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.”

Inside the keep, Cersei’s speaking similarly ugly truths to Sansa, giving her the education that might have benefitted her as a young bride. Sansa earned admission to this particular frantic academy not just by simple proximity—there are lots of other hens in Cersei’s grim, gorgeous coop—but by a clever show of defiance. “I’m sorry, your Grace,” she tells Joffrey as he heads off to a coddled form of battle. “I’m stupid. Of course you’ll be in the vanguard. My brother always goes where the fighting is thickest, and he’s just a pretender.”

That Sansa’s managed to play the game so well, with so few assets to fortify her, seems to have earned her a measure of respect from Cersei, though it’s entirely possible that the older woman’s revelations are the result of wine, or a desire to be cruel instead of comforting. When Sansa gets caught praying, Cersei breaks down how genuine her request for mercy is: “On all of us? Even me? Even Joffrey?…Oh, shut up you little fool…The gods have no mercy, that’s why they’re gods.” Cersei breaks down for the final time the institutions that Sansa’s shaped her life around, informing this rather frightened virgin that “Tears aren’t a woman’s only weapon. The best one’s between your legs. Learn how to use it.” And the best lesson Cersei gives the woman who may replace her is what Sansa can gain by throwing up a facade that gives her room to act. “If my wretched brother should somehow prevail, these hens will return to their cocks and crow of how my courage inspired them, how I lifted their spirits,” Cersei tells Sansa, explaining why she’s performing a duty she clearly loathes. “When I told you about Ser Ilyn earlier, I lied…he’s here for us. Stannis may take the city. He may take the throne. But he will not take us alive.” When Sansa turns down Sandor’s offer to take her home, she’s embracing that lesson, choosing a world whose rules she knows how to operate within over the improbable pursuit of a child’s dream of safety.

And while Stannis has superficially embraced the Lord of Light and Davos’s son has undergone a full-throated conversion, while Cersei counsels Sansa to defy the gods rather than to seek their kindness, the only person in King’s Landing who fully believes in the full power and mystery of the supernatural may be the master of men’s more ordinary secrets. “I think you believe in what you see, and in what those you trust have seen. You probably don’t entirely trust me,” Varys warns Tyrion ” And yet I have seen things, and heard things, things you have not. Things I wish I had not. I don’t believe I’ve ever told you how I was cut…One day, I will. The dark arts have provided Lord Stannis with his armies and paved his path to our door. For a man in league with such powers to sit on the Iron Throne, I can think of nothing worse.” Whether that foresight aids him in battles even beyond his comprehension, with forces gathering beyond the Wall and dragons on the loose in Qarth remains to be seen. But Varys’ ability to believe illustrates the blindness of the people who employ him, who fancy themselves in full control because they don’t know how much of the universe lies beyond their grasp.

-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.

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.

“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.”

In King’s Landing, Tyrion’s struggling to transcend his legacy as the warden of Casterly Rock’s sewers and plumbing as he prepares for the seige of King’s Landing. Aiding him are two men who confound him in part because he can’t figure out what they’re aspiring to. All Bronn will tell him is that he doesn’t want to wear a gold cloak. And Varys never answers Tyrion’s question at all, deflecting him into a discussion of Tyrion’s stewardship as hand.

The man Tyrion is up against, whether he knows it or not, has the reverse problem. Rather than perpetually feeling aggrieved, denied a birthright by a father and sister unable to see his worth (or in Cersei’s case, the true seat of his affections), Davos Seaworth is perpetually astonished by how far he’s been elevated. “My father was a crabber. And most sons of lords don’t like to eat with the sons of crabbers. Our hands stink,” Davos explains to Stannis, the man who raised him up after Davos saved his wife’s life and the rest of the garrison at Storm’s End. But Stannis, so traditional in all other respects, is decidedly foreward-thinking when it comes to the merits of the man who’s aided him most. “I gave it up, because he was my older brother and it was my duty,” he tells Davos of what loyalty has cost him, why he wants to indulge himself when it comes to a man of merit. “When I sit the Iron Throne, you’ll be my hand. I expect you’ll be the first crabber’s son to wear the badge.”

And the world that can accomodate Davos’s rise and Lady Talisia’s voluntary fall can present opportunities for even greater escapes. Arya, spurred perhaps by the sight of other men being hung and tortured in her stead in an effort to discover the murderer of Amory Lorch, uses her power over Jaquen to spring herself and her comrades from Harrenhal. And her brothers hide from Theon, with Osha and Maester Luwin’s assistance. Under some circumstances, the survival of three children can be a miracle.

*And that readers of the books will recognize as critically, chockful of allusions to future events and themes, which we can discuss in comments to your hearts’ desire, though please label spoilers from the books as such.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

And speaking of Tywin’s daughter, I thought this was a fantastic episode for Cersei. Mostly, this season, she’s seemed at the edge of madness and certainly in the throes of caprice, but here, in her scenes with Tyrion and Sansa, she’s careful to outline what can go wrong when you give yourself up to sentiment. To Sansa, devastated at the onset of her menses and the assumption that she’ll shortly be wed and bedded by the king she’s come to abhor, Cersei counsels a tight reign on sentiment. “Love no one but your children,” Cersei counsels the younger, new-made woman, sounding more like she means the nickname of Little Bird she’s given Sansa since her father’s death. When Sansa wants to know if she isn’t obligated to love Joffrey, Cersei tells her sadly, “you can try,” but offers no promise that Sansa’s determination to fulfill an ideal of courtly love will make it so. When she and Tyrion meet, there’s the first sign of understanding and potential reconciliation between them. When Cersei chastises Tyrion for his management of Joffrey, telling him “I’m not the one giving the boy whores to abuse,” she’s not just faulting him for a failed tactic, but for thinking Joffrey’s cruelty is a whim rather than his nature. In fact, Joffrey may be her punishment for indulging her own whims and lying with—and loving—her brother.

In the North and in captivity after a failed escape, that same brother is meditating on the impossibility of submitting to the wills of those who command you when they conflict. “So many vows. They make you swear and swear,” Jamie tells Catelyn Stark, who has saved him through an assertion of her own will and her claim to have her orders recognized. “What if you father hates the king? What if the king murders innocents?” Catelyn has no answer but to request Brienne’s sword, to move from the world of principle to the world of whim herself, faced with her own version of Jamie’s dilemma: the men her son commands want to slaughter Jamie, and to waste his value as they spill his blood. Sometimes, whim is a means of liberation from the iron prison of will, the rules that would let three men burn to death in a barred cart, that would let a valuable diplomatic tool be killed for honor.

And beyond the wall, Jon Snow, the foster son Catelyn hated as a violation of the rules that governed her world, is facing a world where the prospect of true choice may be more threatening than the snow. Ygritte, ostensibly his prisoner, but soon clearly his captor, mocks Jon as a virgin, but she’s indicting a society that would deny her sexual autonomy as well. “Now I can never marry a perfumed lord. What will my savage father say?” Ygritte jokes, mocking the idea that her virginity is her father’s property, to be bartered in exchange. “Soemone tried to tell us we couldn’t lay down as man and woman, we’d shove a sword up his ass.” Ygritte disdains a life where choice is ripped from her, and Jon may find that he has to learn how to make choices stripped of the oaths that saved him from having to know his own mind. “You know nothing, Jon Snow,” Ygritte tells him. It’s true of the geopolitics that will define a continent, and his heart, kept secret from even himself.

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.

I’m a long-time advocate of shorter seasons, and I think we’ve seen a lot of illustrations of the foibles of trying to fit 22-episode orders into a 40-week period this year. Revenge‘s long hiatus slowed the momentum of the ABC Hamptons-set thriller down to a crawl, and the show’s gotten baroque and full of moody shots in its attempt to fill up episode space since its return. Community‘s disappearance from NBC’s airwaves for an agonizing and indefinite period left fans waiting, and while NBC tossed out and then yanked sitcoms like Best Friends Forever and Bent in quick succession. Now I understand that shows fail, networks need to replace things that aren’t working at all, and fans don’t want to wait a long time for their favorite shows to come back. But I’d much rather see short, excellent seasons of shows that are suited to it, and to see them run continuously rather than spaced out in seemingly random ways.

NBC’s Thursday night comedies seem uniquely suited to shorter, smarter seasons. 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation‘s shortened seasons were their best for entirely different reasons. 30 Rock‘s second season was shortened by the writers’ strike, but it was a hilarious, joke-dense season. “SeinfeldVision” and “MILF Island” were fantastic riffs on the industry that preceded the “Queen of Jordan” running gag the show is using now. “Greenzo” featured two of the show’s best-ever cameos in David Schwimmer and Al Gore. And “Sandwich Day” turned Liz’s love of food into a sign of something other than middle-aged singleton schlubbiness. No one has ever made scarfing a sub look so poignant before or since.

Parks and Recreation‘s shortened third season had tons of great comedic beats as well, but it also illustrated how sitcoms can pull off strong serialization without dropping plotlines for a long stretch of episodes or producing episodes that don’t work as standalones. The stated major arc of the season was the question of whether Ben and Leslie would get together, a will-they-or-won’t-they that fit neatly into a wide variety of settings. And it turned out that Leslie’s victories in restoring the Harvest Festival, over her rivals in Eagleton, and in organizing Lil’ Sebastian’s funeral were actually setting up Leslie being asked to run for office. The show didn’t always hit the same beats, and in fact in episodes like “April and Andy’s Fancy Party” and “The Fight,” we got to see a number of the vulnerabilities that would plague Leslie in her campaign this season, namely her desire for control.

The 22-odd episode season may be an industry convention, but that doesn’t mean it’s a creative imperative. If the 2012-2013 season is going to be the last year we have 30 Rock, Parks & Recreation and Community, I’d rather have one of those shows on every night for 36 to 45 straight weeks (with exceptions for holidays), and to have those episodes be uniformly excellent, no filler. And if television’s really just about selling soap, I’ve got to believe it might sell better with new programming rather than reruns and schedule gaps.

1. Congressional Offices: Most of the time, Hollywood loves to portray Congressmen as minor figures who get in the way of the President’s agenda, and who can be dismissed or shamed with a single big speech. It would be much more interesting to flip the script and focus on a Senator or Representative who often serves as a swing vote. You could have legislative fights that come down to the wire in a realistic way, told from the perspective of people who are getting lobbied rather than doing the lobbying, and decisions that are either genuinely heroic or transparently self-interested. And if it’s a Representative, you get a big reelection subplot every two years.

2. Agencies: Pop culture forgets almost all the time that the executive branch isn’t limited to the White House, though it makes an exception for the FBI and national security agencies. You could set an awesome drama in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights, or Treasury’s Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes division, or a hilarious Parks and Recreation-like comedy at a minor agency like the Office of Personnel Management, whose preternaturally cheery director John Berry is essentially a real-life Leslie Knope.

3. Political Publications: The hell with the noble, Watergate journalistic tradition of the Washington Post, or the kind of supposed truth-telling Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom will try to celebrate. If you want a sense of how stories blow up in Washington and minor gaffes become huge stories only to be forgotten again, set a show at a political tabloid like Politico or a website like Huffington Post. Young reporters party hard, scrap hard for stories, and have hilarious stories from the campaign trail. And it’s a setting that lets a show tackle everything from elections, to sex scandals, to legislative fights.

4. Advocacy Groups and Trade associations: Has no one learned the lessons of Thank You For Smoking? If, God forbid, Parks and Recreation comes to an end, someone really should snap Rob Lowe up, make use of his surprisingly excellent comic timing, and write a show where his character is the head of some hilarious or malevolent advocacy group or trade association. Want to know why Washington is messed up? It’s not because of a lack of rhetorical force by the president. It’s about money and distractions, some of them provided by
these kinds of organizations.

5. Think Tanks: Friend of the Blog Chris Marcil actually got me thinking about this list when he tweeted “Has anyone pitched a Washington show set at a think tank? They seem like places where people do nothing but have B-stories and go on NPR.” Some of that’s true, but if you want episodes about where political ideas come from, you could do worse than think tanks. Plus, there’s the hilarity of think tank softball.

One of the things I’ve always liked about Pawnee is its slight crackedness, part English small town wacky, part All-American grievance factory. I like that one of Leslie’s stump speech promises can be “to expel the violent gangs of geese in Detwiler Square.” And I like that Pawnee contains a the Newports’ gloriously ludicrous mansion, which in keeping with Bobby’s status as an overgrown child contains both a rich-dude’s game room with a bowling alley, and an elegant crystal bowl fully of gummy bears.

It also contains its very particular villains, in this case, a van rental dude played by Glee’s Mike O’Malley who, having initially agreed to rent Leslie’s campaign his fleet for election day for $900, sells out to the Newports for $10,000. He proves immune to all sorts of inducements, including a promise of free publicity, and Tom’s offer to let him in on his latest business idea: alcoholic frozen Yogurt Platinum (which I would totally eat). He’s even resistant to Ron Swanson’s Code of Manliness. When Ron tells him “Where I come from, a man’s word is sacred,” Van Guy spits back “Okay, what’s your stance on pinky swears, George Washington?”

So it’s up to Donna and her beloved ride to save the day. I always appreciate when she and Jerry get a chance to be heroes, and while Jerry’s expression as he gets hit in the face with a pie for science and FBI Agent Bert Macklin is priceless, this time, it’s Donna’s turn. She’s been along for the ride more than anything else on the campaign, fascinated by Jerry’s love of menial campaign work, but with the same clear line she always has between work and the rest of her life. So it’s nice to see her commit all the way, even on the last day of the campaign, when it matters most. In a Towanda the Avenger move, she crushes Van Guy’s fender, has Tom and Ron act as her witnesses, and informs him “We can settle this right now. I will accept payment in van rentals.”

Even though Leslie’s attempts to apologize to Bobby after insulting his father only to learn that he’s died was ostensibly the A story tonight, I was actually most intrigued by something she said in the open. “If we win,” she said of the campaign bus, “hopefully it will be the home that Ben and I share forever.” Ben’s sacrifice of his job solved the problem of whether the two of them can stay together during her campaign. But now that we’re close to knowing whether Leslie will win or lose, it’ll be interesting to see if they can build a long-term relationship, especially when Ben has to find a job that doesn’t involved the advancement of Leslie’s life goals.

And I also want to know what’s going to happen to April Ludgate-Dwyer when she finds something she’s interested enough to stretch for beyond Andy. We’re still at a point in the show where seeing her be kind to someone is novel, even if being kind means saying things like: “First of all, dark places are awesome. Second, Ann is kind of lame so way to dodge a bullet. And Millicent is Jerry’s daughter. So two bullets. And you’re not alone. You’ve got lots of friends. Somewhere. I assume. You’re going to be just fine.” But at some point, that juxtaposition will cease to be striking. I can’t wait to see how April’s going to grow once she figures out what she’s going to grow into, and I do hope the show makes some strides towards helping her find that soon.

Much of the time, the power of Game of Thrones comes from watching people we love manipulated by forces beyond their control—or by the decisions of those they are powerless to influence. Sansa’s limpid eyes can’t restrain Joffrey’s murderous streak; Catelyn’s choices are subordinated to her husband’s sense of duty and her son’s war; Brienne and Sam can’t help being born into bodies that make it impossible to live up to the ideals assigned to them by station and gender. But this week, we see characters severed from the ties that bound and constrained them by tragedy, mistaken identity, and offers of new opportunities—and as a result, we see them faced with, and in some cases, making choices that will have significant implications for them, and for the world that is being radically reshaped around them.

The first person to be cast into the wind is Brienne, who loses her king and the identity and legitimacy he briefly granted her by making her a member of his Kingsguard, when Melisandre of Asshai’s monstrous offspring murders Renly in his tent. In her grief, she swears “I won’t leave him,” but Cat has to remind her of her choices, and of the necessity of making one, cautioning “You can’t avenge him if you are dead.” Once she’s free from her oath to Renly, Brienne ends up choosing a new liege lord, one that’s both beyond the menu of options Cat saw for her, and that’s in keeping with her strict application of the code of chivalry and flexible thinking about who can embody it. “I do not know your son, milady,” she tells Cat. “But I would follow you if you would have me. You have courage. Not battle courage, but a woman’s courage.”

Margaery Tyrell’s also cut free from a marriage that was guaranteed to be loveless, and carried some considerable risk beyond that. Her decision is more conventional than Brienne’s, and has larger implications. It helps, of course, that she has someone there to broker the decision for her, the consistently conveniently placed Petyr Baelish, who tells her, “You will note that I am standing here talking to you, not Stannis.” The two of them clashed in the previous episode, with Margaery bridling at Baelish’s nosiness, and his retort that the marriage of a wealthy girl is always of interest, no matter the specifics of her domestic arrangement with her husband and brother. But while their interests were misaligned at that moment, when their interests converge, they can recognize each other as equals in shrewdness. “Do you want to be a queen?” Baelish asks her. Margaery’s answer is attentive to both grammar and geopolitics: “No. I want to be the queen.”

Also making twinned decisions that augur collective tragedy are Theon and Bran, once brothers, now enemies. Theon, frustrated when even after being given command of the Sea Bitch, his launch turns into not a celebration of his authority but another humiliation. But his discussions with Dagmar about the weaknesses of deviating from the job assigned them by Balon gives him another idea—hitting Torrhen’s Square can pull troops out of Winterfell, leaving the much richer prize underdefended. And poor Bran takes the bait exactly as he’s intended. He may have grown into leadership in his parents’ absence, but the style of leadership he’s learned is his father’s and brother’s, a kind of decision-making that’s unable to see deceit and evil. “We have to help them,” he declares when news of the Ironborn’s invasion reaches his holdfast. “if we can’t protect our own bannermen, why should they protect us?” His honor may be his doom.

And Arya gets a lesson in making choices from Jaqen H’ghar, who she saved from fire only to see join her brother’s enemies. If he admired her before, he’s even more impressed by how she’s comported herself in Tywin Lannister’s service, as a stony-faced liar who hides her loyalty to her brother deep enough to declare that he can be killed. “A girl says nothing. A girl keeps her mouth closed. No one hears. And friends may talk in secret, no?” Jaqen muses. He’s about to offer her a tremendously valuable boon, but the lesson that’s wrapped around that offer is the more valuable gift. “I was always a girl,” Arya says, hoping to break down Jaqen’s sense of invincibility. “And I was always aware,” he counters her, parrying her thrusts as Syrio once did. “But a girl keeps secrets. It was not for a man to spoil them.” Information is powerful, as is the right to conceal yourself. When Arya chides him for going into the service of such dreadful men, Jaqen seeks to sharpen her mind. “Why is this right for you and wrong for me?” When she protests he didn’t have a choice, Jaqen refuses to treat her like a child or a victim. “You did. And I did. And here we are. A man pays his debts. A man owes three. The red god takes what is his, lovely girl. And only death can pay for life.” He’s given her choices to make and the tools to help her make them wisely. She dispatches with a torturer first. It remains to be seen what she’ll done with the rest of her decisions.

Those sorts of lessons Dany could benefit from, in a place where she’s getting more options presented to her than good, disinterested counsel and instruction. Xaro offers her “More than enough to buy horses, ships, armies. Enough to go home,” asking her to marry him with the caveat that “I’ve already married once for love. The gods stole her from me.” Pyat Pree offers her refuge in the House of the Undying. And though a mysterious masked woman warns Ser Jorah of Dany that “she is the mother of dragons. She needs true protectors now more than ever,” he has more ardor than advice to offer her. “You would not only be respected and feared, you would be loved,” he tells her. “There are times when I’m with you and I still can’t believe you’re real.” All very well. But not much help to Dany in choosing with wisdom.

One of my friends pinged me last night to say that he thought this episode of Parks & Recreation was my platonic ideal for a half-hour of the show. He’s basically right. Everything from the shot of Jerry watching the debate with the nuns like he’s one of the Three Stooges visiting home to Leslie’s closing statement was precisely my cup of tea. But mostly, I enjoy episodes of the show where all the characters are working on different elements of the same, sprawling project the way they were in “Harvest Festival” or “Lil’ Sebastian,” and tonight’s was one of those.

Episodes like this work because you can shift how much time you allocate between the A, B, and C story without worrying that one throughline will get short shrift. They’re all part of the same enterprise—in this case, making sure Leslie’s debate performance is solid, her spin room is working hard, and a room full of big donors is entertained. Those three setups give the characters room to work on separate issues, like the love triangle between Ann, Tom, and Chris, which has never seemed more plausible or well-executed than it was tonight, or April’s caring about things. But they’re all really part of the same goal, which is something the show does well both because the characters have great chemistry in a lot of different combinations, and because those kinds of big-project stories are both uniquely suited to and illustrate what’s interesting about a bureaucratic organization.

The debate was an interesting moment because it illustrated a problem that Leslie’s campaign—and the show about her—have shared all season: the candidate hasn’t been able to find her stride, even though she’s clearly the most qualified person in the mix. She should be able to nail the debate: “You could debate Newport in your sleep,” Ben tells her. “I have,” she chirps enthusiastically. “I know,” Ben reminds her. “I sleep in the same bed. It’s been hell.” And her opening swipe at Bobby Newport, that he wants to buy the town, is true, and something that will be proven even truer before the end of the evening. But it goes over like a lead balloon. What matters isn’t what’s accurate, or even significant. It’s that Leslie looks mean and negative, when we’ve had four years of television episodes proving that she’s anything but. Conversely, the substance of Bobby Newport’s insistence that “I want your vote because I want Pawnee, and my Dad, to see what I’m made of” is gross when you think about it closely, but it sounds endearing (Ditto on “I guess my thoughts on abortion are, let’s all just have a good time.”), so he gets credit he manifestly doesn’t deserve. Leslie’s closing statement is a party-at-the-lake-house worthy moment precisely because she finds a way to unify the substance of what she’s saying with the style and break through to the audience. It’s the first time she’s really been able to do that since “Born and Raised.”

I think it’s important to note that there’s a difference between this kind of clarity and the belief a lot of pop culture has about politics, which is that rhetorical brilliance breaks all impasses, cows all cynical manipulators of the system, binds up our wounds and leads us into the promised land. Instead, this whole season has been about the fact that while working in bureaucracy can be relatively smooth sailing if you know how everything works and have good systems set up, persuading the public and winning elections is a vastly harder thing to do, even for someone who is essentially smart and personable. People have agendas and senses of themselves that they have precisely no interest in surrendering. This is something that most pop culture fails to grasp. It just assumes that we share values and worldviews, and when we get out of kilter, the only thing that’s required to get us back on track is the rhetorical equivalent of a whack with a wrench. That’s not accurate, and for a storytelling and character-growth perspective, it’s not particularly interesting.

In addition to that wonderful centerpiece, this is a nice summing-up moment for a number of other characters on the show. April admits publicly, or at least to Tom, that there are things she’s invested in, even if she can’t make her arms work right to clean the house in preparation for the fundraiser, confessing “I care about Andy, and Champion, and I want Leslie to win.” In return, she got through to Tom what he’s been incapable of acknowledging before: that he has to act normal around Ann if he wants to be with her, and save pronouncements like “She’s smooth, like a blended whisky,” for Leslie’s spin room. Ron gets to put his manly and musical skills to work hacking into the cable network to save the fundraiser after opening it with the bluntest statement of purpose in political history: “Hello. You are here because you gave us money. Now, we will give you ribs. Also, you will watch the debate. If you like the debate, you’ll give us more money. That is all. Ron Swanson.”

And I just love the idea both that Andy’s tremendous, perpetually-refilled enthusiasm would lead him to step into the void of the cable outage with movie retellings, and that Pawnee’s richest non-Sweetums-beholden residents would be rapt by it. This is a good town, full of good people. They deserve a good City Councilwoman. Knope 2012.

Over the years I’ve been watching Community, I’ve written a great deal on and off about Dean Pelton. Often, it’s been about the way the show’s handled his sexual orientation in the absence of another gay character. But there’s an extent to which I think, if Abed Nadir is Dan Harmon’s stand-in on the show, Dean Pelton represents Community itself with the study group as audience proxy. Pelton is the clearest articulation of the show’s desire to be weird, and to be happy in that weirdness, whether it’s embracing a Dalmation fetish or splitting the show into six different timelines. But Pelton isn’t a happy, untroubled freak—he’s a freak who both wants to let his flag fly and is in a constant state of anxiety about how it will go over with the people he wants to impress. And when he tells the study group “Can I be perfectly honest with you guys? I think I went too far with this one. I have to go to the bank today. What am I supposed to tell people in line?” and then tells himself “Come on, Craig. Get your life together,” it’s the perfect prelude to Community’s most conceptually and emotionally ambitious episode in quite some time.

I like Community’s high-concept stuff, but ultimately, the show’s emotional capacity is more important to me than its experimental riffing. It’s why “Mixology Certification” remains my favorite episode of the show: it took a deeply normal concept, let all the characters bring their own type of weird to the proceedings, and reaped enormous emotional rewards, from Pierce’s self-destructive cussed independence, to Shirley’s past as a drunk, to Abed’s confrontation with a social world that’s less forgiving of his foibles. Tonight’s episode was much more narrowly focused than “Mixology Certification” was. But putting together Community‘s most-empathetic character and its least-empathetic ended up reaping considerable payoff for the most serial storyline the show’s done, Abed’s ongoing confrontation with the fact that his way of seeing the world may make it special, but it also doesn’t make him a very nice person.

The episode really kicked into gear when Abed tries to explain how the Dreamatorium works, and ends up insulting Annie. You see it that way because it’s calibrated to a specific level of brain function,” he tells the girl who’s volunteered to play with him so Troy and Britta can go on a date. “Not stupid, just less able to see what I see.” In response, Annie jams the works, spitting out “We lower-functioning brains call this empathy.” What follows doesn’t resolve anything—it’s not clear if Britta and Troy did or are going to get together, Annie may not know what’s going to happen between her and Jeff next, and who knows if Troy’s going to air conditioning repair school—but we do know more about how Abed sees the group he’s terrified of losing.

He assumes that Annie wants to be overwhelmed by Jeff, imagining that she’ll like it if he, as Jeff, tells her: “Make love to me, Annie. I know I’m just a surgeon, and you’re a hotshot upstart administrator. But damn the rules. Damn the system. Damn our two-foot height disparity. I want you.” And Abed sees Britta and Troy as a joyless couple, who tell him things like “We just saved an uninsured homeless man’s life,” “Using an unapproved procedure. Now we’re going to kiss.” (Troy’s confession that “I’m more turned on by women in pajamas and lingere. I just want to know they feel comfortable,” is, however, unintentionally the best ever.) Leonard is a cable-less peeper. Abed’s terrified that Annie truly does see him as a “Control freak with no empathy. People bend over backward to help him.” And he’s terrified to admit to anyone how he really sees himself. It’s deeply poignant when he tells Annie “I don’t get married. I don’t invent a billion-dollar website that helps people have sex. I don’t make it into Sundance, SlamDance, or DancePants. Troy invents DancePants in 2019, but don’t tell him. He has to stumble onto it.”

If Abed’s stuck categorizing the world, Annie, at least, is able to confess that she has the opposite problem: trying to bend the world to meet her needs. “We’re just in love with the idea of being loved. And if we can teach a guy like Jeff to do it, we’ll never be unloved,” Annie tells Abed. “We both need to get more comfortable wining it.” And after several episodes of Abed asking for clarification on what to feel, or whether something is a social cue, he finally gets it right. “I’m hungry,” he says, asking Annie “Are you hungry? I’ll make us buttered noodles.” It’s a small foundation for redemption. But sometimes, you wear your Duala-Dean outfit to the bank and end up out to lunch. For Community‘s often-stunted characters, life’s all about taking enormous risks for potentially small emotional payoffs. The show takes huge creative risks for small ratings payoffs, but the emotional gifts, when it gets things right, are enormous.

It was cast as a character, purely and simply, which is one of the aspects that attracted Idris to the role. I have no knowledge or expertise or right to try to tackle in some way the experience of being a black man in modern Britain. It would have been an act of tremendous arrogance for me to try to write – and you have to try to imagine the quote marks around the words – a black character because I don’t know what a black character is and we would have ended up with a slightly embarrassed, ignorant, middle-class, white writer’s idea of a black character, which would have been an embarrassment for everybody concerned. I suspect that there’s a dearth of decent roles for black actors because most writers are white and they try to write their idea of black and it’s an embarrassment.

In theory, I appreciate this kind of humility and think it’s important. But I also think it’s the kind of thinking that can easily feed the continuing dominance of white characters unless you’re deeply committed to race-neutral casting, and to the idea idea that the actors you cast may contribute substantially to shaping the backstories and motivations of the characters you created. If you can do that, and leave for a black, Hispanic, or Asian actor to come in and bring new accents, physicality, and insight into the characters’ decisions that might not fit cleanly with white defaults, than I’m all for the idea that white writers shouldn’t try to specifically write black characters out of respect for the points where their insight ends. But if you’re not in a position where casting is race-neutral, where the default will always be white, then I’d rather have actors flagging some characters as non-white. Otherwise, the palatte’s in danger of staying depressingly, dully monochromatic.

Every decade gets the political show it deserves, or thinks it deserves, though some decades are pretty disingenuous. “The West Wing” gave us an idealized account of the Clinton era, with a saintly president and high-minded pols. In the ’00s, “24” offered an ultraparanoid version of the Bush era that legitimized torture as the primary means of dealing with a world in a constant state of crisis.

“Veep,” by contrast, comes not to justify Caesar but to goose him. It captures our post-Reagan, post-Clinton, post-Bush, 24-hour tabloid news and Internet-haterade dystopia, and reflects our collective queasy ambivalence toward a political system that we fear simply reflects our own shallowness back at us. If “The West Wing” was a fantasy of hyper-competence, “Veep” is its opposite: a black-humor vision of politics at its bleakest, in which both sides have been co-opted by money and special interests and are reduced to posturing, subterfuge, grandstanding and photo ops. Naturally, it’s hilarious.

This is true—I’ve seen the pilot for Veep—and it’s uproarious. But it’s not the only show that gets this, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Last night’s Scandal ended with an uproarious parody of the idea that if we got lawmakers of both parties in the room and talked things over sensibly, that Reason Would Prevail and everything would be all right. Faced with a Supreme Court nominee who was facing a prostitution scandal (the hooker he’s patronized turned out to be his wife), gladiator-in-a-suit crisis fixer Olivia Pope combed a DC madam’s records, figured out which Senators had also been her clients, had her minions seek out said men and drop the code words for the sex acts they’d been ordering up all those years, and blackmailed them into keeping their traps shut. It’s an utterly nonsensical scenario, but not actually more nonsensical than the idea that our politicians are people of good will we can just pull together and everything will be all right.

It remains to be seen if USA’s Political Animals, about a First Lady-turned-Secretary of State and her dysfunctional family, and NBC’s 1600 Penn, which will be out this fall, take the same tack. And it’s true that we don’t lack a serious show in the vein of 24, though Homeland‘s paranoia’s aimed more at the national security bureaucracy than at proving we should have all means at our disposal to wring information out of terrorists. But is interesting that a truly idealistic show hasn’t thrived in the age of Obama. Maybe it’s the the ridiculousness of our politics has consequences bigger than the President’s sex life this time around, and idealism would actually be kind of a downer.

In your book, “Knowing Your Value,” now in paperback, you write that every TV executive who has ever insulted your appearance has been a woman. Is there no sisterhood in television news?

No, there isn’t. Women play into each other’s weaknesses. Women worry about being liked, about making sure everyone’s comfortable in the room and about being seen as bitchy. We worry about that stuff, and it gets in the way of the goal that we’re trying to accomplish at the negotiating table.

Obviously this is a bit internally contradictory—you can’t both be worrying about pleasing everyone and shivving every lady within knifing distance. But it doesn’t seem precisely implausible that in an industry with a lot of male executives—7 of MSNBC’s 11 executives—and, Rachel Maddow and Melissa Harris-Perry notwithstanding, a sense that women fit into certain slots and have to look certain ways, women might get competitive with each other in ways that could turn from the professional to the personal. Women are entirely capable of doing (or as we’ve seen in this television season, producing) bad, sexist things. And there is a core contradiction in the idea that we’re supposed to be all sisterhood is powerful and also be more assertive and look out for our own because no one will do it for us. And of course, this is a clever way for Brzezinski to suggest that it’s other women in the media who are a problem. Some days, being a woman in the media is like living in an Escher painting of infinitely looping wrong moves and second-guesses.

In many cases, you actually are watching Western (or at least Western-owned) TV. Fox International, through a deal with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Rotana Media, operates two satellite channels in the region, bringing subtitled and dubbed versions of hundreds of Hollywood films, along with such series as Glee and Modern Family, to homes in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. Turner Broadcasting operates an Arab version of its Cartoon Network from Abu Dhabi. In 2011, Sony Pictures TV opened a sales office in Dubai.

“Recent years have seen a boom in TV channel launches across the Middle East,” says Stuart Baxter, senior executive VP distribution for Sony in the region. “It offers a real growth market that SPT’s business can thrive in.”

For distributors facing saturated or shrinking domestic and European markets, the Middle East is an oasis. It’s big (67 million households representing 300 million-plus viewers) and young (as much as 60 percent of the population of some countries is under 20 years old). The Pan Arab Research Center estimates gross advertising revenue for the region hit $9.2 billion last year, up $700 million from 2010. These figures have to be taken with a grain of salt — there are no agreed-on metrics for measuring ad spends in the Arab world — but everyone agrees the market is only getting bigger.

If I were a studio, I’d want to make sure I was set up to respond to an emerging market in a way that maximized my profit, and my assumption (do correct me if I’m wrong) is that they’d make more for licensing their shows to be broadcast overseas than from licensing remakes. The Middle Eastern market taken as a whole may not be nearly as big as China, where demand and World Trade Organization dispute resolution mean that we’ll get IMAX and 3D-formatted movies for years no matter how irritated American audiences can be by them. But it is growing. And if hoping to tap into growth that gets executives to send word down the wire that they’d like to see a few more characters that will appeal to that opening audience, than commerce and the public interest have the potential to be in alignment. It would be nice for pop culture to play a role in demonstrating how much the joys and aspirations of folks in the U.S. and in Middle Eastern countries are actually in alignment.