excellent action setting, or generalized royalty and aristocracy nostalgia. An LA Times article from earlier this year offered some theories, both psychological and structural: “Some others: Israeli television’s gallows humor fits with post-9/11 American anxiety; Israelis are preoccupied by some of the same subjects as American network executives (‘the country has more psychologists per capita than anywhere else in the world, and that leads to psychologically complex stories,’ said David Nevins, Showtime’s president of entertainment); a U.S. business that has grown restless with traditional sources; Israeli shows are relatively cheap; and Israeli TV’s small budgets birth creative storytelling.”

In a sense, I regret that we’re really only going to be able to remake Israeli shows rather than rebroadcasting them directly. Our national conversation about Israel is bigger than this, but it might be healthy to keep the setting so audiences here can see the country the same way we see England: as an ally, a place of both great natural beauty and sometimes-prosaic urban design, where some people are involved in existential struggles against security threats and others are consumed with the prosaic business of everyday life and everyday jobs.

In his review of Rob, Todd VanDerWeff says something: “Everybody’s trying to figure out the way to do these vaguely politically incorrect shows where the characters talk about race and culture and so on frankly and honestly. Everybody’s chasing that whole envelope-pushing thing that cable does so well because they vaguely sense that this is something network could do well, too.” In that case, they might well look to David Nevins and to Showtime for tips on how to do those things right without being obvious, or without making a hash of things trying to represent the full range of a debate.

At his executive session yesterday, one of my fellow critics asked if he thought House of Lies glorified the 1 percent and the people who produce their wealth at a time of rising anger against them. “House of Lies is all about excess and confronting the contradictions of it and the hypocrisies of it. I think House of Lies is an incredibly timely show,” he said. “We’re not really about taking the sanctimonious, obvious route to confront those issues of income disparity. But I think it’s got very interesting things to say about how business is run.” He trusts his audience to see something on screen and to interrogate it, rather than to simply accept that because it’s on screen, it must be good.

When I asked him about whether, given the nice ratings for Homeland and House of Lies, he thought there was an unmet appetite for shows that took on the issues of the day, he agreed heartily:

Relevance is a big deal for us. I want to do shows that resonate in the wider culture. I think theere’s a huge opportunity to challenge the world that we live in. Relevance, timeliness, is, I think, one of the things that can define Showtime…I feel like that’s a big part of what happened with Homeland. I got to Showtime the summer of 2010. My first day was in August. And that script showed up. I’d had conversations with Howard [Gordon] and Alex [Gansa] back when I was a producer. They gave me the script within my first week there…we started talking about what the pay cable version of that would be. I realized we didn’t have a show that played in the fall with Dexter, and a year from then, the fall of 2011 would be the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and her was a script that if we were smart about it, was going to resonate with a lot of the things that were going to be occupying journalists and pundits. It’s rare that something lines up like that…In a similar way, House of Lies, some of it is by coincidence but some fo it is by design.

The political cycle moves much faster than the television development process, so Showtime would have be unusually good at forecasting to have shows land in the same way that Homeland and House of Lies have. But I appreciate hearing anyone say that trying is worthwhile.

At Showtime’s panel for Shameless this morning, John Wells (who gets his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame today) suggested that the aperture of network television has narrowed such that he wouldn’t be able to sell some of his most popular shows today.

“It took us a long time to sell West Wing and it would be increasingly impossible now. You would take it to cable,” he said, suggesting that he also wouldn’t have been able to get China Beach on the air. “We never would have been able to sell ER…I can tell you that even at the time it was turned down by all the major broadcast networks twice before we actually got NBC to make it.” But he suggested that the combination of a return to profitability and the rise of smart, sophisticated storytelling on cable might pry the doors open again. “I’m hopeful about the network business,” he said. “They’re starting to see the competition for high-end programming, programming that’s going to be watched by a more sophisticated and affluent audience, that they have to compete with cable. I find it to be a very good time to have ideas that are different.”

He also suggested that even if the Supreme Court declined to overturn the rules against indecency on network television, the key to pushing the boundaries was to provide clear context and emotional basis for both events and language, pointing to ER as an example.

“We spent a lot of time intentionally pushing against where we knew the fence to be because we knew the audience was ready for more than what the government was prepared for us to do,” Wells said. “The audience is always very prepared to accept something that is done within the context…It was an episode I wrote and directed in which Anthony Edwards was dying and fell out of bed and started screaming ‘Shit!’ because he was so frustrated with where he was in his life…We didn’t get a single letter because the context, people understood.” In a different philosophy than that laid out by CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler and 2 Broke Girls executive producer Michael Patrick King yesterday, Wells questioned indecency for indecency’s sake. “Is the audience going to understand what we’re trying to get at, or are we trying to inflame or do the thing that you do in elementary school where you wave around words and try to get a reaction?” he asked.

Wells also spent some time discussing the role of Ian Gallagher, the young gay character on Showtime who is not just romantically, but sexually active. He said that Cameron Monaghan’s turning 18 meant that Shameless would be able to be somewhat more explicit about Ian’s sex life without having to worry about violating federal child pornography laws. And Wells said he’d been touched by how the story had resonated with young gay teenagers who told him and Monaghan that they appreciated how the show reflects the complexity of their lives. Especially given the role of Roscoe on Showtime, it will be interesting to see if the network is digging in as a grittier alternative to shows like Glee, which focus more on the emotional lives of teenagers than the details of their sex lives. That’s not to say that you’ve got to be explicit to explore emotion, but it’s true that sometimes the details of sexual experience (or of exploring gender identity) do create specific emotional reactions, and it’s nice to have a commitment to exploring that.

The bridge is yours.

-The EFF is pushing to get device jailbreaking exempted from copyright law.

-The room of one’s own problem is still a problem.

-If Showtime wants to dominate my mid-season TV calendar, they are making a pretty effective pitch

-Ahh, the nerd economy.

-Given the way he treats characters, getting all his favorite actors and subjecting them to terrible things in a haunted cabin seems like an inevitable destination for Joss Whedon.

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Maureen Ryan’s piece on the structural reasons women aren’t getting and keeping more television writing jobs has been getting a lot of attention, and deservedly so. It’s terrifying to think that studios are still sticking by the idea that it’s better to hire a man because he’ll support a family or the assumptions that women can’t write male characters, and it’s depressing to see yet another arena where being a team player and supporting a creator’s vision doesn’t get you credit, it just makes you invisible. And I think in the context of our discussion yesterday about prestige television’s preoccupation with masculinity, this part of the piece is particularly important:

Women are perceived as being more appropriate for the staffs of “soapier,” ensemble-driven shows, but that’s not where TV is headed right now. “The trend in the industry has been away from that kind of [soapy] TV, toward shows that are either more episodic or more big-event shows,” said Writer B. “And in those areas, the perception — and I’m not saying I agree with this — is that they are more the province of male writers.” (Here’s a bit of advice for aspiring women writers from that showrunner, whose last few potential female hires got better offers from other shows: “If you’re a woman who writes kick-ass action, the employment picture is a lot better.”)

Comedy’s comeback could be a factor as well; networks have been bulking up on half-hour programs ever since ‘Modern Family’ became a breakthrough hit. Though late-night shows typically have very few or zero women on staff (that’s true even now, despite last year’s controversy over the overall lack of women in late-night writers’ rooms), finding a prime-time comedy in which more than a third of the writing credits come from women isn’t all that easy. Though ‘Parks and Recreation’ has many women on staff (40 percent of its Season 3 writing credits went to women), that’s not necessarily typical — of the 17 credited writers for ‘Modern Family’s’ first two seasons, five are women.

These biases are just so strange. Do we think there won’t be women in the future, or that all gender issues will have been solved by science, so women won’t have anything to say about science fiction? Women are present at big events in the real world all the time, like September 11, and in the White House during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound earlier this year, and our ovaries don’t tend to prevent us from recognizing the momentousness of occasions or thinking big thoughts about them, so it stands to reason that we might be able to translates those thoughts to fiction.

But more than that, as commenter Katie pointed out in the prestige television thread, “I also think it’s telling that the crop of female driven shows on Showtime are regulated to some kind of weird, semi-fake ‘comedy’ bracket.” There seem to be semi-contradictory tropes that suggest that women can’t write comedy but our lives and stories are sort of inherently light, not worthy of the introspective, anti-heroic treatment that the Tony Sopranos and Walter Whites of the world get. There’s about as much logic to this assumption as there is to any of the other ideas that keep women out of writers’ rooms, but it’s still disturbing.