(Courtesy ABC News)

When I got the news this evening that the actor James Gandolfini had died of an apparent heart attack at 51 while on vacation with his family in Italy, I gasped so sharply that the friend I was having dinner with thought a family member had died. In a way, he had. If you write about television, as I do, or watch it frequently, Gandolfini’s performance as Tony Soprano on the titular show that helped remake HBO and prestige television along with it was a major contribution to the world we inhabit together. But like a good friend or good relative, Gandolfini didn’t just provide a larger context, he kept showing up, in ways large and small but always pleasant. So many of us remember Tony Soprano, but we have our private Gandolfinis, too.

For me, Gandolfini played two of the most important supporting roles in film’s exploration of the War on Terror, and what we’ve done to ourselves in pursuit of nebulous victory within it. As Lieutenant General Miller, Senior Military Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Defense in Armando Iannucci’s lacerating look at the run-up to the war in Iraq, In The Loop, Gandolfini had a quiet, frustrated dignity even as he was dragged into self-important conversations at parties or dealing with diplomatic disaster that could lead to far worse things than embarrassment. Though he was overshadowed by showier performances in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, as the unnamed director of the CIA, Gandolfini was the adult in the room in his scenes, whether he was asking for risk assessments, or trying to figure out the puzzling, intense young analyst (Jessica Chastain) who presented him with absolute certainty in a time and place plunged into factual and moral darkness.

In Cinema Verite, one of the better movies HBO’s made in the last several years, Gandolfini played a role that was simultaneously less conventional and more predatory. As Craig Gilbert, the television producer who convinced the Louds to permit themselves to be filmed for America’s first widely-watched reality program, Gandolfini was simultaneously predatory and charming, particularly as he wooed Pat Loud (Diane Lane) into believing they’d be partners, rather than exploiter and exploited, on an important project. Tony Soprano might have killed you at sea. Craig Gilbert would eat your heart for a story.

As Carol, the lead Wild Thing in Spike Jonze’s tremendous adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are, a movie I deeply hope will become a classic that parents and children can watch together, even as it separates them, Gandolfini was a different kind of monster. If Tony Soprano presented self-indulgence as a matter of family, of tradition, of honor, Carol was the id to his super-ego, the creature who pursued pleasure for pleasure and wonder’s sake, and was crushed when he found out it wasn’t enough for Max, the little boy he’d adopted and befriended. Tony may have destroyed people he claimed to love out of a need for control, but Carol’s promise to “eat you up, we love you so,” was about desire run wild, about affection that didn’t understand the benefits of restraint.

And among my favorite Gandolfini performances was in a little movie he did with John Turturro, who wrote and directed it, a musical called Romance and Cigarettes. Blessed, as Tony Soprano was blessed, with the evocative sobriquet of Nick Murder, Gandolfini plays a working class-guy who is married to Kitty Kane (Susan Sarandon), cheating on her with Tula (Kate Winslet), and failing at being a father to Baby (Mandy Moore), Constance (Mary Louise Parker) and Rosebud (Aida Turturro). It’s a fabulously strange, sexy picture, and it begins with Gandolfini singing Englebert Humperdinck’s “Lonely Is A Man Without Love,” before proceeding on to other joys, including Eddie Izzard as a church choir director:

But more than anything else, it was Gandolfini, who gave us a man who fascinated us and commanded our sympathy despite the enormity of his crimes, reminding us that people whose only sins are against each other’s hearts deserve our attention, too. Tony Soprano opened the gates of hell to an awful lot of memorable monsters. But as an actor, James Gandolfini never seemed to forget what it meant to be profoundly, sensitively, almost obscenely human.

This post discusses the final two episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

The last two episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars center on the two central mysteries that have threaded their way throughout the year: who raped Veronica at that party? And who killed Lilly Kane? But though those questions have very different answers, they center on a similar problem. How do you be a decent person when up against social pressure, fear of losing your class status, addiction, or even rotten parenting?

There are a few good people in Neptune. Weevil may not be able to resist baiting Logan, when he chases after Veronica, who’s become convinced that Logan was responsible for her getting roofied at that fateful party, even if he didn’t actually dose her himself. “When they run away like that, it’s kind of a hint they’re not interested,” Weevil taunts the more privileged boy. “I”m just looking out for Veronica. So if you think you’re going to lay a hand on her the way you did Lilly…” And when Logan falls back on class to try to assert his dominance in the conversation, Weevil has an answer for that, too. “What’s worse?” he asks Logan. “Thinking Lilly had feelings for me, or that she was using me for sex?” Weevil may be stuck in an ugly and unproductive war of words with Logan, with whom he’s feuded since the first episode, but it’s remarkable to see how consistent Weevil’s support for Veronica has been. He’s one of the only boys her age who appears to want remarkably little from her, who doesn’t ask for anything in return, whether he’s trashing Logan’s car back at the beginning of the show, or only wanting to know “You okay?” when he picks her up from the Ecchols’ house after she discovers the camera in the guest house.

He’s not the only person who is decent out of proportion to public perception. As Veronica uncovers the story of what happened to her at the party, an unexpected voice of conscience shows up in the form of Beaver. “She’s actually kind of hot, when she’s quiet,” the odious Dick declares of Veronica, who is passed out in bed after a GHB-laced drink. “She’s not willing, Dick,” Beaver tells his friend, who is encouraging him to have sex for the first time with a woman who can’t possibly consent. “She’s unconscious.” That he knows the difference, that he, like Weevil, asks “Veronica, you okay?” marks Beaver as one of the boys in Neptune who appears to have picked up a rudimentary moral education, even if he leaves her there passed out in bed and ends up vomiting outside, rather than ensuring her safety.
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In the second season of Veep, Armando Iannucci’s caustic comedy about the woman who occupies the second-highest office in the land (though if you ask Kent, the President’s chief of staff, that should make her half as tall as the president), something happened. Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) got good at her job, or at least as good as a secretive President, a depressed staff, a daughter in college, and a sexually magnetic weasel of an ex-husband would let her be. And in tandem, Veep got wiser about the awkwardnesses of foreign travel, what it’s like to be climbing the Washington career ladder in your twenties, and how hard it is for people in public life to date.

I sat down with Iannucci to talk about why Selina did a Leslie Knope in her second season, what made Dick Cheney the most powerful vice president, and what makes HBO sitcoms different from their network counterparts. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to start out by asking something that had been sort of noticeable to me in the second season, which is that all of the characters seem somewhat more competent and I was wondering if you talk a little bit about that evolution of that decision.

I think there’s two things, one is, you know, we’re getting to know them and therefore, it’s all about them, doing more with them. So I think any politician, when they go into a high office, there’s a period of adjustment. All the huge mistakes that presidents make usually are within the first six months, all the embarrassing stories, and they didn’t quite get this right, and why didn’t they do that, you know, that sort of goes on. But also I felt the first season was about coming to terms with the limitations of her job and also her staff. The second season would be more about what happens when you have power and influence, what does that do to you? Because that’s what you got into politics for. Okay what happens when you get what you’ve been asking for?
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The Guardian reports that the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, or BARB, the British television ratings measurement organization will follow the Nielsen ratings and attempt to start measuring how much television is being streamed, rather than watched through traditional set-top devices:

The move will provide the first official measurement of the number of viewers downloading or streaming TV shows on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Justin Sampson, chief executive of Barb, described the move as “pivotal”. “Our initial focus is on reporting the extent to which IP [internet protocol] content is being downloaded or streamed. This is a significant step forward in our ambition to deliver cross-platform measurement of content.”

Barb said it plans to release a “TV player” report by the end of 2013 and has appointed the analytics firm Kantar Media to collect the data from computer devices.

It will be interesting to see how BARB’s method of measuring streaming consumption compares with Nielsen’s plan, which will add 160 streaming-only households to the sample of 23,000 television homes that are the basis for its ratings measurements, as well as going back to its existing household pool to see which of them have televisions that are connected to the internet, but not to cable. Like Nielsen, BARB has devices to monitor viewing in about 5,100 homes, which it says captures data from about 30,000 devices. It’ll be interesting to see if, rather than or in addition to adding streaming-only households to their sample, they start monitoring all the devices of the people in their existing sample, and if so, whether that will affect the participants in the sample who are willing to continue being monitored. And once both Nielsen and BARB have their systems set up, it’ll be interesting and indicative to see if one suggests higher streaming rates than another, both in terms of figuring out whether there are cultural differences in television viewership, and in terms of whether or not each country decides it wants to tweak its measurement methods or households pool.

I’ve written a great deal this season about the ways in which prestige television, traditionally considered the provenance of middle-aged male anti-heroes, is actually strikingly attentive to the experiences and worldviews of young girls. And as Game of Thrones closed out its third season on Sunday, and as Mad Men reached a high point of its sixth year with Sally Draper’s discovery of her father’s latest infidelity, they seemed to be strikingly in parallel. Both shows have many concerns. But among them is what happens when girls lose their fathers, whether to death, divorce, or simply grown-up incompatibility.

Arya Stark loses her biological father Ned Stark to violence, specifically to an execution ordered by King Joffrey Baratheon. Joffrey’s a vicious young boy who’s entirely out of his depth in his role as king of Westeros, but he has father problems of his own. The man who raised him as a son, Robert Baratheon, dies in the first season of Game of Thrones after he’s gored by a boar on a hunt, his reflexes dulled by the wine his wife Cersei has encouraged his squire to overserve him. And Joffrey’s dogged by rumors (which are, of course true), that the violent, mercurial, unfaithful Robert isn’t his biological father at all, but instead, that he’s the product of the long-running sexual relationship between his mother Cersei and her twin brother Jaime. Jaime is lost to Joffrey in the swirl of the War of the Five kings, captured by the Starks in battle, disappearing into the countryside on the run with Brienne of Tarth after Catelyn Stark frees him, stripped of his sword hand by Locke, and ultimately come home a changed man. When Joffrey orders Ned Stark killed, he’s doing so to kill his own doubts about his parentage, his legitimacy, his right to the throne on which he sits, as well as to commit an act of cruelty against Sansa Stark, who is naive enough to have condemned her father to prison, and then naive enough to believe that she can save his life.

But while Sansa doesn’t acquire another father figure, instead falling into the custody of her prospective mother-in-law Cersei Lannister, and then the bevy of Tyrell women, Arya gains and loses several other older men in her life throughout the course of the series. There’s her dancing master, Syrio Forel, the former First Sword of Braavos, who is hired by Ned to instruct Arya in swordplay when they move to King’s Landing. To a certain extent, Syrio’s a surrogate father, proving Arya company that Ned’s unable to give her while he’s tied up with the duties that come with being Hand of the King. And he also does what Ned can’t quite do directly, training Arya on the basis of her talent, rather than her gender. And Syrio doesn’t just give her lessons: he also gives Arya the beginning of a new philosophy and a relationship to death, a defiant “not today!” a force that many other women in the series feel powerless against. When the knights of the Kingsguard come for Arya as part of the Lannisters’ attempt to sweep up the Starks in a single set of operations, Syrio acts more like a father than an instructor, giving Arya the opportunity to flee, even, it seems, at the cost of her own life.

She runs into the arms of the man who will become her second surrogate father, Yoren, a Brother of the Night’s Watch who’s come to King’s Landing on a recruiting mission that’s largely been a failure. Yoren’s decision to take Arya in is impulsive and decent, but they’re matched in many ways. Like Syrio, Yoren’s willing to treat Arya like a boy, cutting her hair, urging her to keep her gender a secret. And he trains her like a boy, too, sharing with her the story of his own childhood family loss, and teaching her the mantra of revenge that sustained him until he was able to avenge that loss and run off to join the Night’s Watch. But he dies, too, in an attack on their party, and Arya’s left alone again.
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As the television season’s been winding to a close over the sweeps of May and the end of the spring prestige television season this June, I’ve been watching a great deal of Seinfeld. Though I grew up a non-television watcher, Seinfeld was one of the shows I caught repeatedly while I was at my cousin’s house*, and , as was the case with Friends, where I sensed that the show was enough of a phenomenon to feel that I needed to see the finale in real time, with everyone else. But I’ve been watching the episodes more systematically and with greater concentration, appreciating that what’s great about the Soup Nazi installment, for example, isn’t the catchphrase but everything going on around the utterance, loving everything about Elaine, marveling at every way Kramer finds to crash through a door. And I’ve been struck by something I didn’t expect: the refreshing dumbness of George Costanza.

We’re in a moment when all forms of ordinariness are being pushed to the margins in popular entertainment, particularly in television. Working- and genuinely middle-class people are the dramatic minority on television. Shows like Raising Hope, which follows the lives of a landscaper, a housekeeper, and a grocery store clerk, and The Middle, about a less abjectly-poor family, drown under a tide of gleaming luxury cars and lavish homes on Modern Family, the utterly unaffordable loft occupied by the young professionals on New Girl, even the seized beachfront palace where undercover agents hang out on USA’s police procedural Graceland. The stakes are always of the highest order: if it’s science fiction or fantasy like Lost Girl, the world is always about to end, if it’s a crime drama, the crime is always rape or murder, and if it’s a national security story, the terrorists are always extraordinarily competent. And we’re surrounded by experts and geniuses. Fox is trying to replicate House, about a brilliant but cantankerous doctor, with Rake, a drama about a brilliant but cantankerous lawyer. The labrats of the CSI franchise gave rise to the off-the-charts anthropologists, soil analysts, and artistic techs on Bones, who solve even more unsolvable crimes. Even in comedy, we’ve got fabulously-competent characters like Parks and Recreation‘s politician Leslie Knope and the late-lamented Happy Endings‘ Jane Kerkovich, who’s never met a turkey she can’t stuff the hell out of or a car purchase negotiation she can’t ace. We love brilliant super-villains, root for genius anti-heroes, cheer hyper-effective cops.

It’s doesn’t require a complex psychological explanation to explain why we like rooting for winners, even if they’re winning at endeavors like cooking methamphetamine in Albequerque or staging massacres at weddings. But in this highly aspirational environment, it’s amazing what a relief it is to spend time with the George Costanzas and Nick Millers of the world, people who don’t have it all figured out, and for whom the outcomes of any conflict aren’t always particularly certain.
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The finale of the third season of Game of Thrones featured a whole bunch of major developments, including Arya going full murderer on some minor Freys, Dany taking Yunkai, and Jaime Lannister’s less-than-totally-joyful reunion. But it also ended a season that made significant changes to George R.R. Martin’s novels, both in the moment, and in terms of the implications of this season for events that Martin hasn’t yet resolved in prose. For those of us who have read the novels, here are five questions that the third season raises both for Martin’s novels, and for how events will play out in subsequent seasons.

1. What happens at Joffrey’s wedding? In Martin’s books, Jaime Lannister makes it back to King’s Landing after Joffrey’s wedding to Margaery Tyrell, not to celebrate, but to mourn the death of his unacknowledged son with his sister Cersei, after someone poisons Joffrey during the nuptial feast. That timing means that Jaime can’t do much to avenge Joffrey’s death in the moment, except to visit his brother Tyrion, the main suspect, in prison. But even though Jaime’s been maimed, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t want to take immediate action to try to keep Joffrey alive, or to exact violent revenge against whoever he suspects of killing his son. This is, after all, a guy who pushed a little kid out a window as one of the “things I do for love.” What’s the wedding going to look like now?
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how badly our blockbuster movies have done at designing villains lately, prompted by frustration both with Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness. But yesterday, two pieces I read made me think about a rather different issue that’s raised by the way we design villains: how our heroes deal with them. Because we’ve got a situation that’s a problem not just for storytelling variety, but for what we understand as heroic. If all villains are so powerful that they present a threat to our continued existence, our only solution becomes to subject them to an awful lot of physical violence. It’s not just, as Linda Holmes has suggested, that we’re still hailing as heroes people who are responsible for or fail to prevent an awful lot of collateral deaths. Heroism’s getting collapsed to the ability to do a lot of physical damage in the name of right, no matter the cost to our stated values.

“One reason filmmakers might be wary of this idea is that they’re afraid of the optics of a male hero hurting a female villain, given the prevalence of real-world male violence against women,” Dan Wohl wrote at The Mary Sue. “If physical confrontation between hero and villain is absolutely crucial, it’s hard to deny the possibility that the imagery of domestic violence or sexual assault could be evoked.”

It’s telling, in Wohl’s formulation, that we’ve become awfully comfortable with wildly showy displays of violence against male villains, even those who are eventually taken into custody for trial or imprisonment. In The Avengers, the climactic showdown with Loki comes in the midst of an invasion of New York City. It makes sense that the superheroes in question mount up in response to the sudden arrival of alien invaders who proceed immediately to killing an enormous number of American citizens without serving notice of their intentions or giving anyone any sense to surrender. But those invaders are somewhat different from Loki, the god from Asgard who spearheaded their incursion. When he comes face-to-face with the Hulk, Hulk tosses Loki around like a rag doll, literally pounding him into the stone inlay in Tony Stark’s office. It’s a very funny bit of action choreography that fits well with what we know of both characters, both Loki’s sense that he’s invincible, and the Hulk’s sense of profound irritation. But if the Hulk could physically subdue Loki, he also could have taken him into custody, as Loki is later taken, without beating the hell out of him.
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This post discusses episodes nineteen and twenty of the first season of Veronica Mars.

One of the things I like a great deal about Veronica Mars is how well, even in the midst of its mannered noir storytelling, it captures what it means to be a teenager, and specifically what it means to be variable as a teenager, without being light or inconsequential. And this pair of episodes, whether through Weevil’s break-in at the Kane house, Veronica’s burgeoning relationship with Logan, or the sexual harassment of Carmen gets at something frightening about being in high school. It’s possible for teenagers to be genuinely different people than who they were when they did things that were criminal, but they have the resources to take actions with truly lingering consequences.

When Weevil breaks into the Kanes’ house, he initially tells Veronica a lie that’s based in teenage changeableness, saying he wanted to retrieve a diamond ring. “I was trying to get it back,” he tells Veronica. “It was my mothers and she was saving it for me for an engagement ring. Once upon a time, I was dumb enough to think I wanted Lilly to have it.” What he’s really after is a spy pen that holds secret messages, a toy Lilly got out of a cereal box and bragged to Veronica–before Veronica knew about Weevil–that she’d use to communicate with her conquests. Whatever message too or from Weevil that was in that pen may have been written in a moment of passion and total sincerity. But he’s changed enough, and circumstances have changed enough, for him to need it back. Being the bad boy Lilly used to make her parents angry is no longer such an innocent occupation.

In the next episode, Veronica gets caught up in helping Carmen, a girl whose boyfriend is blackmailing her into staying with him with a tape of her suggestively sucking a popsicle in a hot tub that turns out to have been made under the influence of GHB. The boy is revoltingly self-regarding and self-justifying. When Carmen sticks to her guns and breaks up with him, he distributes it, believing that no one will want Carmen once they’ve seen the video, telling Veronica “She forced me to. She left me.” It’s utterly pathetic, nasty behavior that ignores the fact that both he and Carmen are headed off to college, a world where people won’t know to track down a video of Carmen in a sexually compromising situation, and where even those who do might understand that she was drugged, that the video doesn’t represent her whole personality, or even that sexual voraciousness (if Carmen had made it consentingly) is hardly the whole of her personality, or a crime. The boy, hopefully, will have to live not just with being taped to a flagpole and an unfortunate tattoo, but with the moral knowledge of what he’s done. Carmen, by contrast, may suffer the short-term consequences of the video, but in refusing to retaliate, even though Veronica cooks up the material that would allow her to do it, reveals herself to be the more grown-up person. She knows what she’ll be able to handle after high school.
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Attack Of The Show veteran-turned-star-of The Newsroom Oliva Munn’s reaction to her (female) critics—probably best embodied by a 2010 interview in which she said said such a phantom critic “needs to fucking turn her fucking computer off, take the sandwich out of her mouth and go for a goddamn fucking walk… Just walk it off, bitch.”—has always struck me as probably psychologically necessary for Munn herself, and a bit off the mark as to how one might reasonably interpret the choices Munn made earlier in her acting career. In a new interview with Flare, she puts some of her frustration with Hollywood sexism as exemplified by women in a bit more context:

She’d lined up a job at Fox Sports, as a sideline reporter for women’s college basketball, but soon landed Attack of the Show!, a variety program beloved by geeks and gamers. She quickly ingratiated herself to her (largely male) audience—leaping into a giant pie in a French maid uniform in one infamous skit, a move she now regrets—and developed a cult following for her quick wit and willingness to play silly. The Daily Show producers noticed her hustle and, in 2010, tapped her to be their “senior Asian correspondent.” The show, already under blogosphere fire for Stewart’s dearth of female players, was skewered for the hire. Sites such as Jezebel accused Munn of being better known for deep-throating hot dogs on Attack and posing for Maxim than for her comedy chops. “There’s apparently no way that I can embrace my sexuality, be on the cover of a men’s magazine, and also be thoughtful and smart, and know what the Pythagorean theorem is,” Munn says. She posed for a second Maxim cover shortly after she was hired. “If you don’t like that I’m being sexual, or letting myself be objectified, then you better not own a push-up bra and wear it outside of the house,” she says.

To work backwards from all of this, the problem, of course, is that there are far too few roles available for women that are simultaneously sexual and intellectual. Munn got one of those rare roles last summer in a supporting turn in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike. In that film about male strippers, she played Joanna, a woman who was casually dating, or at least sleeping with, the main character, the titular Tampa stripper with dreams of designing furniture, played by Channing Tatum. They had easy, uncomplicated sex after Mike’s shows, and hung out with Mike’s coworkers on Tampa’s beaches. And it turned out, in a reversal that worked to create emotional surprise in the movie in two different ways, that Joanna was a graduate student who met Mike through her field research on strippers and sex workers. She wasn’t just a woman who was capable of having sex the way Mike and his male friends seemed to—though of course Mike’s own relationships to sex and intimacy were more complicated than they appeared—she was someone who, by virtue of her academic position, had built distance into her relationship with Mike and his fellow strippers, who had placed herself in a position to analyze and even to judge them in a way they couldn’t quite reciprocate with her.
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