This post contains spoilers through the May 27 episode of Game of Thrones.

In the world of Game of Thrones, the greatest challenge for the characters is often knowing how to behave in any given situation, whether it’s a court under siege, the front line of a battle, wildling captivity, or a sophisticated, depraved foreign court. Because the society is so rigidly constrained by class, gender, and martial roles, often characters’ survival depends on how well they’re able to conform to the roles that people expect or need them to take up. Arya’s ability to survive in Tywin Lannister’s employ involved a balance of servility and amusingness, while her sister Sansa needs to please some members of the Lannister court by her utter submission and others with flashes of spitfire temper that indicate a greater capacity than that normally exhibited by and allowed to noble ladies. But on rare occasions, transcending the role that’s been assigned to you and the accepted wisdom can change your life or save it. And as Stannis’s fleet converges on King’s Landing, sailing smoothly into Tyrion’s trap under cover of darkness, find what breaking character can win them.

First, there’s Sandor Clegane, who’s taken something of a smaller role in the show than in the novels. But as King’s Landing braces for invasion and seige, he steps forward to tell the truth about anyone unlucky enough to cross his path. “There’s women in the ground. I put some there myself. So have you. You like fucking, and drinking, and singing. But killing, killing’s the thing you love,” he sourly informs Bronn, who’s having a drink and a girl as preparation. “You’re just like me. Only smaller.” Bronn may be able to dispute the question of which one of them would win in a fight, but he’s unable to deny the essential similarity. And when he sees what Sandor fears, watches the bigger man paralyzed as a man on fire wheels towards him on the battlefield, Bronn saves his life with a well-aimed shot, an acknowledgement of fellowship, and that he knows Sandor’s weaknesses too. The obscene green light of that fire lets Sandor finally see his own limits clearly. “I lost half my men. The Blackwater’s on fire,” he tells the king he’s protected with dogged loyalty. When Joffrey orders him back into battle, Sandor liberates himself in a fashion so startling it allows him to escape. “Fuck the Kingsguard,” he declares in terms more definitive and sincere than Jamie Lannister could ever muster. “Fuck the city. Fuck the king.”
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The bridge is yours.

-Oh, hey, maybe True Blood‘s new showrunner will make the show less insanely racist…after one more season of Alan Ball.

-What studios can learn from Battleship and The Avengers, which shockingly have one thing in common.

-I’ll have more on Bring Up the Bodies soon, but it’s true that it’s excellent.

Over at Forbes, Adam Thierer ponders whether we could see a return to a model where companies sponsored entire shows or blocks of television, rather than networks selling ads to a bunch of different companies piecemeal throughout an hour or half-hour—especially in an era when consumers are increasingly fast-forwarding ads or skipping them entirely. While audiences certainly don’t like ads, whether becuase they break up storytelling or because they’re insipid, there’s no question that they’d probably like the alternatives to advertising support a lot less, whether that results in higher cable fees, higher iTunes purchase prices, or higher Netflix and Hulu subscriptions. Sponsorships could be less intrusive and could provide coherent framing to an episode of television, and could generate a great deal of good will for a brand if it’s seen to be keeping a show alive.

To a certain extent, Subway’s already done this with Chuck and with product placement in Community. And that brand’s work with NBC’s quirkier shows with more loyal fan bases raises an interesting question: how would such sponsorships work in a way that’s both good for programming and good for the companies that are buying in? Product placement can, of course, end up being more of a limitation than a help. It’s lovely to have a company provide cars for your characters, of course, but it can become awfully irksome if you want to tell a story about a car crash, and the company threatens to pull the cars if they’re shown crashing, crashed, or even if they’re stated to have crashed. An overly rigid approach to corporate and creative synergy can stifle storytelling and end up meaning we see less of the product on-screen.

Subway’s involvement in Chuck and Community, by contrast, always demonstrated an ability to be self-deprecating and a little obvious. On Community, the brand was willing to be the bad guy in aspiring small business owner Shirley’s fight to open up a sandwich shop in the Greendale Community College Cafeteria. The show didn’t have to disparage the sandwiches themselves, which were always implied to be a reasonable if corporate competitor, to use Subway as a specter of disappointment to a character. Similarly with Chuck, Subway’s presence was winking, a bit of placement that felt more like a compact between the company and the fans than two giant corporations.

If sponsorships become a popular model, I’m sure brands will be lining up to form affiliations with the biggest shows like Two and a Half Men and Two Broke Girls. But that’s actually missing the point. If companies want synergy and real, long-term relationships with the fan bases of shows, they need to shop around and pick programming that fits their sensibilities, and where getting what they want out of the relationship doesn’t cause harm to the show in the process. Buying a sponsorship is all about buying goodwill, and that means surprising an audience with the level or nature of your support for a show. It’s the rare situation where selling soap and making art could be well-aligned fo the companies that try to get sponsorship right.

This post contains spoilers through the May 20 episode of Game of Thrones.

“The Prince of Winterfell” may be a lot of plot setup, but it’s also an episode that illustrates one of the things I love about the scope of Game of Thrones: it’s a big enough world that when coincidences happen and surprising combinations of people come together, they can feel even more miraculous than dragons or white walkers. But that space also means that people can forge different paths than the ones reserved for them by their station and gender.

Brienne of Tarth’s made those choices again and again throughout her life, whether she’s choosing knighthood over the life of a nobly bred lady or loyalty to Catelyn over a conventional oath of fealty to a leige lord. But in this episode, her choices are juxtaposed particularly sharply with those of her inverse, Jamie Lannister. Jamie is a man, and not just any man—”Do you remember Jamie at 17?” Tyrion asks in reflective wonder, considering his talented older brother—but a preternaturally gifted specimen of manhood. He was born to the knighthood Brienne has to fight every day to claim for her own, and instead of upholding the code she worships, he’s spattered it with gore. As they go on the run together, Jamie may enjoy taunting Brienne, asking her first “Have you known many men? I suppose not. Women? Horses?” and then “Has anyone ever told you you are as boring as you are ugly?” But he’s losing the very battle he thinks he’s goading Brienne into. “All my life, men like you have sneered at me,” she tells him. “And all my life, I’ve knocked men like you into the dust.” Jamie may never have the struggles with his gender and vocation that Brienne suffers every day, but she’s vastly more secure in the knighthood she chose than Jamie ever was in the white cloak that suffocated him.

Then, there’s Talisia, who was “raised to be a proper little lady.” She explains to Robb, in a speech that newcomers to the series should remember very, very carefully (along with another important bit of foreshadowing)* how she came to transcend her own state:

When I was 12, my mother and father went to a wedding. Weddings in Volantis last for days…we couldn’t bear to be inside…every child in Volantis was in the bay that day…Drummers were playing for coppers in the east bank. I was treading water, talking to a friend, when I realized I hadn’t seen my brother. I called his name. And then I started screaming his name. And then I saw him, floating face down, and my heart just stopped. I dragged him from the water. My friend helped me, I think, I don’t even remember. He was so little. When we pulled him on to the riverbank, I screamed at him and I shook him, and he was dead. Just dead. A man ran over. He had a fish tatoo on his face. In Volantis, the slaves have tattoos..This man worked on a fishing boat. And he pushed me out of the way. You have to understand, for a slave to push a highborn girl, that’s death, a terrible death…He started pressing on my brother’s chest again and again and again, until my brother spat up half of the Rhoyne, and cried out, and the man cradled his head and told him to be calm. I decided two things that day. I would not waste my years planning dances and masquerades…and when I came of age, I would never live in a slave city again.

Robb’s been attracted to her all along, but it’s this tale of personal alchemy that unmans the young king, leaving him unable to honor his obligations or resist a woman who performed the kind of transformation he needs to undergo in reverse. Making love to her is an act of transgression, a violation of his pledge to pay for the bridge crossing with his future. But if Talisia became what seemed impossible, perhaps Robb can find it himself to transcend his lack of training and take up his kingship, finding a way to become “one of the good ones.”
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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.

This is the week when the television networks announce their fall lineups and try to persuade advertisers that they should spend bunches of money to sell products during their new shows. It’s also the time when those of us who care about the white dudely domination of Hollywood get to see how many—or how few—women and people of color will be creating and headlining new shows. Here are the basic numbers on who’s creating and starring in what you’ll see on your television this fall.

39: Number of new shows ordered by NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC, and the CW.

12: Number of those 39 shows created by women.

2: Number of those 12 shows co-created by a man and a woman.

5*: Shows from creators of color, including Michael Cuesta on Elementary, Ajay Sahgal on Groupon comedy Friend Me, Mindy Kalin’s self-titled The Mindy Project, Alessandro Tanaka’s Animal Practice, and Toni Trucks’ Do No Harm.

3: Number of new shows with African-American leads, Andre Braugher in Last Resort, Meagan Good in Infamous, and Jessica Lucas in Cult.

2: Number of new comedies with people of color as sole leads or parts of core ensembles—Anthony Anderson in Guys with Kids and Mindy Kaling in her sitcom (also per the Deadline item linked above).

*Calculated to the best of my ability given scanty availability of pictures of writers.

Like many critics, I tend to want NBC to succeed if only because it gave me 30 Rock, Community, and the utterly sublime Parks and Recreation, and would like the network to be rewarded for sticking with those shows with improving ratings. But the last five or six months have neither given me faith that America will suddenly and against its basic stated desires recognize the fundamental greatness of watching Leslie Knope run for office, nor that NBC has a plan that will work to provide a subsidy for its weird, brilliant shows. And this analysis from Deadline—which, mind you, is analysis, not fact—kind of confirms my sadness:

While it is an office comedy, It’s Messy has a strong female lead. By last November, before the majority of the pilot scripts commissioned by NBC, including Kaling’s, were in, the network had already given early pilot orders to three pilots with female leads, the Sarah Silverman project, Save Me and Isabel. Save Me‘s order was cast-contingent and it looked touch-and-go for awhile but, after a long search, on January 19 Anne Heche signed on to star. Four days later, NBC made the bulk of its pilot orders, including a fourth female-centered comedy, the Roseanne Barr-starring Downwardly Mobile. It may have been Roseanne vs. Mindy for the fourth and last female-lead comedy slot on NBC’s pilot slate as around the time of the Downwardly Mobile pickup, the network passed on Kaling’s script, which had made it to the final round of consideration at the network.

If this really was a choice between Kaling and Barr, Barr was, to me, the wrong bet. There’s no question that Roseanne is brilliant. But it’s been a long time since it went off the air, and Barr’s most recent project, a cracked reality show about her macadamia nut farm did more to suggest that she was not the person to bring in to be the voice of a recession comedy than to confirm her old bona fides as a working class prophetess. Instead, she’s been running that venture, campaigning for the Green Party nomination and futzing around on Twitter, all worthy pursuits to be sure, but ones that read more as her coasting on her past success than gearing up for new ones.

Kaling, on the other hand, has been doing yeoman work holding up The Office, a comedy NBC should have cancelled years ago but that is worth tuning into occasionally almost solely for her presence on it. How nice would it have been for NBC to recognize that work, as well as her charming social media presence, her successful other enterprises like her blog and book, and to affirm the value there. Kaling may not have been able to speak for working-class women, as Barr did so effectively for so many years, but she could have been part of the explosion of South Asian women on television, one of what are still very few female show creators. It may have been that in between sending off 30 Rock and renewing Whitney, NBC felt like it had made its contribution to the female-comedy boom, and it was set. But picking up Kaling’s show would have moved that boom forward into its next iteration, beyond white women, and beyond a particular kind of hot-but-clumsy-or-awkward white woman. NBC bet on its past, instead, and ended up with neither Barr’s show on its schedule, nor Kaling’s. And Kaling’s, though it needs a name transplant, looks fantastic:

I admit I’m totally shocked by this statistic. But it turns out that 60 percent of the audience for Girls, Lena Dunham’s post-Sex and the City take on the lives of sheltered young post-graduate women in New York City, is male. MediaPost, the source of that statistic, suggests that some of it might be men sticking around after Game of Thrones, though if those men were uninterested, you’d think they’d burn off during the half hour airing of Veep that happens in between the end of Game of Thrones and the start of Girls.

I’d be curious to know why those dudes are watching—and Slate’s deconstruction of the show every Monday by a slate of male viewers has become one of my must-reads to start the week. Is it to get insight into the lives of young women? Is it to laugh at Hannah and her friends because their lives are such a horror show? I’m glad for the evidence that men are more than capable of turning out for a show about a female protagonist, an anti-heroine, even. I just hope they’re not turning in because they hate Hanna Hovarth more than they’re actually interested in her.

This post contains spoilers through the May 13 episode of Game of Thrones.

I enjoy watching Game of Thrones so much, and identify so deeply with some of the characters, that occasionally—horrific violence and lack of proper sanitation aside—I forget that they exist in a profoundly different era. Last night’s episode explored one of the psychological ways in which that’s true: what happens when people who have lived their lives governed by others’ wills find themselves confronted with the prospect of choice.

First, there’s Dany, who in recent weeks has become a less admirable character as she’s refused to assert her will or even attempted to discern it. It’s one thing to insist that her claim to the throne of Westeros is good in foot-stamping terms, another to actually devise a strategy of her own beyond the offers the members of the Thirteen are willing to make her. Her vacillation, and her rebuffs to the people who attempt to help her through a deliberative process, leave her vulnerable. Last week, she found her dragons stole and her khalasar slaughtered. This week, she finds that the deed’s been done by men of greater vision and will than she currently possesses, who saw in her a way to claim Qarth for their own. Will can’t merely be affirmed in this conflict, it must be asserted.

But is it possible for it to be complete? Tywin Lannister’s conduct this week suggests that he knows Arya to be false, but wants to keep her with him anyway. “If you’re going to pose as a commoner, you should do it properly,” he warns her, letting her know both that he sees through her facade and that there are limits to his tolerance, to this whim in the midst of his exercise of his will. “Have you met many stonemasons?” Arya asks, testing Tywin as he tests her facade. “Careful, girl,” he warns her. “I enjoy you, but careful.” Even a man of iron will has some remaining softness for a girl who reminds him of his daughter, but it remains an open question whether this whim will fortify Tywin’s will or be his doom. She still has one death left to dispense, after all.
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This post contains spoilers through the May 10 episode of Community.

I should start this off by saying how pleased I am by Community‘s renewal, even at thirteen episodes rather than a full season. It’s really nice to see this wonderful, experimental little show that’s been so marvelously dedicated to exploring the boundaries of television’s forms get a chance to go out at a logical time for the world in which it’s set, as its characters get the degrees they came to Greendale to get and head out into the world. Though now that we’ve achieved this and are one year closer to six seasons and a movie, I think it’s time to set a new impossible dream: a season of Community set in all the remaining timelines.

As for the episode itself, this was more clip show than anything else, but I think it got at an important point that the show doesn’t always address head-on: what if landing at Greendale hasn’t been great for all of these characters? Of course, their shrink is lying in Chang’s service when he tells the now-former study group that “There is a place called Greendale, and you all spent three years there, but it’s not a community college.” But as we journey through it, the show kind of suggests that their time there has been neither educational nor salutary. There are classes in advanced breathing and the ability to fry things. Parking spots are determined by chess matches with human pieces. Abed may be going through the early experimental period of his filmmaking career, and the Dean may be getting his jollies, but making movies with him isn’t exactly what everyone else came to school to do. “If you’d gone to school there, you’d be obsessed with it too,” Jeff explains. And oh, we are. But that’s not the same thing as it being what all of them needed or intended.

And now that we get one more season, I’ll be curious to see if and how Community sets up these people to go out into the world. Will Troy go to air conditioning repair school? Will Jeff actually get his law degree back? Will Shirley open her business? What about Annie? And what experiments are yet to come? As Garett put it, “I want to see what happens if we confiscate one of their pens.” So do I, Gareth. So do I.