Over at New York Magazine, Heather Havrilesky has a great piece that posits an answer to one of the things that gets me twitchiest about post-apocalypse stories: the lack of an explanation for how everything got so terrible in the first place. She argues that the point of shows like The Walking Dead or novels like Colson Whitehead’s Year Zero is to clear away some of the complications of modern society and to let us revel in the possibilities of stark choices or stark scenarios: the opportunity to wander around a city alone, unencumbered by security guards or a need to justify turning up someplace, the possibility of nobly sacrificing yourself for your baby, the opportunity to demonstrate your love and commitment to someone you love who is in danger in a visceral, even violent way. She writes:

The focus of these novels isn’t on the shape and form of the catastrophe; those details are often pretty vague. The apocalypse mostly serves as a way to turn up the contrast on a hero’s solitary battle to adapt and sally forth. Stripping away the complications and distractions of the modern world, what is our protagonist left with? The same melancholy and longing he or she always had, of course, but with far more of an excuse to feel these heavy emotions at every turn. Instead of injecting desperation, romance, solitude, and morbidity into a banal tale, these qualities are encoded in the apocalyptic novel’s DNA, minimizing the trivial clutter and heightening the stakes. Values and ideas about morality are stripped down to their essential nature: Kill or be killed? Conform and tolerate oppression or escape and risk death? Somehow, though, even in older works like Ballard’s The Drowned World, such disturbing questions are savored and relished. There’s an obvious delight taken in the awfulness of the transformed planet. In his survey of science fiction, A Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss refers to this tendency of authors to concoct enviable end times as “the cozy catastrophe.” As others suffer and die around him, our hero runs wild, enjoying the fruits of the worldwide holocaust.

This fascinates me in part because I think my reaction to post-apocalypse fiction, and really, all sorts of futuristic narratives, is to be more interested in how we got there than what we do when we’re there. I love the first two books in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy because they’re all about the choices the characters make to extend their lifespans, to terraform Mars, to embrace new religions, and ultimately, to declare independence from Earth, but I’m relatively bored by the third novel, which is about all the sex and drama a new generation has once the future’s finally arrived. Reading The Hunger Games, I always want to know how the Capitol seized enough power to bring the Districts to heel enough to set up the Games in the first place. I wonder about first contact and the Bugger Wars in Ender’s Game, though I think Orson Scott Card is smart enough to weave a lot of backstory about the way the world changed into his story about what it’s become now. I love Contagion so much because it’s the rare, beautifully optimistic movie about how we avert a post-apocalypse, rather than bowing down to the inevitability of disaster.

Coming to the end of my day of writing on Monday, I realized something: I was exhausted by my last several days of watching television. It’s not just that Sunday has become so jam-packed with strong, interesting shows that my weekends feel more like a build-up to my craziest work day than a chance to relax, or the fact that I’m in the middle of a barrage of mid-season finales. It’s that that almost all television now, particularly in drama, seems to be operating in a sphere so intense that it’s impossible to relax—and sometimes impossible to watch, or even to follow what’s happening on-screen. Every show has a conspiracy. Shocking violence has become the norm, and seems to be escalating quickly. The stakes are constantly so high in every episode of television that plot is often swamping strong character dynamics. It made me wonder if our television needs to take a chill pill for a while, if only so we can start thinking more carefully about what kinds of storytelling tools are most effective.

The shows that got me thinking about this phenomenon were Scandal and Homeland, two shows that purport to operate in very different environments, network and cable, soap and anti-hero drama, but this week had a plot element in common. It’s not as if political assassination attempts are taboo on television: West Wing shot President Bartlet in its “In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen” episode, though the show made clear relatively quickly that the President himself would survive, and drew much of its drama from the grave threat to the life of one of his chief aides. But in that case, it felt like assassination was reserved for a moment of extreme gravity in the narrative arc of the show. In four days last week, we had two shows that had as their plot points attempts to kill a high official of the United States government. On last Thursday’s episode of Scandal, President Fitzgerald Grant was shot on the way to his birthday party, in what seems to have been a plot set in motion by his wife—it was the presidency as soap opera subject. And then on Sunday’s episode of Homeland, former prisoner of war Nicholas Brody, who has declined to murder a bunker full of government officials, got a chance to kill just one, the Vice President of the United States, the man responsible for the drone strike that killed Brody’s surrogate son and the biological son of the super-terrorist Abu Nazir. Last year, Brody’s decision not to commit an assassination was one of the most exciting episodes of television on any network.

It’s not only that more than one show is now fantasizing about killing high officials, a highly sensitive subject, that diminished the power of Homeland. It’s that the conspiracy around Brody has gotten significantly more complex. There are more people in play on the ground, journalist Roya Hamad, a munitions expert and his team, Abu Nazir himself, who seems to have strolled over the border. The scheme is grander, an attack on a welcome home ceremony for Marines, in front of Roya’s camera crew. The shock of Brody’s true nature would be even bigger now that he’s a Congressman. All of these elements amp up the magnitude of the plot against America. But they also introduce the possibility of inconsistency, implausibility, of error, and of emotional discontinuity, or losing track of characterization. And yet people continually seem to think these sorts of escalations are worth it, to believe that plausible character development and the emotional stakes that come along with being a human in a high-pressure situation aren’t actually enough to sustain our interest, and there has to be a giant conspiracy (as was the case with Lost Resort and remains the case with Revenge) or mystery or the promise of bloody destruction to keep us in our seats. It’s too bad, because some of my favorite shows—Sons of Anarchy with the cartels and the Irish, Homeland with Nazir, and Revenge with its shadowy initiative—have spent a lot more time on conspiracies that seem like they must eventually be dissolved or dismantled than on their main characters emotions, and have done so at moments when the actors on each shows are hitting high-water marks.

And it’s not just complicated serialized storytelling that can be getting in the way of experiencing genuine emotion on shows. One of the things that’s marked the search for increased intensity in our television watching is increasingly escalating violence, disgustingness as a signpost of how serious a situation. In 18 hours yesterday, I saw two of the grossest things I’ve ever watched on television, Glenn yanking an arm bone out of a zombie’s rotting flesh on the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead (I couldn’t make it through the rest of the episode) and a scene from an upcoming episode of television that was much more viscerally upsetting for taking place in a non-genre setting. This is not to say that grotesque violence can’t be powerful signposting: the latter incident is so powerful and so keeping in character that I’m still having a physical reaction to my revulsion hours later. And for those of you who know what’s coming in the Song of Fire and Ice universe, I’m bracing myself for some truly horrific things coming down the pike in Game of Thrones that will literally test my ability to keep my eyes on the screen as they occur. But I’m curious about the extent to which it’s actually necessary to holding mass interest.
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The rotting zombies on The Walking Dead, foul as they are, have nothing on the show’s decayed human souls. The third season of The Walking Dead has been about what violence and scarcity do to our society’s moral codes — how our sphere of ethical concern narrows to a pinhead as conditions become dire. Last night’s midseason finale hammered the point home, using the battle between Rick’s band of survivors and the Governor’s to examine the hows and whys of moral decline after the apocalypse.

As The Walking Dead becomes less of a turgid zombie soap, and more about the conflict between bands of humans in a dangerous, anarchic world, its central question has become less “how do we survive?” and more “who do we want to survive?” Each major turning point in the midseason finale — Rick’s choice to spare Michonne, Darryl’s decision to turn back for his brother Merle, Carl’s intervention on behalf of a new group of survivors, and the Governor’s big speech casting Merle out of respectable Woodbury society — are all about defining who matters morally and what the answer to that question means for the people asking it.

The Governor’s answer to this question is the simplest and most inhuman: kill everyone who isn’t one of His People. “We’ll have to take them out, let the biters move back in,” he says of the prison group, comparing them to the National Guardsmen he massacred in cold blood at the beginning of the season. While Rick is more compassionate, treating people outside his group as objects of suspicion rather than targets to slaughter, his worldview also centers on a stark us-and-them distinction. “If this goes south, we’re cutting her loose,” he says of Michonne, who has yet to earn ingroup status despite putting herself on the line to rescue Glenn and Maggie from the Governor’s clutches.

It’s the reversion to this tribalism that makes The Walking Dead‘s apocalypse so chillinglly real. Modern moral progress, as Peter Singer argues, has proceeded by expanding the sphere of moral concern to an ever-larger group of people. People may have once only cared about those who share their nationality, race, or gender, but as Enlightenment ideals about universal human rights took root, humans have moved inexorably towards treating everyone as equally worthy of moral concern. The Walking Dead‘s third season has suggested that, when you demolish a stable society, this purported moral progress will have proved a smokescreen, and that our enlightened selves are just as brutally tribal as our ancestors.

The moral drama in the struggle between the two groups of survivors, then, isn’t over the appropriateness of groupism in the shadow of the End. Instead, it’s about how we rebuild our moral code from the ashes. The difference between the Governor and Rick rests mostly in how they make decisions, and not the decisions they make.

The Governor is, for all his pieties, a dictator. He alone makes every critical political decision, hiding critical information from his subjects to ensure that they always come to see his own righteousness. His labelling of Rick’s group as “terrorists” who “want to destroy us” depends on Woodbury’s residents not knowing that the attack was really a rescue mission, a worrying suggestion that War on Terrorism secrecy may be dulling our own moral sense. What seems right in Woodbury, in short, is whatever the Governor says is right.

Though Rick declared that “this is not a democracy” at the end of the second season, his decisionmaking has become more cooperative, depending on input and informed consent from all the group members. When Rick asks Darryl to escape with the group and leave Merle behind, he gives him reasons to so, appealing rather than ordering. When the Governor instructs his lover Andrea to stay away from the battle, he dismisses her questions with a curt “do as I ask.”

So though Rick is the clear leader of his group, their moral code is determined by mutual consent and deliberation rather than dictatorial fiat. Indeed, Carl’s suggestion that Rick give up his leadership post in the preview hints that the group’s moral democracy may bleed into an actual one. Under the Governor’s rule, that would be unthinkable.

In the absence of actual, non-Sandy news today, the conversation has turned to whether the approaching hurricane will end up influencing the presidential election, and if so, in which direction. I can’t pretend to any insight into whether Sandy will hurt Obama, help Romney, or what impact losing a day or two of early voting will have on either campaign. But this conversation did get me thinking about something that’s always bothered me about post-apocalyptic fiction: why there are so few central governments playing major roles after huge disasters.

I understand that it’s narratively quite exciting to explore landscapes that are anarchic, the psyches of men like the Governor in The Walking Dead who rise up and assume dictatorial control over small communities, or the group decision-making of a place like Haven, the refuge in Justin Cronin’s vampire novel, The Passage, that’s struck a terrible bargain to stay alive. The post-apocalypse is an opportunity for ordinary men and women to test themselves, and to have opportunities to become heroes, to take up arms and reveal their inner badasses, to stand up for decency and civilization in the absence of other structures supporting those values. We like watching Rick Grimes rise to the occasion, to be surprised by Amy Wolgast’s survival and what it means about the resilience of little girls, be they enhanced with vampiric powers or no.

But in apocalyptic scenarios, established governments have enormous advantages, both in beating back whatever dreadful things are coming down the transom, and in consolidating communities after the worst dies down. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, which has really settled in as one of my favorite movies of the past couple of years, is a terrific example of this: as a dreadful, flu-like illness spreads across the globe, individual government employees who go out into the field are vulnerable, but the bureaucracy takes great care to preserve the health and well-being of its core leadership. They get vaccines first. The chain of command both restores order and helps make citizens dependent on the government. People who are frightened for their lives may raid pharmacies and loot their neighbors’ houses, but they’re not exactly likely to storm National Guard barricades of the highways, and they may protest the order in which vaccines are distributed, but they’re unlikely to totally jeopardize vaccine production or their chances of getting their own treatment, much less their chance of being defended against a terrible and rising tide. The Passage at least has a nod to that—the surviving colony is founded by FEMA—but like most post-apocalyptic stories, it skips over the question of how the central government fell in the first place. It’s too bad that most stories try to get away from national, or even local, governments survive or fall as fast as possible. There’s a lot of interesting storytelling to be done about what it takes to lead in crisis, what it takes to resist the temptation to seize dictatorial power, what it means to fail, and what happens when bureaucrats who have been invisible for much of their careers suddenly become the people who stand between a wider population and disaster.

If you’ve ever wanted to test out how you’d fare in the post-apocalypse, Joss Whedon is here with the case that Mitt Romney is the candidate for you!

I feel like in the zombie apocalypse, Bain Capital would probably survive to restructure the remaining human sanctuaries. Can’t you just see the Governor from The Walking Dead calling for help in making his crackdown on Woodbury, Georgia more effective? Even zombie hordes can’t stop private equity.

The Directors Guild of America has released its annual report on who directs television series, and the results are not exactly promising—and they illustrate one reason it’s hard for women and people of color to make gains in the industry. The percentage of episodes of television in the 2011-2012 television season directed by white men rose from 72 percent to 73 percent. White women directed 11 percent of episodes, the same as last year. And women of color and men of color basically traded work: men of color directed 13 percent of episodes, down from 14 percent last year. And women of color directed 4 percent of episodes, up from 3 percent in the previous season. In other words, the amount of work available to white men is relatively secure. And men and women of color aren’t making gains relative to the whole: they’re trading off gains with each other.

But it’s also worth noting which shows are doing better than average, some of which are predictable, and some of which are not. The Game, created by Mara Brock Akil, had 100 percent of its episodes directed by women or people of color, as did Single Ladies, which was created by Stacy Littlejohn, and produced by Queen Latifah’s Flavor Unit company. Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal clocked in with 67 percent female or minority directors, Nurse Jackie with 60, Girls with 44 percent, and Don’t Trust The B—- In Apartment with 23 percent. If male showrunners are having trouble finding women and people of color to direct their television shows, they might do well to ask the women around them who are creating television shows who they hire.

But it’s not only shows created by and about women who have done well hiring women and people of color to direct episodes. 36 percent of the last season’s episodes of Sons of Anarchy, a show created by Kurt Sutter, himself a white guy, were directed by women like Gwyneth Horder-Payton, a veteran of The Shield, Paris Barclay, who won two Emmys for NYPD Blue, and Mario Van Peebles. Grimm, created by three men, had women and people of color behind the camera for 48 percent of its first-season episodes. And The Walking Dead, the bloody zombie show based on the comic books by Robert Kirkman, had 53 percent of its episodes directed by women and minorities under the leadership of Gale Anne Hurd in its second season after Frank Darabont left the show. Being a lady doesn’t mean you can handle veiled autobiography, or stories about dating and sex. Women can do the tough stuff, too. And some men seem to recognize it.

When AMC announced earlier this week that Breaking Bad will premiere its fifth season on July 15, it was met with so much rejoicing that many missed the second half of the press release: AMC will also be premiering the first of eight episodes in a new reality series called Small Town Security, about “a family-owned private security company in Georgia.”

Even for AMC, which has made several high-profile missteps over the past few years, this seems like a strange detour. Over the past year, the network has dabbled in both talk shows and reality shows with Talking Dead, Comic Book Men, and The Pitch. But those series were clearly piggybacking on the success of AMC’s two most prominent (and most profitable) successes: The Walking Dead and Mad Men.

It’s admittedly harder to make a reality series about manufacturing meth, though I’d definitely tune in for a Breaking Bad talk show (Talking Bad? Breaking Chat? Just spitballing here). But Small Town Security is AMC’s first step toward standalone reality programming.

The conventional narrative – and in my opinion, the correct one – is that AMC grew too fast, too soon. After quietly rolling along as the premiere channel for commercial-filled American movie “classics” for decades, the network experimented with original content and hit two unprecedented home runs: Mad Men and Breaking Bad. But quality costs money, and each of AMC’s attempts to curb the costs of its original programming resulted in an embarrassing loss of face, from protracted salary and creative arguments with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner to rumblings about Breaking Bad moving to FX, amid rumors that AMC was demanding a shortened (read: cheaper) final season.

I’m a TV critic, not a businessman, and I’m well aware that my priorities are different than the priorities of AMC executives. But I can’t see how it’s a good idea to invest in reality programming that has no ties to AMC’s flagship series. Small Town Security is being developed by producers Ken Druckerman and Banks Tarver, whose biggest success is VH1’s so-bad-it’s-awful Mob Wives. The sky certainly isn’t falling – AMC has already greenlit pilots for two new scripted dramas – but I don’t know any Breaking Bad fans who will stick around to watch a reality show that would seem much more at home on Discovery or A&E.

High-quality television obviously costs money, and if the price of Mad Men and Breaking Bad means filling other time slots with cheap-to-produce supplemental content, I can live with it. But it wasn’t so long ago that the network was investing in genres that no other network would touch, which led to successes like The Walking Dead and failures like the miniseries remake of The Prisoner. I don’t see any of that pilgrim spirit in AMC’s latest moves. That may be good business. But let’s not forget that AMC’s willingness to invest real money in something risky and brave is how we got Mad Men and Breaking Bad in the first place.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 27 episode of The Walking Dead.

I’ll admit to having felt like this season of The Walking Dead has spent a lot of time with the characters, human and formerly human, stewing in the same juices: the endless hunt for Sophia, the secrets of Hershel’s farm, the insecurities of Dale, Glen, Darryl and Andrea, the question of whether Rick or Shane is better suited to lead and to love Lori. Fortunately, the stunning final scene of this episode tied all of those threads neatly together. After massacring the walkers in the barn, who they’ve convinced themselves aren’t human, one more emerges: Sophia, changed and ravening. And Rick finds a bridge between Shane’s harsh moral view of the apocalypse and Hershel’s idealism, shaped by isolation from the outside world, and shoots the girl in an act of self-protection and mercy.

I thought the scene did a wonderful job of giving everyone a human moment that addressed, if not resolved, their arc. Glenn steps up to protect Maggie, and she protects her father, grieving with him, but doesn’t try to stop her lover. Darryl, after rejecting Carol’s profession of affection with a brutal, “Leave me be. Stupid bitch,” earlier in the episode, holds her as she sees what’s become of her daughter, and as she witnesses her death. Carl, who told his mother, “I’m not leaving until we find Sophia…I was thinking, she’s going to like it here, this place. It could be a home,” who tried on a man’s cursing to go with a man’s hat earlier in the episode, is reduced to childhood by his friend’s transformation and execution, sobbing in Lori’s arms. Andrea steps up to the front lines with Shane, unaware that Shane’s emotions and his move to start the massacre are deeply engaged with Lori, who is off to the side here. T-Dog is, for once, unconflicted and part of the firing line. And Dale is late to the slaughter, protected from his own dehumanization by fate if not design.

So is the conclusion that Rick is right? Do the reasons you do things matter as much as the fact that you do them? Does Hershel’s determination to see the humanity in the walkers redeem the risks he’s taken, his denial of outside reality? Does the murder Rick commits out of a profound sympathy for the little girl his community’s lost mean something different than the brutal executions carried out by the other members of that community? And does Lori’s declaration to Shane that “Even if it’s yours, it’s not gonna be yours. And it’s never gonna be yours. And there’s nothing you can do to change that,” actually make it so? The Walking Dead is very good at posing moral questions, though I’m not sure it’s as good at knowing what its own answers to them are. Even if the show doesn’t reveal them to us all at once, I’d like a sense that they have a coherent and decisive worldview.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 20 episode of The Walking Dead.

Last night on The Walking Dead, the prospect of new life, whether in the form of a pregnancy, a revitalized sex drive, or the dream of a cure for “Mom. Sean. Mr. and Mrs. Fisher. Lacy. Duncan,” got everyone in trouble.

First, there’s the question of the walkers in the barn, fed by chickens and kept safe. Dale, providing at least half-successfully wily, lets Hershel know he knows what’s up without implicating Glen, only to find himself in a moral debate with their host. Hershel’s upset by the walker’s death at the well, suggesting it was coarsening. “You killed a person,” he tells Dale. “We don’t shoot sick people…My wife and stepson are in that barn. They’re people.” But he has the benefit of isolation, something that still doesn’t quite strike me as plausible. And Maggie has their beliefs on that score challenged when she’s attacked by a walker in the pharmacy and saved only by Glen’s brutal and brutally efficient intervention. But the budding affection between them is too much for her. “You’re smart, you’re a leader, but your friends don’t see it,” Maggie tells Glen. “They don’t want to see it. You’re just their errand boy. Walker in the well? Send Glen down. You’re walker bait.” Rick and his people may be right about what it takes to survive, but Hershel may be right that it’s cost them something along the way.

Then, there’s the matter of Lori’s abortion. Maggie’s right that there’s something horrible about Lori making Glen take risks for her, particularly for something she’s not even sure will work. And I appreciate that the show suggested it would be entirely reasonable for Lori to not want to bring a child into a zombie-ridden world. “I got a deep well to draw on. I still remember joy. But I think Carl’s is already running dry,” she explains. I understand that keeping her pregnant makes the show more complicated and provides a lot of dramatic tension, or as Glen puts it, “You’re pregnant. You need vitamins. Medicine. A nice pillow.” And it’s interesting that the show presented her decision to vomit up the morning-after pills as less rational than trying to go through with an abortion. But it’s still a fairly typical television approach to abortion on television: get absolutely up to the edge of the prospect, then back aggressively away from it.

And then, as Lori decides to have Rick’s child, Shane and Andrea, hyped up by stress, have sex in a car and return to Hershel’s farm changed. What will it mean for Lori, who’s been unable to do the right thing and relinquish her hold over Shane, to see his affections shifted. What will it mean for Dale to have Andrea revitalized, not reliant on him for her ties to life and to the group? In a world dominated by death, the life force, and the hope it engenders, can be awfully dangerous.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 6 episode of The Walking Dead.

I haven’t felt exceptionally engaged by this season of The Walking Dead, but tonight’s episode raised two big questions for me. First, related to the actual events of the show, what’s really going on at Hershel’s farm? And second, at what point the show’s grossness disgusting for the sake of disgustingness?

Given that most American popular culture doesn’t take belief particularly seriously or delve into theology, I’m glad to see the show reveal Hershel’s faith slowly and to set up a genuine religious conflict between him and Rick who, as he puts it, is trying to stay out of the Almighty’s way. There’s an interesting symmetry to the episode, beginning with Hershel’s eulogy for Otis — who Shane killed to save his own life — in which he calls children like Carl “now, more than ever, our most precious asset,” and the end, in which it’s revealed that Lori is pregnant. Have Rick and company stumbled on a theocracy? Will Lori’s pregnancy be the subject of a tussle that brings their uneasy arrangement down? Hershel’s initially reluctant to let them stay, but after Rick appeals to his religious beliefs, telling him, “If you saw how it is out there, you wouldn’t ask,” he relents, on a trial basis, warning Rick that “If you and your people respect my rules, no promises, but I will consider it.”

And that raises an interesting, and perhaps corollary question: why is it that Hershel and his people have been able to remain unmolested? There’s a road that lead to their place. It’s not fortified. There are a lot of humans concentrated there. So what’s going on? What rules could possibly keep zombies out, except for the one living in Well 2? And how did he get there in the first place?

All of these questions are, to me, vastly more interesting than the site of yet another intensely grisly zombie death. When the bloated, shambling corpse breaks in half while they’re trying to haul it out of the well, it’s just disgusting, serving no other purpose other than to illustrate the futility of their effort. And then the show compounds the sickening nature of the scene by having T-Dog bash the zombie’s head to a pulp, a sequence that’s shot in typical detail, rather than a merciful dispatch to the head. I’ve worked hard to get myself used to violence, but I still tend to think that there ought to be some justification for extreme instances of it. And I can’t really see the point: this is pulping someone who was once human just because the outer parameters of the show permit it. I miss the moments from the first season of the show when the actors playing the zombies had a chance to impart a real pathos to their characters, to suggest a strange fragment of humanity remained beneath necrotizing flesh. Those kinds of scene lent a sense of horror, and of choice, to the violence the characters had to admit. Absent that sense of conflict — or a sense that poisoning this one well will have real consequences — scenes like this are just disgusting. They don’t actually mean anything about the dead, or the people forced to dispatch them a second time.