My friends Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz have a long and marvelous (and I’m not just saying that because they are my friends) conversation about Alan’s new book, The Revolution Was Televised (about which more later) up at Press Play. And something Alan said helped a lot of my thinking about the era of anti-hero television over the last year or so snap into place. He told Matt:

When Carolyn Strauss told me that HBO’s decision of what to do as their first show after Oz came down to The Sopranos or something by Winnie Holzman, the creator of My So-Called Life, about a female business executive at a toy company, I immediately stopped paying attention to the interview for a good five minutes, because all I was thinking about was an alternate timeline where this Winnie Holzman show was the next big HBO show. I was asking myself, would the other show have spawned imitators? Or would it not have, because “Female business executive at a toy company” is not as inherently cool as “New Jersey wiseguy in therapy”?

It’s striking to me that while both of them talked about this alternate world, neither, at least in the edited version of the interview that appears online, mentioned Sex and the City. There’s no question that The Sopranos, which began airing seven months after the debut of Sex and the City in the summer of 1998, is the more formally ambitious show. But Sex and the City has never really gotten the credit it deserves for its deeply probing discussions of, among the factors my friend Emily Nussbuam at the New Yorker has identified, romanticism and cynicism, second- and third-wave feminism, and libertinism and prudishness, nor for its foundational role in the rise of HBO. Both in terms of acting as a destination show that brought viewers to the network while it elevated the traditional sitcom, and in the income it provided to HBO through syndication, Sex and the City deserves both critical and financial recognition for its role in elevating both the network and cable television in general.

And it, and the possibility of this long-lost Winne Holzman, raise the specter of an alternate universe of prestige television drama that’s dedicated to the rise and deconstruction of female fantasies in the way that shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men paint glorious specters of masculine badassery that are the primary draw for some viewers, and then reveal the rot in them, a process that’s the primary draw for others. I can dream up a lot of the kinds of shows that we’d have in that bizarro world: in genre, the She-Hulk procedural I bring up so often I know it’s annoying, a functional version of Powers with Katee Sackhoff as Deena Pilgrim, in period shows, something about Helen Gurley Brown and the rise of women’s magazines, or a kicky vision of the seventies and eighties in Washington and New York through the eyes of a woman suspiciously like Nora Ephron, in crime, maybe a story about the DC Madam. I suspect the dynamics of this world would be similar: a period of establishing the competence and coolness of these women, followed by overreach, downfall, and accountability (arcs, by the way, that Sex and the City and Girls‘ most determined critics never give those shows enough credit for following). But the details would be different: we’d have to have audiences that accept private lives as important as power struggles, sex as something to be explored rather than simply had, frivolity as not more condemnable than violence or anger.

I wouldn’t want to have to choose between this fantasy world and the one we’ve got. I don’t want to give up Game of Thrones or The Wire for any of these other things. I just wish they could exist too, that Sex and the City wasn’t written out of history, and that Damages could have worked better on FX and on DirecTV, and that we weren’t still stuck on the idea that male fantasies are the stuff of literature, and female fantasies are treats.

Dexter is a show I’ve watched extremely sporadically over the years, in part because I have a relatively low bar for being frightened and upset by horror tropes, in part because my experiences with it have suggested that the supporting players are much weaker than the main characters, and in part because it’s often carried an unmistakable whiff of cheese about it. But I’m tuning in this season, both as a spur to myself to get completely caught up, and because I think the show is doing something interesting in the larger context of prestige television. When Deb (Jennifer Carpenter) discovered her adoptive brother Dexter (Michael C. Hall) sticking a rather large knife in an extremely bad man last season, the show put her in the position of a television viewer who suddenly has the panel of glass the separates us from the anti-heroes we’ve consumed so avidly and has to reckon directly with both the consequences of the denial and exercises and moral flexibility that let us like these very bad men from afar.

I’ve written frequently before that anti-hero shows have been able to establish such a powerful foothold in American popular culture because, in a more rigorous way than we normally mean it, they are a guilty pleasure, a harmless way to allow us to experiment with moral flexibility and a sense of amoral sophistication. The term anti-hero’s been stretched beyond meaningfulness, as Salon’s Willa Paskin pointed out in our Bloggingheads episode, but it’s to its strict definition that I want to apply this argument: an anti-hero is someone we root for even though we shouldn’t, often who does bad things with such elan that we mistake the former for virtue, competence outweighing evil. In Walter White, at least for a time (and some viewers think this way), we can toy with admiring genius for its technical perfection rather than its awful ends. Omar Little’s shotgun, cheerful whistle, and way with a courtroom bon mot are an argument in favor of outlawry rather than, as the case with many other characters in The Wire, a sense of waste that the man isn’t turning his talent to other ends. Tony Soprano lets us turn the sport of judging our neighbors and NIMBYism into melodrama: would we begrudge the man his criminality if he kept the lawn trim, his children in school, a local restaurant alive, and kept the blood far away from our property lines? There’s no denying that these thought experiments are hugely engaging, but part of why they’re fun comes from a sense of transgression, a curiousness about whether the show will resolve these questions in a morally satisfying way and bring us along with them.

In Dexter, both his technical genius and the things about him we fight so disturbing are heightened even beyond these examples: in last season’s finale, Dexter managed to do right by threatened undocumented immigrants, rescue his young son, and dispatch Travis, his nemesis of the season. And Dexter is, of all the prominent anti-hero characters, probably the one it would be most unnerving for us to actually have to confront. Omar doesn’t turn his gun on civilians, and shares some of our moral disgust at both criminals and the infrastructure that supports them. Tony Soprano is genuinely invested in certain aspects of American family life. Walter White may be far down the road to monstrosity, but he was once a recognizable figure, and he remains capable of trying for kindness and generosity with the people whose affection he genuinely wants to possess. Dexter is, on a fundamental level, not like us. And while none of us watching at home have to directly confront Omar Little, Walter White, or Tony Soprano and live with the consequences of their disregard for our rights, Deb has to do that directly with Dexter, and I think it’s going to be fascinating to watch.

Unlike Carmela Soprano, who married Tony Soprano knowing who he was, or Skyler White, who came to terms with who her husband was in bits and pieces, Deb has her confrontation with Dexter mid-murder, in total contravention to who she understood Dexter to be. Deb acted like most of us would behave if we were confronted with the reality of someone like Dexter: horror, evasion, and ultimately, clarity. The question will be how she does something none of us at home are burdened with having to consider: taking action, reckoning with her own blindness and her own deep love. That’s a surprisingly old-fashioned moral direction for the show to take, and it’s a surprisingly exciting one.

For more on Dexter, Homeland, Lost Resort and more, here’s the latest edition of A Movie and An Argument With Alyssa and Swin, my podcast with Mother Jones’ critic Asawin Suebsaeng.

I always feel a bit stifled by Boardwalk Empire, though the show can achieve moments of emotional transcendence, like Richard Harrow’s attempted suicide last season, or Jimmy Darmody’s march to his execution. But this trailer gets at something intriguing that I’ve been thinking about in the context of anti-hero shows:

Much of the time, shows like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad experiment with how far characters can transgress while we still like them, or before the universe that they operate in demands that they be punished. But it’s another thing to ask how violent someone can get and still retain the humanity and respect for other people’s rights necessary to function on a day-to-day basis. Tony could kill someone and go on with Meadow’s college tour, but Walter White’s murder of Gus Fring seems to have broken down some of the things that moored him in his place. Of course, Tony was raised to integrate violence into his life along with other social norms and into his conception of being a man, while for Walter, it’s a rather new, and more volatile, discovery. In Nucky’s case, the question will also become how much violence a political system, as well as a home, can handle before the person who commits it can no longer be accommodated in polite company.

I’ve been writing on and off for months about where women fit into the current Golden Age of television (or are we in the Silver Age at some point? Someone who knows more than I do about mythology, help!), particularly into the ranks of masculinized anti-heroes. So I just loved Todd VanDerWeff’s brilliant piece on how the current standards for television excellence are defined by masculinity, and how shows like Girls and Enlightened are powerful—and uncomfortably received—challenges to those norms:

We have a very particular idea about what makes “good” TV in this age of episodic online reviews. “Good” TV is either a single-camera sitcom filled with pop-culture references or moments of pathos (ideally both), or a serialized drama—often on cable—that probes the darkest limits of the human experience and has a bad-boy protagonist. In essence, we’ve created a world where the only two shows that can be copied to make good TV are Arrested Development and The Sopranos.

There’s nothing wrong with this, actually. Copying those two shows has resulted in a lot of great series, including some terrific, distinctly feminist TV, be it the female heroes of Parks & Recreation or Mad Men’s multi-faceted portrayal of what it meant to be a woman in the ’60s. But copying those two shows has also resulted in a narrow TV palette, a limited series of colors to draw from when constructing the next “great” TV show. These series tend to have sensibilities that are very white and masculine, largely because they’re all created by white males, and, hey, write what you know. (It’s not like my reviews aren’t informed by this same perspective.) Even the shows created in this mold that have female characters at their centers—Damages, say—tend to define that female character by how well she fits into a traditionally masculine world.

I’ve long thought that Sex and the City, which I love, has been weirdly excluded from the narrative of the rise of great television even though it premiered before The Sopranos did and had as much to do with the rebranding of HBO as an adult, smart, frank network as The Sopranos did. I wonder if that is in part a response to fact that the default perspective in popular culture is male, so shows aimed at women are based in the assumption that men will never come along, or that women will find some sort of refuge from male-dominated culture hugely refreshing. And to a certain extent that’s true—shows that speak to my experience in any way that’s close to emotionally precise are so rare they feel miraculous. But I wonder if their particularity becomes a hindrance when it comes to acting as a model. It shouldn’t be that hard to extract from Sex and the City that frank, aspirational shows about female friendships and female sexuality are a draw. But somehow, that show becomes particular time, place, and set of actresses, exceptional in its depictions of anti-heroines, its excellence, AND its privileging of women’s experience, while The Sopranos is conventional in its focus on men and unconventional only in its focus on an anti-hero and the quality of its execution.

I hate that we still haven’t found the show with a female lead, about specifically female issues, and from a specifically feminine-coded perspective that’s such a smash and so well-executed that everyone wants to try to be as smart and as ground-breaking and as buzzed-about as it. I hate that quality shows about women remain exceptions rather than anything close to a norm. As much as I love Girls and Enlightened, they’re too low-rated to qualify. But they’re sparking hugely difficult and important conversations, and perhaps they’re turning over fertile soil for someone who will follow them, and strike gold in the same fields..

The internet was buzzing this week with the news that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had gotten word of a Tumblr called Texts From Hillary that painted her as a world-dominating, sunglasses-swiping badass—and made her own contribution to it. It was a delightful moment of self-awareness and unexpected hipness from a woman who’s rebounded from a tough loss in the 2008 presidential campaign to become one of the most powerful people in the world. But it’s been part of a long process, one by which Hillary Clinton’s become cool by embracing the very things that used to mark her as a dork.

It’s a process that begin in 2007, when Clinton dressed up the decidedly gimmicky process of having supporters vote on a campaign song by turning the big reveal into a spoof of the ending of The Sopranos:

What’s great about the spot is not just its piggy-backing on the cultural capital of one of America’s most iconic shows, but the way it played with popular conceptions about the Clintons themselves, the idea that Bill has a weakness for junk food, that Hillary can be a nag and possess an epic side-eye.

She displayed the same kind of self-awareness in her speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver the next summer, when she thanked “the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit” for supporting her during the campaign. This time, the cultural artifact wasn’t as universally applicable—it was gender specific, and itself considered a little dorky and sentimental. And rather than using it to transform herself, Hillary used it to double down on something about her that had been widely remarked on, her preference for blocky, brightly-colored coordinating ensembles.

She owned her dorkiness, the way she seems to be owning the scrunchies her staff reportedly wants to take away from her today. It’s easy to forget how hysterical people were about Hillary’s hair during the first Clinton campaign and during the Clinton presidency. But she couldn’t do anything right, and now she seems rather determined to do what she wants whether it’s au courant or not. I saw her rocking a particularly elaborate scrunchie with a tweedy coat at a screening at the MPAA earlier this week, where she spoke about watching Luc Besson’s Aung San Suu Kyi biopic The Lady on the plane on her recent trip to Burma.

Maybe it’s just that Clinton is finally legitimately powerful enough, and powerful in her own right, not to have to care one whit about whether anyone thinks she’s cool. But after so many years of trying to please everyone, Clinton appears to be trying mostly to please herself when it comes to her personal style and presentation. And the rest of the world’s caught on to the idea that Hillary is someone whose approval they should want, rather than the other way around.

The writer Meg Wolitzer has a blockbuster essay in the New York Times Sunday Book Review about the differences between the ways fiction by men and women is marketed, reviewed, and received. There are a lot of elements there, and I’m sure it will be much-discussed, but what struck me most about it was Wolitzer’s explication of the way incentives systems work to reward consumers for reading novels by men and about “male” issues, and to reward female novelists for taking on male characters and “male” themes:

Stories, long and short, and often about women’s lives, suddenly mattered to the cultural conversation. This period, the 1970s and to an extent the early ’80s, initially appeared to create an entirely different and permanent reality for female fiction writers. Men were actively interested in reading about the inner lives of women (or maybe some just pretended they were) and received moral kudos for doing so…

Recently, when the novelist Mary Gordon spoke at a boys’ school, she learned that the students weren’t reading the Brontës, Austen or Woolf. Their teachers defended this by saying they were looking for works that boys could relate to. But at the girls’ school across the street, Gordon said, “no one would have dreamed of removing ‘Huckleberry Finn’ or ‘Moby-Dick’ from the syllabus. As a woman writer, you get points if you include the ‘male’ world in your work, and you lose points if you omit it.”

Lorrie Moore added, “A female scholar once said to me: ‘I already know what women think, pretty much. I’m more interested in reading books by men.” The problem with this statement becomes clear if you flip it. Were a man to say, “I already know what men think; I’m more interested in reading books by women,” he would be greeted with incomprehension. While there may be no such thing as “male” or “female” writing, to say that the emphases of male and female writers might sometimes be different doesn’t mean that the deepest concerns or preoccupations of women are inferior or any less essential. Literary women novelists can of course do very well without male readers. And some literary male writers have admitted envying women the “femaleness” of the novel-reading (and -buying) community — a community that, from my own experience with book groups and individual readers, I know to be attentive and passionate.

This is exactly what’s happened in television and the critical definitions of the so-called Golden Age. We’ve created the sense that the audience is morally sophisticated for emotionally engaging with the aberrant, sometimes abhorrent behavior with middle aged men (who, for the most part, happen to be white). To contemplate Tony Soprano makes you an ethically sophisticated thinker. To commune with Carrie Bradshaw makes you a consumerist flake.

But what’s so critically important about Wolitzer’s point here is that this is not a natural or permanent state of affairs. If the rise of feminism created a space where the incentives were shifted, and where men got credit in conversation and in their personal relationships for reading fiction that explored the rich inner lives of women, we could create that kind of environment again. Some of that requires some of the right, big books and movies and shows to come along—I wish Karen Russell’s phenomenal novel Swamplandia! had made it further in the Tournament of Books in a way that might have given it some slingshot momentum, and I thought Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones was an unfortunate missed opportunity to give that director credit for his long-standing interest in the inner lives of women and girls. And some of it will require critics, male and female alike, to work together to forge a new consensus. The strong reception Lena Dunham’s Girls has been receiving from the kind of male critics who are at least semi-reflected in many Golden Age shows gives me hope that we might be at a sort of tipping point in television.

I kind of feel like Netflix is giving us everything and the kitchen sink with Lillyhammer: it’s The Sopranos! And a little bit of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Scandanavia! With a good dose of fish out of water stuff a la You Kill Me! And a sheep! And a girl band! And a bit of Uncanny Valley in that opening sequence that makes the characters look more like Grand Theft Auto avatars than actual humans!

That said, I do quite like semi-goofy gangster stories and Steve Van Zandt, so I’ll definitely check this out.

But I think the show, and the other originals Netflix has signed up for, including an Arrested Development continuation and a House of Cards remake point to a larger challenge for the service as it tries to develop a brand identity. What’s been great about Netflix as a streaming and DVD delivery service has been its breadth. Whether your thing is violent motorcycle gang soap operas, workout videos, or great sitcoms of the ’80s, it had you covered. It would likely be easier for Netflix to dig in and develop a couple of great sitcoms, or one or two great dramas, or to decide it’s going to do a couple of anti-hero shows across formats, effectively deciding that it’s going to court a niche audience for its originals business, or at least one niche at a time. But it’s a harder thing to develop consistently excellent programming across a wide variety of genres, tones, and subject-matter tranches. I can understand why the company would prefer to try for that, though: after causing a lot of confusion and doing itself a lot of damage, I’d want a master-stroke to bring in new or disaffected former customers, and to make a lot of my audience very excited. I’m just not entirely sure how it’ll pan out.

Gavin Polone makes a good, but depressing point in the process of analyzing what NBC needs to do to improve its standing among the networks — and concluding that they should go after men very aggressively:

One of NBC’s true assets is the ability to promote its new shows on NFL Sunday, the only programming they have that gets a big male audience. But if they want to get men to watch and stay with their shows, they have to commit to giving men what they want thematically and not water it down in an attempt not to alienate potential female viewers. The Playboy Club might have reached a male audience (as the original club did), but instead of making the show a titillating male fantasy set at a time when Hugh Hefner’s lifestyle was heroic rather than clownish, the network steered the show toward mystery and female empowerment stories. The result felt neither here nor there and didn’t attract either audience. Women are more tolerant in terms of what they’ll watch than men are. If a character is boorish, sexist, and violent but is written with integrity and is in a vehicle for interesting plots, women will watch: The Sopranos was a great example of this. But no matter how well done Drop Dead Diva may be, no straight guy will watch it. When I was first producing Gilmore Girls, I remember testing it and hearing the males in the test audience say that they thought the show was quite good but that they’d never tune in.

I really wish this wasn’t true. It’s incredibly irritating to be told by, say, Marvel Comics, that if women would just pony up some more cash than we already do, they’ll do better by us. We already bend so much. Are we really supposed to believe that if we completely acquiesce to culture made by and for men that they’ll they’ll reward us with products that are oriented towards us and our experiences? It doesn’t seem to have worked out that well for us to just buy in to culture about men, or culture where really terrible things happen to women in the name of grittiness. Watching The Sopranos and The Wire didn’t get us a New Golden Age mob or cop show with women in the center of the frame and men at the periphery.

And I just want to holler at men who insist they’d never tune in to a show aimed at women to consider what they’re missing, to consider what women add to their favorite shows. Does anyone who watches Sons of Anarchy seriously think it would be a better show without the female characters? Even without the men of SAMCRO, or with them on the edge of the frame, Gemma and company would make a killer stand-alone television show, and I hate to think that the men who tune in to Sons of Anarchy wouldn’t tune in to that. Similarly, I think the total dude aversion to Sex and the City is a mistake, though I can see how the show would be discomfiting for men who aren’t used to hear themselves spoken about in the same ways men regularly speak about women in culture. And Buffy the Vampire Slayer may have romantic and emotional subplots, but it’s an unambiguously wonderful cheesy action show with great villains. It’d be pretty depressing to see men not tune in to AKA Jessica Jones when it comes out, or to have it labeled the chick superhero show, the bone that gets thrown to women as a reward for our patience.

I don’t know what’s worse: the idea that women have to constantly submit to guy-defined culture, or that guys, by staying in their own enclaves, miss out.

I think Marc Bernardin has some good points about why, even in an era full of excellent television shows, we arguably only have two science fiction or fantasy shows that operated at the same level of, say, The Sopranos throughout or through most of their runs: Battlestar Galactica and Lost (his choices, not mine). But I don’t really think this is the case:

GENRE IS THINKY. If you look at the average night of television, you’ll see that most drama shows are about doctors, lawyers or cops. Because people – from the audience all the way up to network heads – understand how those shows work. Because a patient will always roll into the ER, some schmuck will always go to court, and someone will always get murdered in “the Big City.”

But science fiction, particularly, is a genre of ideas – ideas that usually resist the reduction into the doctor-lawyer-cop mode. And all too often, when people don’t understand a thing they either don’t let it on the air – unless they monkey with it to such an extent that the ideas are gone and it’s a husk of what it could’ve been – or they don’t support it once it does get on the air. A show with no marketing or scheduling support is a show no one knows to watch, or when to watch it even if they wanted to.

All of the best shows of the Golden Age are deeply idea-based shows. The Wire as treatise on capitalism, bureaucracy, and education is almost too obvious to mention. The Sopranos is a meditation on the nature of evil — and the efficacy of therapy, to the point that the show’s ending mirrors the let-down of terminating. Breaking Bad is a similarly stark moral show, one that also touches on everything from health care reform to the War on Drugs. Deadwood is about the emergence of civil society from the quite literal muck. And not only are all of these ideas-based shows, they’re shows that directly comment on the predictability of genres like doctor-lawyer-cop shows. Levy gets called out by Omar. The cops who beat Bubbles don’t get redeemed by their good intentions and concern for victims. No medical professional is compassionate about Walter White’s cancer, but they are very willing to take his money.

And I think more to the point, this may be jumping the gun a bit. We’ll see how Game of Thrones goes, but in between that, its big order for American Gods, and its big Michael Chabon-written magicians-fight-the-Nazis show Hobgoblin, HBO is making heavy future investments in fantasy. It takes a lot of efforts, and a lot of misses, to produce the shows that define our new Golden Age. The halcyon years for genre may just arrive a few years later than the Golden Age for more general interest television.

I’m behind on my Deadwood watching, but rather than leave you bereft on a Thursday, I wanted to think a bit about how the show fits into a framework Amanda Marcotte lays out in a provocative, and I think largely convincing, essay arguing that the defining feature of our current golden age of television is an examination of uneasy and untenable ideas about masculinity.

There’s no question that many of the great shows have put men squarely in the center of the frame, and featured women making critical, brittle decisions around them and in relation to them. Carmela Soprano and Skyler White are fascinating tragic figures, women, and most importantly wives, who have contemplated betraying their husbands, shedding that mantle of matrimony and becoming independent, morally integrated people, but who ultimately declined to act. The most arresting image of this season of Breaking Bad, for me at least, has been the sight of Skyler flipping coins at the Four Corners to determine if she should leave her increasingly monstrous husband and, resisting her own fate, pushing the coin back to New Mexico every time. Examining how men embrace, or run from, or reform their own masculinity is a first-order question for feminists in part because it determines what women have to react to, the space left for us to form our own identities, the things we will inevitably have to deal with and resolve as we continue our quest for equality.

But Deadwood shows us a world where the men at the center of the frame — and the show has a less rigid main character than the other shows on Amanda’s list — spend a lot of time tailoring their expressions of masculinity to the presence of women, and women struggle with the opportunities to redefine themselves that, if not exactly expansive, are broader on the frontier than they were at home. I’m not done with the show, and obviously there are falls to come. But watching Alma Garrett kick her drug addiction, put off her widow’s mourning, make love to Seth Bullock, plot revenge with Whitney Ellworth, and curse E.B. Farnum, claiming the territory of masculine crudeness and dark thinking for her own, is glorious. Trixie may be my favorite female character in the age of prestige television, vulnerable and striving, cautious of liberation, aware that there is always a price to be paid and suspicious of Sol Star, a man who wants to subvert the economy of desire. And Calamity Jane is Brienne of Tarth, more wedded to conceptions of honor than anyone around her, even if she can’t live up to her astronomically high standards.

Unlike all of the other television shows that define the golden era, programs in which the rules of business and of life are fixed, sometimes constricting to the point of physical and psychic death, Deadwood is about the creation of those rules in gender, and law, and business, the moments when we succeed and fail to make our own revolutions. It’s critical that we contemplate our cages, both the ones we’ve made ourselves and the ones designated for us. But the stories about what we do or don’t do in the moments when everything could be different are just as powerful.