This post discusses plot points from the October 9 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

“You’re unbelievable,” Jacob Hale tells Jax towards the end of this episode of Sons of Anarchy as he agreed to Jax’s proposal to blackmail a member of City Council to get him to vote through approval on Charming Heights in exchange for Jacob agreeing to rent one of his properties to Nero so Nero and the Sons can restart his companion business. “Oh, I’m just getting started, Jake,” Jax tells him. It’s a fitting epigraph for an episode that began the necessary process of separating Jax’s conception of himself from objective reality. There may be part of him left that’s still the little boy who drinks milk from the carton. But more and more, he’s a man who writes letters to his son about trying to avoid caving to his hate while taking delivery of a woman’s breast and finger in an ice chest delivered by his mother.

First, there’s Jax’s dealings with Jacob. It’s a smart move for the show to translate manipulating votes around the table in the SAMCRO clubhouse to Charming politics—I’m only surprised it’s taken the show longer to do so, and I hope it does more, something that Damon Pope’s model of leadership would suggest for the Sons’ future. “I know how important Charming Heights is to you, to this town,” Jax tells him smoothly even as he proposes an ugly campaign of blackmail. “We’re going to make your dream come true.” The promise to Jacob, and to the club, is much prettier than the reality. Bobby may dream of a future that’s “pink, wet, and tastes like sunshine,” with Tig singing the glories of “Pussy. Or Italian ice.” But it’s going to take ugly work to accomplish, and the home invasions by the Nomads sworn into the charter may sink the Sons’ credibility for good. It’s not much fun listening to Clay these days, but he’s right that “the hate swings that far out, it may not swing back.”

It’s also worth considering how Jax’s plan to blackmail City Councilmen will pay off for the club in the long run. This was a tricky sequence, and I know not everyone in the audience thought Sons of Anarchy pulled it off, in particular because of the casting of Walton Goggins to play a transgender woman. The debate about whether male actors should play trans women is an important one, and I think worth separating from the discussion of this particular episode, but to me, Goggins’ turn as Venus was bravura and funny. There’s no question that Jax’s plan, to knock out a key swing vote and stage pictures of him engaged in a raunchy session with Venus, is a form of sexual assault, and I thought the show did a decent job of making that clear, particularly as Jax moved smoothly into blackmailing the man’s stepson, offering him oral sex with Venus and then telling him “How’d you like these bad boys blowing up your Facebook page?” The plot is a nasty one, and if I have a quibble with it, the plan seems too sophisticated for the Sons. But I did think that the show managed to walk a delicate line between articulating the ugliness of what the Sons were doing and its portrayal of Venus herself, who came across as self-aware about what she was participating in, and determined to extract every penny she could from the Sons. Jax may have thought he was presenting himself as liberal-minded (or at least putting up a good front for the scheme) when he told the teenager he was talking into sex with Venus “Doesn’t mean you’re gay, man. We’ve all been there.” But I appreciated the kiss Venus planted on him on the way out the door—Jax may be willing to hire a transgender sex worker, but he’s not as comfortable with her as he pretends to be.
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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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This post discusses plot points for the October 2 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

After Opie’s death in last week’s wrenching episode of Sons of Anarchy, anything might have felt anti-climactic. But I thought this hour of television felt particularly opaque. It makes sense for Jax to be overwhelmed by his pain, but the miasma of that grief is obscuring a crucial question, whether he’s strong enough to wrench the sons into a new wagon track. And while Gemma had a lovely moment, stumbling down the hall after she learned the dreadful news, asking “This club. What the hell’s happening to us?” it’s irritating to watch her cause trouble for no particular reason than because she seems to take pleasure in causing other people to feel pain or to inflict pain on themselves.

There’s no question that Gemma is still working through the pain of separation from her husband, and from the violent abuse that prompted it. “You want to drink yourself stupid, you want to lay down with Spic bangers, you got it,” Clay tells her when she tells him to stop checking up on her. “I don’t know who you are anymore.” “Why don’t you bounce my face off the floor?” Gemma spits at him. “Maybe then you’ll recognize me.” But only some of the trouble she’s causing seems an attempt to exorcise those particular demons. The beating she lays on an out-of-town prostitute working for Nero, which landed his staff in the clink and got him ejected from his business, may be an echo of old jealousy, a memory of the skateboard she used to break Cherry’s nose for sleeping with Clay back in the first season. But the fight she instigates between Tara and Carla, telling Tara, “Dora the Whore in there. She almost got him killed today,” may be a way to give Tara a chance to blow off some steam. But it functions more as a distraction that lets Gemma to push conversations about Wendy and childcare and the general ugliness between her and Tara down the road.

I’ve loved Gemma as a character since I started watching the show, but her nastiness and viciousness here are hugely unpleasant. “Maybe they just realized I wasn’t a whore,” she snaps at Carla when she gets bailed out, as if being Queen Mother of a motorcycle club affords her much greater dignity than a madam. When she asks Nero whether the disaster for his business is her fault, she immediately runs from the responsibility, saying “I left my thick skin in Charming.” Carla’s bruised face when Nero, who has is contemplating splitting with Gemma anyway to seal a business deal with Jax, escorts her home is an awful accusation. But I’m not sure whether Gemma, or the show, is ready to face up to it.
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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.

This post contains spoilers through the third episode of the fifth season of Sons of Anarchy.*

I’m not sure I buy all the complicated mechanics that brought Opie to this particular death, but sure as Jimmy Darmody, who walked to his murder in the last episode of Boardwalk Empire last year knowing full well his life had ended in Europe, Opie’s been gone since his father’s killing, since his brokenness ruined his marriage to sweet porn star Lyla, maybe even since Tig Traeger shot Opie’s first wife Donna with a bullet that was meant for Opie, a piece of metal that’s been chasing him ever since. “I don’t know if I love anything,” Opie told Lyla last week, giving her the money to care for his children while he went back to prison with the Sons. “It just ain’t fun anymore,” he told Jax in the prison yard. “Chasing cash we don’t need and spending every dime trying to stay alive.” “American dream,” Jax replied, not quite agreeing with him.

Jax is a prince by blood, and Opie’s membership in SAMCRO has been sealed by spilling it, over and over again. Where Jimmy represented an underlooked historical phenomenon, the men who failed to successfully reintegrate into society after the First World War, Opie is terrible lesson about a particular kind of membership in a downwardly mobile white underclass. Jax’s pride may shame him about the prospect of living off his wife, but Opie never had a wife he could live off of. His association with criminality has meant that Opie has always been at risk of running up the kind of debts and obligations that he can’t pay off through honest labor and still provide a stable environment for his family. And perhaps most importantly, the Sons have always given him his most powerful sense of identity and social standing, even as the men who gave him that status were an inevitably fatal cancer on his family. Opie has always returned to the Sons, and why wouldn’t he? Even family that eats away at your soul is better than the prospect of becoming a hollow man.

And in the end, Opie’s love for Jax, and his inability to part from the remaining source of his identity, turns into a kind of suicidal impulse. When he finds a way to join the Sons in prison, “staying close,” as Gemma puts it, he does so with an act of violence. When Jax starts a scrap, loyal Opie follows him into it. And when Jax, cornered by Pope’s ultimatum, his seemingly limitless power over the imprisoned Sons, Opie does the inevitable: he fights, and in fighting goes to his death. “Keep it interesting, shithead,” the warden doing Pope’s bidding tells him. He means to shame him, to turn Opie into an animal fighting for his life in the dark. But in Kurt Sutter’s Hamlet, Opie is Horatio following through on his offer to his prince to quaff the poison. “Now cracks a noble heart,” indeed.
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This post contains spoilers through the September 18 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

Wayne Unser has always been one of my favorite characters, on any television show. His backstory with the Sons would make a tremendously rich part of the backstory if Kurt Sutter ever makes his First Nine show, both personally and politically. And after four seasons of reaction and declining power, there’s something tremendous about watching him rise from a beating with new purpose. He starts from a low point. “You really come over to feed the bird?” Clay asks him as they confront Gemma’s ruined home, Wayne not entirely able to stand on his own power. “She’s on her own trip these days,” Wayne admits, acknowledging what his gestures of loyalty have often meant to a woman who has often been attracted to more violent, unstable men.

But he peels himself literally and emotionally off of Gemma’s floor and takes himself back to his old office for a conversation with Eli Roosevelt that brings both their races and their visions of the governance of Charming. Wayne kept quiet when Clay insisted that the attack must have been further black retaliation for Tig’s killing of Pope’s daughter, but it’s because he’s saving a theory for himself. “This wasn’t black retaliation,” he tells Roosevelt. “It felt more white to me.” Roosevelt is skeptical, asking him: “Really? And what does white feel like?” “Sloppy. Clumsy,” Wayne explains. “The beatdown was obligatory, not angry.” Much like Homeland and Carrie’s suspicions of Brody, this is a case where we know Wayne is right, given that we see white men dumping Clay’s safe, a white man reading the paperwork recovered from it. But it’ll be fascinating to see him prove it, and along the way, forge an identity that doesn’t involve the Sons, or Gemma. “I learned how to make it work with the Sons,” he tells Roosevelt, who has been resisting precisely that in a repudiation of Unser’s term. “And yeah, I got a little more comfortable with them than I should have. But I never did dirty work. Still don’t. I’m going to be poking around these home invasions. I find anything, I’ll let you know. I’d appreciate the same.”

That’s an idea of a partnership, rather than a real one. And it’s interesting to see that wisp of a relationship in the air, especially as Jax is finding a new mentor. Jax may be at the head of the table, but his vision for what he’ll do once he’s there remains considerably underdeveloped. Now that Clay is in exile and John Teller’s vision is in doubt, Jax needs someone new. And in Nero, he finds an ally who isn’t enmeshed with the club or its business deals, someone who’s developed an effective, independent business model, a man who seems at peace with himself and his family. He doesn’t need to scramble for more money from the Sons, telling Jax that he’s letting them hide there because “Let’s just consider this networking, okay? Maybe at some point, you get to help me.” He explains to Jax that his business deal with the women he runs doesn’t involve a huge profit margin because the long-term stability of the business is more important than the short-term gain. “I take 25 percent in house, 30 for house calls,” he says. “It don’t pay to be greedy. You got to treat your girls good. They stay happy. They got regulars. The money stays steady.” And unlike Jax, whose sons live at home, with their mother, Nero makes time for his son, who is severely disabled and lives in a facility. “My first boy was born with his insides upside down. His mother was a junkie. I wasn’t paying attention, either,” Jax admits. And despite Nero’s laid-back attitude, his mild, “Sorry. I don’t get out much,” to Jax, he’s more than capable of handling the car chase. The Sons’ model may be polluted. But Nero represents a vision of criminality governed by respect, even kindness. It doesn’t surprise me to see Gemma come back to him either. One of her husbands is dead, the other nearly dead to her. Nero, who had fun with her, gave her son shelter, found him an officiant for his wedding, represents a third attempt at a possible family.
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It’s a bad sign when a show has to contort itself to make its premise work. Such is the case with The Mob Doctor, the drama that premiered on Fox last night about a young Chicago resident who finds herself doing medical work for the mafia to save her brother, who’s run afoul of them. Given a chance to leave Chicago and her debt at the end of the pilot, Dr. Grace Devlin (Jordana Spiro) insisted, against all the evidence, that she couldn’t leave town. But while I may have been frustrated by the contrivances that will keep the show going, it was hugely refreshing to see The Mob Doctor‘s utter lack of ambiguity on an issue where more coherent television shows so often demonstrate moral cowardice and contortions of logic: abortion.

As Grace struggled to decide whether to kill a patient on the order of the mafia don to whom she was indebted, the B plot of the pilot concerned Grace’s boyfriend’s patient, a 14-year-old girl Grace has known since she was a small child. Admitted after collapsing, Suzy turned out to be pregnant, despite the fact that her hymen was intact. While the way she came to be that way was a typical medical procedural gambit, both Grace and Suzy were adamant about the right decision going forward. “My dad is going to kill Johnny. And I have a swimming scholarship to Saint Catherine’s. If I’m knocked up, I lose it,” Suzy told Grace. And Grace, in discussing what to do with her boyfriend, who was reluctant to perform an abortion on Suzy in violation of the state’s parental consent laws, which would have required Suzy’s father to sign off on the procedure, was clear about the cruelty the law was enforcing. “That scholarship is her one shot at making something of her life,” Grace said. “It gives her options and you’re standing in her way.”

Obviously I don’t think it’s good or realistic policy to ask doctors to violate parental consent laws. But there was something breathtaking in The Mob Doctor‘s presentation of the situation. Suzy is a smart young woman. She took precautions and ended up pregnant anyway. The show treats her as if she’s intelligent enough to know what’s best for her. And it framed her getting an abortion as important not simply as a one-time choice, but as a portal to other kinds of self-determination, to other choices and chances to make a better life for herself. The episode didn’t dwell on whether it would be viable for Suzy to carry the pregnancy to term because it self-evidently didn’t make sense for her health, her family situation, or her education. And the dilemma wasn’t resolved with a Convenient Television Miscarriage, the tool of showrunners who lack the courage to actually follow through on their intentions. It just argued that parental consent laws or the unavailability of doctors willing and able to perform abortions can be ruinous for young women, and that young women who find themselves in need of abortions are neither sluts nor idiots.

We live in a pop culture universe where if a married woman gets an abortion, as on Grey’s Anatomy, she must do so in a storyline that emphasizes the emotional turmoil of the decision; where teen motherhood can be a path to tabloid riches via MTV or gauzy, twee romanticizations of what it means to interrupt your adolescence with a pregnancy; where there’s got to be something in the water or a plague of irregular menses to explain why so many pregnancies spontaneously end so early in term; where seeking affordable birth control can get a young professional woman labeled a whore by a powerful media figure. It’s kind of remarkable that the two people who have given us relatively straightforward abortions in their television shows in recent years are Josh Berman, the gay man who created The Mob Doctor, and tough guy Kurt Sutter in his biker show Sons of Anarchy. In that context, if not any other, it would be nice if other people making television shows—this especially means you, Mindy Kaling—took The Mob Doctor as a model and rediscovered a little bit of their courage, and the reality of women’s lives.

This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the fifth season of Sons of Anarchy.

“What if I don’t want to be in charge?” Laroy Wayne’s deputy asks Damon Pope’s number two after seeing Laroy’s body in a railyard pit. “Rise to it, brother. With great power comes great responsibility,” the man tells him, only to calmly shoot him later and promote another man, citing the dead lieutenant’s reluctance to take up the mantle of leadership. It’s a fascinating little play in the mist of everything else going on as Sons of Anarchy begins its fifth season, a warning about commitment for Jax Teller, the prince become the king, and who, having faded into an image of his father in the final frame of the last season, has taken up not just his patch, but his pen. “Finding things that make you happy shouldn’t be so hard,” he writes to his sons. “You have to find the things you love. Run to them.” But for Jax, as it always has been, the question is what he loves best. Is it his club? His wife? His mother? His father as he remembers him? Or, through all the hate, the deeply broken man who raised him? Damon’s daughter is freshly dead at Tig’s hands. John Teller is long gone. But as both men struggle to balance their rage and their leadership obligations, it seems this season of Sons of Anarchy may be a meditation on what it means to be a leader and a man, at home, and in the world.

Just as that weathered photograph would have suggested, the woman at Jax’s side, and the woman the show has suggested she would turn into are at odds as the season begins. “I’m training my new replacement. Starting my new duties,” Tara tells Jax sourly at the beginning of the episode. She may have smashed her hand and turned down her transfer, like Prospero “deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book,” and chosen Charming, but Tara doesn’t seem reconciled to her choice. Jax is deferring to her on questions like day care for their sons, attempting to adapt Charming and the norms of SAMCRO to some of her needs.
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I’m excited for Sons of Anarchy to return to FX tonight and for the debut of Lost Resort on ABC (it’s available online, but airs for the first time on September 27). They’re both ambitious shows with big ideas, Last Resort about nuclear weapons and the geopolitical stability, Sons of Anarchy about masculinity and fraternity. And they’re both shows with diverse casts, from creators with interesting, if contrasting, thoughts on the best way to get television to get more like the people watching it.

Both Ryan and Andre Braugher, who stars in Last Resort, were asked about Braugher’s status as the rare African-American lead on television at the Television Critics Association press tour earlier this summer. Ryan pointed out that this wasn’t the first time he’s had a black male lead in one of his shows—Dennis Haysbert came first in The Unit. But Ryan said he thought that a color-blind approach was the best way to get television functioning like a true meritocracy for people of color.

“I just never looked at it that way. I’ve wanted the best actor for the role. I try to be as color-blind as possible in most roles that I cast,” he said. “You know, when we put together a list for this role, there were various ethnicities involved, the same for Sam, you know, literally every role. You know, networks want people to watch their shows, and a lot goes into who the audience is. I just don’t concern myself with that. I concern myself with how good can the show be? And you’ve heard Andre speak here today. What writer wouldn’t want him saying their words? So things are changing. Thing are getting better, I think. I feel like I’m doing my part…And I actually do believe that Hollywood is the kind of place where merit can and is rewarded, and so I assume it will be nice when these questions don’t get asked anymore, when Andre can just be an actor playing Marcus Chaplin and portray him and get praise for his performance, but unfortunately, we are not to that point yet. But it feels like we are better off than we were 15, 20 years ago, and hopefully, 20 years from now, we won’t have to worry about it.”

When I spoke to Sutter a few days after the Last Resort panel, we chatted about the arc of Sons of Anarchy in terms of its approach to race, particularly given last season’s plot in which Juice, a younger member of SAMCRO, is blackmailed over his father’s race and lead to believe the fact that he is part African-American could lead to him being expelled from the motorcycle club.

“The interesting thing about MCs, or maybe interesting is the wrong word, but the fascinating thing about the racial component I always felt was the idea that we have a very grey areas. They’re not really defined,” he told me. “It was important for me to separate [the club the show focuses on] from white supremacists in the first couple of seasons, and I did want to acknowledge there is this antiquated bylaw in most of the larger clubs. How did that play out? In some clubs, it’s very rigid. What happened to Juice, he definitely would have been drummed out. Other clubs, not so much.”

In the course of talking about Juice’s plot arc the last season, Sutter pivoted to talking about race more generally, and offered something of a counterpoint to Ryan, with whom he worked on The Shield.

“I just like the reality of bringing in people of color in terms of the show,” he said. “I was just reading Shawn Ryan’s TCA [session] this morning about casting Andre Braugher as a lead of that show. And I think it’s important, and I think there’s a certain responsibility that we have to do that. I try to, even though I write a show about a bunch of white guys riding motorcycles, I probably have as many or more people of color employed on my show than most shows.”

The reality of it is that Hollywood probably needs both of these approaches. Shows and movies that aren’t explicitly about race won’t get more diverse unless the people writing casting notices truly mean it when they say they want people of all races and ethnicities to read for roles, and make that desire clear all the way down their chain of command. And it would help if more white creators were genuinely interested in race, and felt comfortable and confident creating characters of color while remaining aware of the dangers of racial ventriloquism. We need a lot of kinds of stories, and a lot of kinds of characters, and it’s going to take people with a lot of different visions to make them.

It seemed inevitable that FX would renew Charlie Sheen’s Anger Management for another 90 episodes after its initial run this summer, which no matter how much I hated it, found an audience (though not as big an audience as the initial announcement of it seemed to suggest was necessary for a renewal). Now that it’s happened, I’m resigned and more than a little sad. But if FX is going to continue to make money off of Sheen, here are five interesting—and even a few redemptive—things it could invest that cash in.

1. A female anti-hero drama, preferably starring C.C.H. Pounder: Glenn Close’s legal drama Damages didn’t quite work out on FX, which has since retrenched its brand as a dude-heavy network, though its Cold War drama The Americans, starring Kerri Russell, should help a little on that score. If FX is going to go lowest-common denominator on content with Anger Management and give Sheen a continuing platform and advertising dollars to rehabilitate his public image, they should reinvest the profits in helping the anti-hero genre grow and giving a woman a similar platform and career boost. C.C.H. Pounder did amazing work for the network on The Shield. FX should consider bringing her back.

2. A show about a man trying to grapple with his abuse of women: One of the grosser things about Anger Management is the way it’s reduced—and so much of the show is a meta-reappropriation of Sheen’s real-life personality—Sheen’s mistreatment of women to cheating and callousness, smoothing over his record of physical violence towards them. In the run-up to Anger Management, FX suggested the show could be about a man grappling with his treatment of women. If the network made that show, made it about a man with a history of abusing, and genuinely confronted repentance, violence, and control, it would be a landmark show.

3. A Louie-style low budget show from a woman or a person of color: In the wake of Girls’ debut on HBO this spring, there was an enormous discussion about the absence of women and people of color as television creators. That conversation, as is often the case with these things, has died down somewhat, but it shouldn’t go away. “John Landgraf wanted to let you know that the door is open for you to come to FX anytime and do the same show Louie does in your own version,” FX’s press guru John Solberg told Chris Rock at the Television Critics Association Press tour this summer. “So you are welcome to come.” The network should get serious about that invitation, but not just to Rock.

4. A genre show: With Game of Thrones, HBO’s found an awesome story engine to put dragons and zombies on-screen—and also to stage big, long discussions about gender and violence. FX has looked at adapting the comic Powers, about two cops who investigate crimes involving superheros, for television, and if that doesn’t work, it should look forward with an eye towards the fact that genre shows aren’t just about the special effects—they’re about issues, too.

5. A story about a male-dominated culture from the perspectives of women: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with FX’s core brand being shows about masculinity, a theme that’s produced a lot of interesting television. But the secret of Sons of Anarchy is that the show is at its best when it’s exploring biker life through the perspective of its old ladies, Gemma Teller, Tara Knowles, and Lyla Winston. That’s a formula FX could use to keep its identity while moving female characters to the center of the frame more frequently. And done right, it could mean the network gets shows about how different masculinities affect women.