On Friday, Happy Endings, ABC’s warm, wonderful sitcom that’s a cross between the chosen-family dynamic of Friends and the anarchic pop culture analysis of Community, debuted in a new timeslot to just 3 million viewers, and a 0.9 rating in the valuable 18-49 demographic. Two days later, The Walking Dead, AMC’s violent zombie drama, finished its third season with 12.4 million viewers, 8.4 million of them between the ages of 18 and 49. These two disparate bits of data could be evidence for a lot of different ideas: the general ascendence of cable over broadcast networks, for example, or the American viewing public’s appetite for violent media. But I want to use it to point out something different, and something that I think plays a larger role than is generally acknowledged in the failure of some broadcast shows and the success of turning many cable shows into must-see TV: unpredictable broadcast television scheduling has made it impossible to turn any single television show into a predictable viewing event.

When Happy Endings debuted in 2011, its first episode aired at 9:31 PM even though the show would normally be airing at 10PM. After the third episode, ABC began doubling up the episodes, airing one at 10PM and another at 10:30. In the second season, the show moved to 9:30 PM. In its third, Happy Endings aired first on Tuesdays at 9 PM, then on Sundays with Don’t Trust The B—- In Apt. 23, and now on the Wednesday time slot that’s done so poorly. While in the show’s first season, episodes 1-12 ran on consecutive weeks without a break in between, there was a three-month gap between the 12th episode, which aired on May 25, and the thirteenth, which aired on August 24. In the second season, the episodes ran in consecutive weeks with a break for Thanksgiving until December, when ABC aired one episode, then took the show off the air until January. And in this third season, the show went off the air for two months, between January 29 and March 29. In between the shifts of time slot and the gaps in between episodes, it makes sense that Happy Endings would get whittled down to a core group of viewers who were committed enough to follow it from day to day and from month to month: who else could possibly be expected to chase the show across the calendar for years at a time?

Scheduling changes like this are due to a number of factors, among them high rates of show failure and the excessive length of the traditional broadcast season. Happy Endings moved to Sundays to replace the cancelled 666 Park Avenue, and networks often shuffle shows around to plug holes on their schedules that emerge as new shows fail to attract audiences and are removed form the calendar. And no show on network can both be aired every week and fill out a season that’s eight months long when the standard broadcast network order is for around 22 episodes of a program. This mismatch ought to create opportunities for networks to pair up existing shows with miniseries, shorter-run series with expensive stars like The Following, for which Fox promised Kevin Bacon he’d only have to do 15 episodes a year, or launches of new shows towards the end of the year, as was the strategy for another ABC show, Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, which has grown into a genuine hit in its second—but first full-length—season. But in reality, it frequently makes for lumpy seasons with long breaks. Parks and Recreation may be the show on network television to which I am most emotionally attached but now, if I didn’t feel a professional obligation to watch it in a timely fashion (something I do on Hulu the morning after rather than the night of), I’d let the episodes pile up on my DVR until I could have the pleasure of a long, luxuriant evening with it, rather than risk disappointment by clearing my Thursdays only to find that the show isn’t on.
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This post discusses plot points from the March 31 episode of The Walking Dead.

There’s a way in which last night’s season finale, “Welcome to the Tombs,” felt like an anti-climax. All this buildup about the inexorable logic of war, all of that moral stakes-setting, and the closest thing we get to a proper battle is Glenn and Maggie firing a few rounds behind a barricade?

But reading the episode this way misses the point. “Welcome to the Tombs” is an attempt to do for the idea of heroic or noble war what The Walking Dead more generally does for zombie apocalypse: bring out the dirty, horrible, mundane reality that’s often hidden in shinier, more fun portrayals. The only guy who got to die a hero this season lived as a villain.

To start with, the bad guy gets away. After the Governor’s attack on the prison results in nothing but property damage and a hasty retreat, he faces a revolt from his “soldiers” — conscripts who weren’t interested in being targets in Glenn and Maggie’s free-fire zone. The Governor in turn does his best Marcus Crassus impression, and guns down his fleeing folk in a fit of rage. Theirs wasn’t a soldier’s glorious death in battle, defending Woodbury from walkers or attacking prisoners: they were victims of a war crime, the mass killing of defenseless innocents. And then the Governor takes his two remaining loyalists and rides off into the sunset, abandoning Woodbury to become, we can assume, post-apocalyptic America’s Joseph Kony.
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Over at Buzzfeed, Adam B. Vary is absolutely right to suggest that, as the late-night television lineup seems poised for another reshuffle as NBC’s relationship with Jay Leno deteroirates, it would be awfully nice if the networks considered candidates for the positions about to be opened up who aren’t the interchangeable white men who have largely dominated those time slots since time immemorial, or at least since Johnny Carson. And I think it’s worth making a larger point in conjunction with his argument: it’s going to be disappointing if the spaces opened up by Leno’s canning and subsequent reshuffling produce not just the same faces, but the same formats, particularly given the waves of experimentation that have been taking place outside of the major networks for years.

There’s the political model, which started in its current incarnation over at Comedy Central. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert may not hail from exactly the same schools of comedy as David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, and Jay Leno, but they’re marked by the same general demographics. It’s what they’ve done behind the desks on their respective sets that’s different. While Stewart and Colbert take on a wide array of topics, they’re doing so not from a general interest perspective but from carefully honed political ones. Their business model aims for ferocious loyalty among a segment of the population they’ve chosen to pursue specifically, rather than pulling from across the political spectrum as a whole. It’s worldview, rather than schtick that’s the initial selling point, Stewart’s righteousness and Colbert’s gleeful satire rather than signature bits like David Letterman’s top ten lists or Jimmy Fallon’s rapport with his musical guests, though of course Stewart and Colbert sold those, too. FX has subsequently taken a step beyond the innovation that Colbert and Stewart represented with Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell, the intensely political African-American comic who honed his act in the Bay Area stand-up scene before moving to late-night, where he’s ditched the suits and the presumption of white dudeness, and brought along correspondents who don’t look much like the men in ties who largely dominate Stewart and Colbert’s shows, too, like lesbian comic Janine Brito.

And Bell isn’t the only person of color in late night in recent years, nor is Brito the only woman or only non-straight person. Vary called out George Lopez’s TBS show, cancelled when Conan O’Brien moved to the network, as an example of innovation both with hosts and format. T.J. Holmes is attempting to make a go of it on BET. And Arsenio Hall is rolling out a new late-night talk show that will be distributed through CBS syndication sometime later this fall. Wanda Skyes had her shot at late-night hosting in 2010. Chelsea Handler and Kathy Griffin have hosted late-night talk shows, if not the conventional late-night variety standards. And over at Bravo, Andy Cohen has built a successful franchise out of his Watch What Happens Live recap show, which features Bravo talent as well as other guests, and is known for a boozy, playful atmosphere—one of his bits of schtick is to have visitors play games with Cohen as a way of loosening them up. The fact that show has worked is one of the reasons we’ve seen things like The Talking Dead on AMC: as is the case with political shows, other niche late-night programming that lets fans process ideas they’re intensely interested in has become a viable alternative to the general interest show. But these alternative experiments in late night programming seem to be off in their own world, rather than acting as a farm team for the existing business model, which means that diversity of format as well as of hosts is off percolating elsewhere, rather than rising to the networks.

Laura Bennett is right, of course, that the internet and the possibility of content going viral has had an enormous influence on the way late night shows structure their bits—it’s almost a reverse response to Daniel Tosh’s clip shows, where the late night hosts want to manufacture the videos that go huge, rather than discuss and drive traffic to someone else’se work. Jimmy Fallon’s recruitment of The Roots was probably the biggest staffing innovation in recent years, a reason to come for the house band rather than just the host, and in keeping with Fallon’s determination to be a musical tastemaker, rather than simply responding to musical trends. It makes sense that late night hosts would want to be drivers of the culture, active aggregators and curators, rather than simply party hosts riding the hot new trend—you’ve got a better argument that audiences should tune in during the time slot if they might witness the emergence of Odd Future on the national stage, rather than if your’e going to interview Tyler The Creator six months after he emerges onto the national consciousness. But I’m curious to see what different kinds of hosts would choose to elevate if given the chance, and curious for someone who’s going to offer a new way to stage those debuts. Suits, desks, and white guys are all fine on their own. But they aren’t the only way to do things.

This post discusses plot points from the March 24 episode of The Walking Dead.

Back at the mid-season finale, I suggested that the stakes in the conflict between Rick and the Governor were essentially the rebirth of democracy after modern civilization’s collapse world: Rick was fighting for an open, cooperative society, while the Governor represented a torturous, authoritarian alternative. That subtext became the text this week with Rick’s big speech renouncing his “this is not a democracy” diktat. Moreover, the episode made a beautiful case for why we should care so much about saving democracy through the unlikeliest of tragic heroes — Merle Dixon.

Let us first sing the praises of Michael Rooker, whose acting was critical helping “This Sorrowful Life” soar well above last week’s atrocious “Prey.” Rooker sold Merle’s transformation from a monster who, in a nice bit of staging, was quite literally shrouded in darkness to a man in existential crisis to, finally, someone willing to sacrifice his own life in a very nearly successful attempt to save the world by killing the Governor. It isn’t easy turn an inveterate racist into someone whose death the audience mourns, but Rooker’s command over Merle’s crisis of conscience, his ability to convey the nuances of the man’s path towards his one good decision is what made that last moment, where Darryl had to butcher a zombiefied Merle, so utterly heartwrenching.
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This post discusses plot points from the March 17 episode of The Walking Dead.

What a mess.

While the last two weeks of The Walking Dead saw the show restored to the first half of the season’s strength, this Sunday’s offering (“Prey”) was a giant leap backwards, marking the worst episode to date of the already-uneven post-break batch. But “Prey” was, at least, a clarifying failure. The episode was a case study in how a show loses dramatic force when it forgets its thematic core — a problem that became clear during the Governor’s full-on slasher turn Sunday night.

Let me first back up and run through what, thematically speaking, made The Walking Dead‘s best moments tick. Back in Season One, and in this season’s exceptional “Clear,” it was existential horror. The show’s harshly bright aesthetic, shot through with haunting images, hammered home the sheer terror of being alone (or nearly alone) in a world newly become alien and dangerous. The central antagonists weren’t, properly speaking, characters: herds of walkers, the need for scarce supplies like food and clean water, and psychologically coping with a scary, dirty, and uncertain way of life constituted the core challenges for the crew of survivors.

At the beginning of Season 3, the show broke firmly with that approach, backgrounding the zombie apocalypse and placing the problem of internecine human warfare in a world without a central authority front and center. It was, at first, a well executed switch — it forced the characters to confront basic moral dilemmas (like “who should we care for?”) and develop what is, for all intents and purposes, a foreign policy. The Walking Dead episodes that succeeded here were less about individualized terror, and more about the moral and political challenges people face when attempting to create a stable social order out of whole cloth.

The Governor was the key to executing this thematic shift. He was the show’s first villain in the most classic sense (no, Merle and Shane don’t count), but what made him so effective is that it wasn’t always obvious that he was “evil” in a similarly traditional fashion. Sure, the Governor was always a brutal, authoritarian, but before the mid-season break, it was possible to read his actions (save one) as rational responses to an irrational world. Killing everyone who could pose a threat to your group is an extreme, but not necessarily crazy, response to the fact that you can’t trust others to remain peaceful. His authoritarian decision-making procedure can be seen as the extension of Rick’s “this isn’t a democracy” declaration to a larger community. The challenge to Rick’s group (and the viewers) was to make the case that there was, in fact, something morally wrong with the Governor and to develop the appropriate response to the political challenge he poses.
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This post discusses plot points from the March 10 episode of The Walking Dead.

Before this Sunday, the Walking Dead had seemed to suggest the brewing war between the two factions was nearly as much a tragic systemic failure as it was a byproduct of deep-seated hatred created by a long history of violence.

After Rick and the Governor’s meeting this week, the answer is clear: hatred is the root cause, but not in the simple, “out for revenge” way one might have assumed. Sunday’s episode was a lesson in how history and memory become overlaid with moral meaning, shaping how we perceive the world and decide to act when faced with hard choices.

We like to think of history as something clinical: people look at the past, scientifically discern its lessons, and distill them down to principles that guide them going forward. Milton was the night’s avatar of clinical history, awkwardly asking Hershel if he could see his amputated stump because “it’s important data” for future generations studying the zombie apocalypse. Hershel’s partly creeped out (“I’m not showing you my leg”), partly amused (“at least buy me a drink first”) reaction captures this approach’s alienness. People don’t see themselves as data; writing a history isn’t the same as compiling social science data.
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This post discusses plot points from the March 3 episode of The Walking Dead.

In both style and substance, The Walking Dead returned to its roots this Sunday, bringing back both the haunting aesthetic and a critical, seemingly forgotten character from the show’s premiere. The result was the most effective episode since the midseason break, a psychological horror show that tells us the worst thing about the apocalypse is being alone.

Only three of the regular characters (Rick, Carl, and Michonne) appeared tonight, as the show abandoned its standard whole-cast format to spotlight their mission to acquire the guns from Rick’s police station to sustain their war effort against the Governor. The more focused plotting facilitated the sort of nuanced character work that had been missing in the past few episodes: Michonne gets to display some welcome droll humor and Carl gets to step out of the “kid badass” archetype to remind us (through a sentimental quest for a photo of his family) that he is, in fact, still a kid.

But this was Morgan’s (Lennie James) episode, returning for the first time since Rick parted ways with Morgan and his son Duane in the first episode. As Rick himself notices, it’s hard not to see Morgan as Rick’s double, but while Rick suggests he and Morgan been through the same travails (“Things went bad for me, things went bad for you”), he’s wrong. While Rick found a community, Morgan and his son trod a solitary path. And that made all the difference: people need each other, often in more ways than we know.

Morgan lost Duane to an attack by his zombified wife (who, back in the first episode, Morgan couldn’t bring himself to shoot). Alone, Morgan spun further and further away from reality, and by the time we see him again he’s surrounded by an unnecessarily enormous weapons stockpile and walls defaced with disturbing, incomprehensible graffiti (“sometimes interrupt with the start;” “we PULL upon detention”). It wasn’t just seeing his wife devour his son that drove him over the edge; we know from real people that solitary living is the death of sanity. Terry Anderson, a journalist kidnapped and held in solitary confinement in 1985, described the experience as the destruction of thought, happiness, and human experience:

The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.

Without people to tether him, Morgan snapped. The apocalypse remakes the whole world as a giant solitary cell, a hellscape that slowly but inexorably pushes one’s sanity to the breaking point.

Though recent research has proven that being held alone (quite literally) damages the human brain, the insight that people need each other is old. In his seminal Politics, Aristotle famously defines humans as “political animals,” capable of flourishing only in a community. Communities make people better: we define right and wrong for each other, while our moral faculties collapse when left alone. “For man, when perfected, is the best of animals,” Aristotle argues, “but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.”

The difference between Rick and Morgan’s lives could be Aristotle’s exhibit A. While Morgan nearly killed Rick (twice!) for essentially no reason, Rick nursed him back to sanity. Morgan, who when introduced in season one appeared morally exemplary, had lost his ethical compass. “People like you, the good people? They always die,” he tells Rick. The survival of Rick’s group says otherwise, and goes a long way towards showing why, despite the dangers of war with other groups, the members of Rick’s little band need their little city after all.

While the dangers of holding people alone have been well-known since Aristotle’s time, the US prison system still routinely locks people away in solitary. Over 80,000 people are currently living in what’s euphemistically called “segregated housing,” including children and at least one person who’s been held alone for 42 years. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has advised against extraditing suspects to the US who will likely be held in solitary, on grounds that, as you might have guessed, it’s torture.

In a world without these kinds of legal structures, there’s also a more obvious need to have others around. At the beginning of Sunday’s episode, we see a man sprinting after Rick’s car desperately calling for help while they coldly drive by. At the end, they come across to his bloody backpack, and stop only to scavenge his supplies.

Sometimes, hell is the lack of other people.

This post discusses plot points from the February 24 episode of The Walking Dead.

The Walking Dead took a break from the last few weeks of moral dilemmas this Sunday, but it didn’t leave hefty topics behind. “I Ain’t A Judas” was a meditation on the causes of war and peace; why do groups of people sometimes organize to kill each other while others coexist?

Zombie fiction has proven fertile grounds for analysts of world politics. Dan Drezner, a professor of international relations, has written a widely acclaimed book using zombies to explain international relations theory (his conclusions are summarized here). While Drezner’s work focuses on how currently-existing governments would respond to a zombie outbreak, The Walking Dead asks us how the proto-governments that form in a world of total social breakdown would relate to each other.

In keeping with the show’s broadly morbid aesthetic, Sunday’s episode gives us a grim answer. The prisoners and Woodburyites appear to be dead set on marching down the road to total war despite the best efforts of Andrea, who embarks on a lonely peace mission to the prison against the Governor’s wishes. “I Ain’t A Judas” suggests Andrea’s quest was doomed to failure; the anarchic, dangerous structure of the world and the history between the groups seems to have made deadly violence a certainty.

The first, and most important, reason that war is coming is the nasty combination of stakes and poor information. In keeping with what’s called a “offensive realist” theory of international relations, neither Rick nor the Governor knows enough about the other side’s capabilities or intentions to safely stay off war footing. Rick’s poor excuses for spies, Merle and Andrea, suggest the Governor is powerful and well-armed. Indeed, given Merle’s depiction of the Governor as omnipresent tactical genius, Rick is getting the sense that moving away from war, even for a moment, could expose them. The Governor, having already lost a number of people to Rick’s raids, begins drafting child soldiers. For both sides, preparing for violence is the only rational thing to do.
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This post discusses plot points from the February 17 episode of The Walking Dead.

Is morality a luxury? One might think that, in a world overrun by zombies, setting up an ethical code should take a backseat to survival. But the strongest moments in Sunday’s othewise lackluster Walking Dead made the opposite case, using a breakdown in the relationship between brothers Merle and Darryl as a case study in why morality would and should be a central concern in a post-apocalyptic world.

The brothers begin feuding in the woods, as the meager spoils of their hunting efforts lead Darryl to question whether they shouldn’t make a beeline back for the well-stocked prison. But the real rift emerges when they spy a small group of survivors fighting a losing battle against a group of walkers. Darryl sees people in trouble who need his help. But Merle sees useless dead weight to whom he owes nothing. “They ain’t never cooked me a meal,” he sniffs.

However close Darryl and Merle may have been at one point (even morally speaking, as they apparently planned to rob the prison group when they first encountered it), the conflict over the embattled group on the highway reveals how far they’ve grown. Darryl believes human life is something worth protecting irrespective of utility. Like a normal person, he believes leaving people to die when you can save them to be a grave moral ill. It’s such an important part of his moral character that he barely hesitates to run in, crossbow blazing, and save the day. Merle is left little choice but to follow his brother but, in a nice touch, he saunters towards the battle in a fashion resembling nothing more than a walker’s shuffle, his move away from humanity reflected in his actual movement.

Darryl finally snaps after Merle attempts to stick up the terrified survivors for food. Demanding “an enchilada” from the Spanish-speaking “beaners,” Merle’s moral ugliness is on full display, and Darryl can’t take it anymore. He points his crossbow at his brother, demanding Meryl let them go and deciding to march back to the prison irrespective of what his brother wants. Merle’s Randian selfishness has made him toxic, so untrustworthy and morally repellent that his own brother can’t stand to be alone with him.

The underlying point here is that morality isn’t just a luxury in this world: it’s something people need, both a survival adaptation and, more importantly, one of the only things that makes their apocalyptic life worth living. Last week, it seemed like family ties were the most powerful motivating force for survivors, shredding group bonds as if they were paper. But Darryl’s move back to the prison suggests ethics run deeper than blood. Merle’s utter lack of humanity makes it impossible for Darryl to depend on him; he needs to be with people who place the same value on his life as he places on theirs to survive in a world where no one can really provide for themselves.

In a clever bit of dialogue, this point is directly connected to Merle’s racism. When Darryl sets off for the prison, Merle pleads with Darryl that he might not be welcome: “I tried to kill that black bitch…damn near killed that Chinese kid.” Darryl’s pithy response — “he’s Korean!” — points to the fact that he’s bothered to get to know these people, while Merle’s refusal to see them as anything other than stereotyped cartoons keeps him out of a community defined by shared trust. Human kindness isn’t a relic of a bygone world. It’s a necessity.

But Darryl’s moral revolt isn’t just about the fact that he can’t trust Merle in a tight spot. Darryl appears to simply not want a life in which he either leaves innocent people to die or thieves from them. In his mind, Merle has abandoned the very things that make life good and valuable, the values and beliefs that make humans noble and underpinned their brotherly love itself. “I may be the one walking away,” Darryl tells his brother, “but you’re the one who’s leaving.” As they’ve both returned to the prison by the end of the episode, the central question going forward is whether Merle can return from this moral exile as well.

This post discusses plot points from the February 10 episode of The Walking Dead.

If the first half of the Walking Dead’s third season was about defining morality as care for your group, the midseason premiere took a step back to ask “what makes you part of the group?” In both the prison and Woodbury, the consequences of war shook the foundations of group structure, revealing seemingly unbreakable bonds to be fragile and calling into question the leadership structures everyone had been taking for granted.

The episode picks up right where the midseason finale left off, with Darryl and Merle set to fight for their lives and Woodbury’s amusement. The Governor’s decision to pit the brothers against each other gives Merle an opportunity to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s a Woodbury man. Reassuring whispers to Darryl aside, it’s not clear whether he would have committed fratricide in a bid to rejoin the Governor’s team had it not been for Rick, Maggie, and Glenn’s assault weapon-equipped intervention.

But it turns out the Prison Expeditionary Force’s efforts were for naught. A rescued Merle proves as poisonous as he was in Season One — his racism reemerges, asking Darryl if he had “gone native” when he sees Michonne with the group, and he sets about spilling everyone’s Woodbury secrets (Andrea is there!) in the fashion most likely to set off a civil war. Rick, rightly recognizing the threat to be too grave, kicks Merle to the curb, but loses Darryl in the process. That Darryl won’t abandon the brother who almost killed him for the group that saved his life shows just how circumstantial the group bonds are. Blood trumps from the moment, though it seems from the preview that Darryl and Merle won’t be having an easy time of it alone in the walker-infested wilderness.
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