The Hollywood Reporter has a long interview with Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer for Netflix, and Cindy Holland, who is the company’s vice president for original programming. And one of the things that it makes clear is that, in addition to the company’s willingness to spend a lot of money—as Sarandos puts it, “I felt like what [a network like] Starz was doing earlier on [during the Party Down era] was just kind of putting their toe in the water and doing a lot of “see what sticks” and not spending too much money. For us, I wanted to know that if it didn’t work, it was because it was a bad idea.”—the real killer app for Netflix, as it’s pitching to creators and to audiences, is what you can do with narrative storytelling when viewers are watching a show like a novel, at a pace that they want, in a break with traditional week-by-week episode programming.

Holland argued that releasing all of the episodes of a show at once frees Netflix’s programming both from the traditional structure of a television episode that’s designed to get audiences to return the next week—and from some of the way the conversation around television functions, something that writers have mourned, but that it’s unclear yet if fans miss. “Part of the conversation early on is thinking about it as a 13-hour movie,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “We don’t need recaps. We don’t need cliff-hangers at the end. You can write differently knowing that in all likelihood the next episode is going to be viewed right away.” When I spoke to Kevin Spacey about why he and David Fincher decided that Netflix was the right home for House of Cards, he cited that structural freedom—particularly from the constraints of shooting a more conventional pilot—as one of the reasons they chose Netflix as a partner.

Sarandos gave a specific example in genre fiction, particularly the show that Netflix is developing with the Wachowskis. “Sense8,” he said, “is a genre that we were looking for, adult contemporary sci-fi, and done in a way that’s very difficult to do for television, both because of budget constraints and because sci-fi storytelling tends to be very complex. Because of our ‘watch them all at once’ mentality, we were able to allow them to create a dense and complicated world.” I imagine that’s a lesson Netflix has learned from the example of Game of Thrones, which relies on an immensely complex web of characters, plot lines, and concepts that aren’t always revisited from week to week, leaving viewers reliant on their friends or online concordances to keep everything straight. Binge-watching lets viewers be reminded of characters and genre concepts regularly, rather than trying to hold onto them over an entire week until the next installment.

I’m happy to hear Sarandos talking about the creatively liberating aspects of his business model, as well as to say things like: “I want it to be the exact number of episodes you need to tell the story perfectly. It’s very difficult to sustain a show beyond three years. Characters start to fall apart, and your writers turn over. Some of the other conventions that I’m happy to dismiss: How long does the episode have to be? And how many episodes does the season have to be?” But I do think the company has to be wary of some of the creative downsides of binge-watching for its writers as well.

One of the things that makes television unique, and that poses a useful challenge to writers is precisely that the medium, as conventionally aired, requires that the staff of a show create content that can hold up under a week’s consideration, and that convinces viewers to come back. Shows that are designed for binge-watching may fall under the latter constraint, because unless you’re a television critic or someone with a very inactive social life, there are a limited number of people who can watch thirteen episodes of a drama in one sitting.
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Abercrombie and Fitch’s policy of not stocking women’s pants larger than a size ten, or women’s sizes XL and XXL—though it stocks those sizes for men, because while men can be big because they’re muscular and athletic, there’s no way women could possibly be larger than a size ten without being hideously heavy or freakishly tall, apparently—is a long-standing one. But it’s been back in the news of late, and I kind of love this Ellen DeGeneres monologue about the company’s choice, which is of course Abercrombie and Fitch’s to make:

I was particularly struck by this line, when DeGeneres asks “What are we aspiring to? ‘Honey, do these jeans make my butt look invisible?’” It’s a crack that gets at the two options for women in mass-market fashion. If you’re heavier than a size ten, companies like Abercrombie and Fitch, and plenty of actual individuals would like you to disappear so they’re spared the sight of you wearing their clothes in a way inconsistent with their brand, or so they’re spared the sight of you at all. And if you do fit in the acceptable range of sizes, it means you’re within striking distance of shrinking into a different kind of invisibility.

You’d think a mass-market clothing retailer would be proud of its ability to make any consumers look attractive, rather than being very clear that it has no idea what to do with consumers who wear anything larger than a size ten. And you might also think that a retailer that wants to be an aspirational brand might consider whether it’s positioning itself out of the reach of its potential customers it wants to capture.

Politico reported yesterday that Alpha House, the Garry Trudeau-created pilot about a group of Congressmen living together in a townhouse in Washington, DC that’s based on a 2007 New York Times story about real-life legislators who are roommates when they’re in the District of Columbia, has become one of the first shows to be picked up by Amazon as part of its attempts to expand into original content development. It doesn’t shock me that Amazon pulled the trigger on Alpha House, which, if nothing else, let the company lock down John Goodman for a show, a move that follows the playbook laid out by Netflix in its splashy signing of Kevin Spacey to star in its remake of the British series House of Cards. But Alpha House was far from the strongest of Amazon’s adult-oriented pilots (it’s also testing shows aimed at children). And even if Amazon isn’t doing a traditional development process like its competitors in broadcast television, it would be wise for the service to consider taking a page from the networks’ playbooks and consider revamping the show a little bit before its full launch. Here are five suggestions for how to make Alpha House shine.

1. Make The House Bipartisan: One of the dullest decisions in the original pilot of Alpha House was to make all members of the house Republicans, and to make them all risible. Goodman’s Gil Joh Biggs, a do-nothing incumbent from a rural district who teaches Louis Laffer (Matt Malloy), an obviously closeted social conservative, to shoot in the basement, and signs them both up for a trip to Afghanistan when they attract Tea Party challengers and need to look tough. Clark Johnson plays Robert Bettencourt, an African-American Congressman who’s mostly in in for the donations from defense contractors—in one scene, he gives Gil John his notes from a filibuster speech so they can both go on the record saying nice things about the same giant corporations. And Mark Consuelos plays andy Guzman, a recently-divorced freshman who’s schtupping the founder of a Super PAC. All in all, it’s nothing we’ve seen before. But if Alpha House can sharpen the characterizations and give us a fresh take on what bipartisanship actually looks like, it could be refreshing and funny.
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The New York Post treats a reveal it got yesterday as a guess-that-name gossip item, but the word that a Game of Thrones actress didn’t want to do any more nude scenes raises more interesting and important questions than the simple question of who it was:

One of the stars of “Game of Thrones” is refusing to appear in any more nude scenes, according to a cast member.

“One of the girls in the show who got her [dress] off the most in the first couple of seasons now doesn’t at all,” Oona Chaplin, who plays the noblewoman Talisa Maegyr on the show, told reporters in London over the weekend.

“She said, ‘I want to be known for my acting not for my breasts.’ ”

Chaplin refused to say which actress it is.

I absolutely support any actress who doesn’t want to do nudity, particularly given the disparate pressure on women to take their clothes off on-screen, and how often that nudity is used as fan service rather than for narrative emphasis or to grow characters. But I do think it’s depressing that we’re at a point where actresses feel that they’re faced with a choice: getting nude, even when said nudity might provide an important character moment or punctuate a scene in a moving way, or be taken seriously. Game of Thrones, in its first several seasons, particularly through its use of sexposition—sex scenes that appeared in the show to make more visually, er, stimulating, scenes where characters explained backstory or politics—helped make that feel more like a choice.

But it’s done a great deal in this third season to make nudity equal-opportunity across genders, and more importantly, to demonstrate that you can be naked and do serious acting. Seeing Brienne of Tarth lunge, nude, out of a bath to confront her antagonist and former prisoner, Jaime Lannister, wasn’t about presenting her body for our consumption as a sex object, but to demonstrate that she wasn’t afraid to be naked in front of a man who had sexually shamed her for loving a king who would never want her. Seeing Robb Stark and his wife Talisa naked together after a bout of marital sex was a display of their intimacy and comfort with each other, as well as the fact that they were still in the early stage of their relationship, when their nudity was still novel to each other. And seeing Jon Snow stripped of his furs was also to see him stripped of the vows he swore as a member of the celibate Night’s Watch: wildling Ygritte’s seduction of him rendered him emotionally and physically naked.

Getting naked is a serious business, something that happens consensually between adults, non-consensually a way of victimizing someone and making them feel powerless, non-sexually as a way of demonstrating comfort, or necessarily to provide care to someone who is vulnerable. Nudity can be funny without making the person who is nude risible, and sensual without making the person who is naked an object. That we still have trouble with those ideas suggests we have a lot to learn as viewers, and that our popular culture has to be more precise in the way it teaches us to absorb the nudity it puts on screen.

The death—or diffusion—of the television water cooler has been much ballyhooed. But NPR’s Elizabeth Blair did a great segment on how word of mouth still helps build television, where the conversations about episodes have migrated, be it Twitter or the AMC’s post-episode chat show The Talking Dead, and was kind enough to have me on to talk about Scandal and how the labor law episode of The Good Wife got people who I hadn’t seen discussing the show dissecting it on social media for the first time:

She mentions something else that’s worth remembering, which is that some shows like NCIS, which get huge ratings, don’t really show up on social media at all. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a word of mouth discussion of the show, it’s just taking place in arenas where it isn’t necessarily visible and quantifiable. It’s fascinating how we assumed the existence of the water cooler for so long without being able to see it on a more than experiential level, and as soon as something more tangible came along, it became easy to reduce the physical water cooler conversation to the ephemeral thing it always was. But the simultaneous success of a show like Scandal, which made itself essential viewing in the time slot in part by making the ability to participate in the real-time social media conversation about it, and the longevity of something like NCIS provides a useful rule of thumb for talking about the television business right now. The old ways are far from dead, and the shiny new ones are far from triumphant, so it’s not a matter of choosing between them—instead, we have to keep an eye on both.

“This isn’t happening for a reason.” -The Boy, Game of Thrones

“They were real.” -Huck, Scandal

“You don’t want to be the last one caught holding a dog collar.” -Dan, Zero Dark Thirty

When Fox announced that it was bringing back 24, its serialized drama about counterterrorist federal agent Jack Bauer that finished its initial run in 2010, as a limited-episode special event in 2014, much of the commentary about the news focused on questions of structure, rather than content. Time Magazine television critic James Poniewozik argued that 24′s resurrection was part of an exciting move by Fox to make more limited series and more special events, a strategy that includes a shorter run for its serial killer hit The Following, a move that both was meant to accomodate star Kevin Bacon’s schedule and to ape the success of dark cable dramas with shorter runs, and an order of limited-run series Wayward Pines. Others saw it as part of Fox’s decision to walk away from a focus on female-focused comedies and return to an old, reliable—and male-centered—hit from its past. But I’m curious about another question. How is Jack Bauer, whose use of torture, as reported by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, prompted U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan to meet with the producers of 24 to talk to them about how the show was affecting American soldiers, going to play in a world where pop culture has become more thoughtful and searing about the impact of these tactics on both both the tortured and torturers themselves?

One of the most painful depictions of torture presently airing appears on HBO’s medieval fantasy Game of Thrones, where the destruction of Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), formerly a spoiled ward of the Stark family, and now the prisoner of a man who appears to be systematically remolding him according to a monstrous blueprint. It’s a storyline that’s been so grotesque and emotionally agonizing that it’s turned off some critics like The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr, who have found themselves exhausted by what they see as an exploitative element to the proceedings, which are presented only in flashbacks in the novels on which the show is based.

But the relentless return to Theon’s cell, to his crucifixion, flaying, hooding, starvation, sexual manipulation, and last week, emasculation, seems precisely like the point, even if it’s so unpleasant to watch that I’ve taken to peeking at those scenes through my fingers on the first go-round and leaving the room for the second. Theon can’t escape his torture, and neither can we. His lead torturer tells him that “this isn’t happening for a reason,” and in point of fact in the narrative, it’s mostly not. The only new information Theon reveals, that he has not actually murdered the heirs to Winterfell, a Northern stronghold, doesn’t defuse a ticking time bomb scenario, but gets filed away for reference. “You’ve already told me everything, remember? Your daddy was mean to you. The Starks didn’t appreciate you. One good bit, though. The Stark boys. They’re still alive. Wouldn’t that be a hunt to remember?” the mysterious man reflects menacingly. When Theon asks “Where am I? Who are you? What do you want?” one of that man’s henchmen replies, “I want to do this.” Torture is arbitrary and endless, a manifestation of insanity, whether that madness is innate or simply the logical place men arrive at during an endless war.
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I try not to get overly invested in any of the many, many shows the broadcast networks are frantically trying to pitch to advertisers, television critics, and ultimately to audience during upfronts week every year, because so many of them will turn out to be dreck, to be abused by the networks that currently claim to love them by means of scheduling shenanigans, or to simply fail to connect with mass audiences. But every year, hope flares up again about one or two of the trailers I’m seeing, and this year, I’m excited about Super Fun Night, Wilson’s comedy for ABC, which looks like it could be one of the more entertaining and honest portrayals of nerdy girls out there, because it seems like it will use their awkwardness not to make fun of them, but to reveal some of the weirdness of social convention:

If the characters act weird while trying to get into a club, it’s partially because standing in a line for hours to go to a place where there is music and alcohol, and where a strange set of rules governs who gets in and who doesn’t, is actually a strange, not incredibly fun experience. If Rebel Wilson underwear with light-up hearts on it to impress a guy she’s supposed to meet, maybe it’s because the rules governing what counts as sexy female attire are actually sort of strange. And maybe if you spend some weekend nights in with your friends or roommates, it’s because nights in are fun not only for freakish losers, but for actual humans.

Female-created comedies in recent years have tended to go in one of two directions, aiming squarely for raunch like Whitney or 2 Broke Girls, or making their characters odd in some way. The Mindy Project‘s Mindy Lahiri is hilariously self-absorbed about everything except her hypercompetence as an OB/GYN, while New Girl‘s Jessica Day is squeamish about sex and whimsical in ways that can be socially inappropriate. I’m sort of curious to see what happens when women from the second character try to become the sort of people who can capably participate in the first. I just hope that Super Fun Night gives its female characters compelling reasons to stay in, as well as to start going out.

When Fox announced that it would be airing The Mindy Project, a sitcom by The Office star and writer Mindy Kaling, based in part on Kaling’s own mother’s work as an OB/GYN, I had high hopes. Like many freshman comedies, particularly its timeslot partner New Girl, The Mindy Project had a first season that involved throwing a lot of elements at the wall to see what stuck and what didn’t. Last night’s finale of The Mindy Project, though, contained a near-perfect sequence that united the series’ two core elements, the practice of medicine, and the pursuit of romantic comedy perfect, and provided a terrific template for how the show can follow New Girl‘s lead and level up dramatically in its second season.

Pulled out of a party to celebrate Mindy and Casey’s moving to Haiti for a year that had become an utter disaster after Danny’s ex-wife had praised his androgyny in a photograph, Mindy had tried to get Casey to break up with her by demanding that he propose, and Casey, unaware that he was playing relationship poker, called her bet and asked her to marry him on the advice of “the Notorious G.O.D.” and she freaked out, Mindy, Danny, and Jeremy ran off to deliver triplets. Their display of extreme competence, set, in a flashback to the premiere, to M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls,” not only gave Mindy a professional win and the ensemble a nice character moment, with Jeremy bragging that the triplet that he was responsible for “had the highest Apgar score.” But the willingness of Mindy’s patients to embrace the chaos of triplets also gave her a critical insight in what she needs to have a grand romantic comedy moment, and it isn’t a checklist of compatibility, or a meet cute in an elevator: it was courage. She rushed to Casey’s apartment, delivered a demented speech on the gap between her aspirations to be in a serious relationship and her actual ability to handle her dream scenario, revealed her chopped-off hair, and reunited with her pastor boyfriend.

This is The Mindy Project‘s sweet spot, the interaction between Mindy’s role as an expert in the mechanics of what it takes to have safe sex or deliver a health baby, or what makes an individual moment cinema-worthy, and her total lack of understanding about how two people get to a point where they want to have a baby in the first place. The finest episodes of the show’s first season were the ones where Mindy’s work helped her realize important things about her approach to dating and relationships—and ultimately made a sly argument that even if Mindy has to run out of dates and parties to deliver children, her commitment to her career is actually one of the things that’s helping her make incremental progress towards a healthier personal life.
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It’s taken me a couple of days to sort through my feelings about Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and not just because the cinematography during the many scenes in it set in automobiles made me carsick. It’s an enormously overstuffed movie, with party sequences that turn on my latent claustrophobia, a cacophonous soundtrack, and so many baubles it’s easy to feel like you’re watching a jewelry store—and there’s a great deal of Tiffany product placement in the movie, particularly of Daisy’s “string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars” and a headpiece she wears to a party—rathe than a movie. But one thing that Luhrmann’s adaptation gets right, and that brings out one of my favorite performances by Leonardo DiCaprio in a long time, is the way Gatsby marries conspicuous consumption, subtle class-based knowledge, and social awkwardness.

One of the best scenes in the movie stems from a situation where Gatsby’s (DiCaprio) set up a situation that’s guaranteed to be awkward: he’s asked Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) to ask his old flame Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), now married to a wealthy boor named Tom (Joel Edgerton) to tea so he can just drop by and reconnect with her. It’s an attempt to be casual in a situation that requires deliberation and a direct approach, and it puts Nick, who is Daisy’s cousin, in an awful social position. As Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki) puts it in Fitzgerald’s novel, “I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night, but she never did. Then he began asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. it was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course I immediately suggested a luncheon in New York—and I thought he’d go mad.”

In the movie, Luhrmann’s delight in conspicuous consumption illustrates just how badly Gatsby is going about orchestrating this meeting. He has Nick’s small house landscaped overnight, then descends on it with a team of umbrella-toting butlers to jam it full of orchids and a multi-layer cake, as if he’s catering a society wedding rather than being invited to his friend’s home. The makeover is simultaneously an insult to Nick and the modest home he’s able to rent and a total sabotage of Gatsby’s attempt at casualness. He’s desperate to seem spontaneous, but he can’t relinquish control of the moment to achieve it, insistent that the moment be perfect, but completely out of things to say. Watching DiCaprio wander in and out of Nick’s house, into the rain and out of the rain, and then totally forget that he’s soaking wet and in a small living room that looks like a greenhouse is a scene as precisely bizarre as the moment demands. And it gets at one of the central reveals of the scene: how little Gatsby is actually thinking about Daisy, or what she might be feeling. The tableau he’s set up is all about him, and he’s shocked when Nick points out part of the reason he’s going wrong. “You’re just embarrased, that’s all,” Nick tells him. “Daisy’s embarrssed too.” “She’s embarrassed?” Gatsby wants to know. He’s assumed both that Daisy is so poised that she couldn’t possibly be rattled, and that his return to her life will be a source of uncomplicated joy. It never seems to have occurred to Gatsby that Daisy is not, in fact, a princess in a tower, and that there might be a reason she hasn’t come looking for him.
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I’ve been excited for FX’s The Bridge, an adaptation of a joint Danish-Swedish television production about detectives from each country investigating the death of a murder victim found on a bridge that marks the border between their two nations. FX made a smart move in transferring the countries in question to Mexico and the United States, and in casting Demian Bichir, nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as an undocumented immigrant in A Better Life, to play the Mexican detective and Diane Kruger to play his American counterpart who, in keeping with the original interpretation of the character, is somewhere on the Autism spectrum:

I can understand why those of you who are feeling overdosed on violence against women as a means of generating drama might be wary of The Bridge. But I’m willing to give it a chance precisely because it’s addressing a real-world epidemic of violence, the murders of at least 370 women in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, since the spate of killings seems to have begun in 1993. The crimes are ongoing, and the investigations of individual murders that have resulted in prosecutions and convictions have raised serious questions about police misconduct. And it’s possible that there are multiple perpetrators who are killing women who come to work in the clothing industry that’s grown rapidly in the wake of the North American Free Trade agreement, or that some of the homicides are related to drug trafficking.

It’s one thing to take on real crimes that have taken place and are continuing to take place, especially those that have had their moment in the public eye and then receded from view, and particularly ones that raise valuable questions about flaws in the criminal justice system. It’s another to bring new visions of atrocity into the world, which is one of the reasons I find the proliferation of increasingly baroque serial killer shows such a turn-off. I’m all for confronting the world we actually live in, or for images and storylines that remind us of realities we’ve tried to put solidly in the past. But I’m losing my desire to imagine what it could be like if there were many more of the most violent sorts of people living in it, for the aesthetic pleasure of consuming that violence. I don’t know that The Bridge will be immune from television’s fascination with the gruesome details of the crimes its main characters are investigating. But my hope is that the focus will be less on a luxurious exploration of the specific acts of violence done to women in Ciudad Juárez and more on the social conditions that make them vulnerable, and the structural problems that make it harder to bring their killers to justice. In other words, I hope that The Bridge and its very different detectives will be a vision of the way the world could be better, rather than a celebration of the means by which it could be much worse.