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.

I’m sure that some of you in the audience have experienced this before, whether Sally Draper gave you flashbacks on Mad Men, or movies like The Wedding Singer, Take Me Home Tonight, and Hot Tub Time Machine revived painful memories of eighties fashions. But I think it’s finally my turn to have pop culture make me feel old: we finally have enough instances to make a trend, and 1990s period pieces are officially a thing.

The evidence started building in 2008 with the release of the underrated* romantic comedy Definitely, Maybe, which starred Ryan Reynolds as a former Democratic political operative turned ad man who lost and found the loves of his life while working first on Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, and later in New York Mayoral politics. Then came Notorious, the 2009 biopic of rapper Christopher Wallace, who released the seminal album Ready to Die in 1994, only to be murdered three years later. And now, it seems, the dam has broken. A biopic of the R&B-pop crossover group TLC is in the works. And the nineties have crossed over to television, where Fox has picked up Surviving Jack, a comedy that stars Law & Order: Special Victims Unit veteran Chris Meloni as a father raising his son in Souther California “in a time before ‘coming of age’ was something you could Google.” It’s a fascinating moment, even if it makes my bones feel creaky, because I have no idea how Hollywood is going to decide are the signature conflicts and causes of this decade.

To a certain extent, it makes a lot of sense that the early attempts at 1990s period movies have been biopics, and particularly biopics about hip-hop and R&B artists. The rise of those forms, and the conquest of popular music by forms invented, popularized, and perfected by African-American artists are two of the signature cultural shifts and conflicts of the decade, and it’s wise of Hollywood to have identified them. Movies like these are appealing, too, because audiences are already attached to and interested in their subjects. Wallace’s murder remains unsolved, and his death remains a subject of fevered speculation a decade and a half after the fact. The death of Lisa Lopes, one-third of the original lineup of TLC, in 2002, has a clearer cause—she died in a car crash—but given that she was only 30 at the time, her early demise makes fans eager to cling to the period of her life that remains available to them.
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Amidst all the business-oriented discussion of whether NBC, which cancelled much of the new programming it tried to introduce last year, can succeed by starting over, going middlebrow, or recreating past hits, there’s one part of the network’s programming decisions that merits mention on the content rather than the financial or audience calculations. The network is remaking Ironside, a show about a detective who uses a wheelchair after he’s shot in the line of duty that ran on NBC for eight seasons between 1967 and 1975. And it’ll be airing The Michael J. Fox show, a sitcom featuring the titular comedian, who did seven years on NBC with Family Ties, which ran from 1982 to 1989, as a news anchor who returns to work despite the way his Parkinson’s Disease, from which Fox suffers in real life. In other words, NBC is putting two shows on air that feature characters with physical limitations, moving a kind of character who’s often relegated to supporting roles—and who’s often there to illustrate the goodness of or provide moral tests to fully able-bodied characters—to the center of the frame. And from the trailers, it looks like both Ironside and The Michael J. Fox show won’t shy away from discussing their characters’ physical limitations, and other people’s reactions to them, directly.

Ironside presents its main character as a man who isn’t limited in his work—or from the trailer—his love life by the fact that he’s had to learn how to use a wheelchair. But the show does look like it’s going to give him something of a chip on his shoulder about it. There’s an interesting moment in the trailer when one of Ironside’s (Blair Underwood) colleagues suggests that he’s demanding for wanting more than the standard, and legally required, accommodations that make it easier for him to maneuver his home and office, and Ironside snaps at him that he was only pursuing what’s due him. It’s nice to see Ironside push back against the idea that people with disabilities need to be saintly exemplars to people who don’t have to use wheelchairs or other adaptive technologies. But it does look like the show might fall into another trope, that of demonstrating just how fully people with disabilities can live their lives, instead of taking that fact for granted. “You really a cripple?” a criminal asks Ironside at one point in the trailer. “You tell me,” Ironside shoots back:

This post discusses episodes 15 and 16 of the first season of Veronica Mars.

After a crackerjack pair of episodes in our previous outing in the Veronica Mars Television Club, I thought this week’s were a bit of a downshift, creativity-wise. But that’s okay, given where they got us emotionally. Much of Veronica Mars is about long-standing emotional commitment, whether Veronica is searching for her mother, unable to let go of the question of who killed her friend Lilly, or carrying a torch for Duncan. And these two episodes did a nice job of looking at what it means to sacrifice something for someone you love, or to stand by someone who’s behaved in a way you find reprehensible, but who is still bound to you, or simply to do something you think is silly for someone who means a great deal to you.

First, there’s Veronica’s relationship with Logan. I joked on Twitter earlier today that there’s an extent to which Logan is the Jaime Lannister of Neptune High School, and the more I think about that comparison, the more I think it’s true. Logan is a privileged guy who does enormous damage to the people around him, inspired in part by the treatment he receives from his emotionally detached, image-obsessed father, and who resists efforts to understand him better, even when such efforts might rehabilitate his reputation. And “Ruskie Business” has a lot of emotion parallels with Jaime’s journey on this season of Game of Thrones, with Veronica playing Brienne of Tarth, minus the need to fight an actual bear.

Over the course of this season, we’ve gotten to know Logan primarily through two losses: the death of Lilly Kane, his on-again-off-again girlfriend, and the presumptive suicide of his mother, inspired by his father’s philandering. The lost of Lilly is in the past, and he and Veronica first team up to honor her real memory, rather than the white-washed image Lilly’s parents prefer to present to the community. But the loss of Logan’s mother is fresher and more immediate, and the power of that wound inspires him to seek out Veronica to try to track her down.
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Far be it from me to praise, in general, Maxim’s Hot 100 list, which in its 2013 edition, as always, is overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly extremely young, and overwhelmingly homogenous in the body shapes of the women it celebrates. Not to mention that there’s something exceptionally depressing about the declaration of pop singer Miley Cyrus, this year’s holder of the number one slot that, “It’s every woman’s fantasy to be told she’s No.1 on Maxim’s Hot 100! So crazy!”

But the inclusions of two women on this year’s Hot 100, and the reactions they’ve provoked, are revealing, both of ways that Maxim might want to expand its brand, and of the limits its placed on itself by teaching men to see women in certain and very specific ways. First, there’s the inclusion of Kamala Harris, the California Attorney General who Maxim manages to compliment in a way that’s actually less condescending than President Obama’s remark that Harris was “the best-looking attorney general in the country,” a comment that foregrounded her looks rather than her expertise. “The current Attorney General of California cracks down on hate and financial crime like a bawss and created the Environmental Justice Unit in San Francisco,” Maxim wrote, next to a portrait of Harris in a smart pantsuit. “She makes following the law super sexy!” Then, there’s Hoda Kotb, the anchor who runs a tipsy, entertaining morning segment on Today, of whom Maxim wrote: “Ms. Kotb brightens our everyday and occasionally puts up with our fearless leader, Dan Bova, on Today. We’ll always want a morning cocktail with the Egyptian goddess!”

It’s all well and good to see Maxim acknowledging some older women, and writing up nominations that acknowledge that a woman’s expertise and her personality, rather than simply her inert body, can contribute to making her extraordinarily attractive. But apparently, not all of Maxim’s readers are on board for a more expansive definition of beauty. Breitbart columnist Ben Shapiro, in the course of making the legitimate complaint that the inclusion of Kotb and Harris tilts the list left—someone like the substantive Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who’s a rising star in the larger Fox organization, might have been a good choice—defaulted to juvenile complaints about their looks.

“As if Maxim’s Hot 100 wasn’t already bizarre enough this year – Miley Cyrus at #1? Really, Maxim? – clocking in at #79 is Hoda Kotb of the Today Show (she is 48 years old) and at #54 is Kamala Harris, attorney general of the state of California and President Obama favorite. Maxim ranks Kotb above Alice Eve (#84, a former Maxim cover girl) and Rebecca Mader (LOST), among others,” Shapiro wrote. “As for Harris, she absurdly ranks above Rachel McAdams (The Notebook, #55), Emmy Rossum (Phantom of the Opera, #56), Eva Mendes (#57), and Brooklyn Decker (#59).”

As much as its ludicrous to watch Shapiro bluster as if there’s some sort of objective, codified standard for women’s looks that Maxim has failed to uphold, his complaints actually make a valid point about the world that Maxim and its fellow American lad-mag derivations have wrought. Kotb and Harris do genuinely stand out on the Hot 100 list because the roster of women is otherwise so consistent. If you spend years teaching your readers that to be attractive, a woman has to fall within a very narrow range of waist-to-hip ratios, pick from a very small selection of hairstyles that have been deemed acceptable in advance, and present herself in a range of ways that suggest that her primary characteristic is sexual availability, of course some of them are going to be surprised when you tell them that everything they’ve learned over the years is incomplete. I’d never venture to suggest that giving over 2 percent of the Hot 100 to different kinds of women indicates that Maxim is on some sort of substantial maturity kick. But if the magazine were to decide it wants to serve readers’ brains as well as their salivary glands, Maxim might need to give them, and itself, a rather gentle learning curve.