It’s taken me a couple of days to sort through my feelings about Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and not just because the cinematography during the many scenes in it set in automobiles made me carsick. It’s an enormously overstuffed movie, with party sequences that turn on my latent claustrophobia, a cacophonous soundtrack, and so many baubles it’s easy to feel like you’re watching a jewelry store—and there’s a great deal of Tiffany product placement in the movie, particularly of Daisy’s “string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars” and a headpiece she wears to a party—rathe than a movie. But one thing that Luhrmann’s adaptation gets right, and that brings out one of my favorite performances by Leonardo DiCaprio in a long time, is the way Gatsby marries conspicuous consumption, subtle class-based knowledge, and social awkwardness.

One of the best scenes in the movie stems from a situation where Gatsby’s (DiCaprio) set up a situation that’s guaranteed to be awkward: he’s asked Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) to ask his old flame Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), now married to a wealthy boor named Tom (Joel Edgerton) to tea so he can just drop by and reconnect with her. It’s an attempt to be casual in a situation that requires deliberation and a direct approach, and it puts Nick, who is Daisy’s cousin, in an awful social position. As Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki) puts it in Fitzgerald’s novel, “I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night, but she never did. Then he began asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. it was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course I immediately suggested a luncheon in New York—and I thought he’d go mad.”

In the movie, Luhrmann’s delight in conspicuous consumption illustrates just how badly Gatsby is going about orchestrating this meeting. He has Nick’s small house landscaped overnight, then descends on it with a team of umbrella-toting butlers to jam it full of orchids and a multi-layer cake, as if he’s catering a society wedding rather than being invited to his friend’s home. The makeover is simultaneously an insult to Nick and the modest home he’s able to rent and a total sabotage of Gatsby’s attempt at casualness. He’s desperate to seem spontaneous, but he can’t relinquish control of the moment to achieve it, insistent that the moment be perfect, but completely out of things to say. Watching DiCaprio wander in and out of Nick’s house, into the rain and out of the rain, and then totally forget that he’s soaking wet and in a small living room that looks like a greenhouse is a scene as precisely bizarre as the moment demands. And it gets at one of the central reveals of the scene: how little Gatsby is actually thinking about Daisy, or what she might be feeling. The tableau he’s set up is all about him, and he’s shocked when Nick points out part of the reason he’s going wrong. “You’re just embarrased, that’s all,” Nick tells him. “Daisy’s embarrssed too.” “She’s embarrassed?” Gatsby wants to know. He’s assumed both that Daisy is so poised that she couldn’t possibly be rattled, and that his return to her life will be a source of uncomplicated joy. It never seems to have occurred to Gatsby that Daisy is not, in fact, a princess in a tower, and that there might be a reason she hasn’t come looking for him.
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Yesterday, my friend Matt Zeitlin tweeted: “The idea that characters are more realistic or human because they change substantially over time is, when you think about it, pretty LOL.” He was responding, I think, to Monday-morning quarterbacking of the last episode of Mad Men, a show which has given rise to an important and difficult discussion about two questions. First, what do the arcs of characters’ individual growth have to look like for us to invest in them? And second, what stories can we tell about characters who have significantly stagnated, as Don Draper seems to have at the beginning of the sixth season of the show substantially about him, which is scheduled to run for at least seven in total?

The television writer Ken Levine asked this question in a post exploring his reaction to Don Draper, in which he also touched on the way that Girls has doubled down on the unlikability of its characters in that sitcom’s second season. He wrote:

The hope was always that he’d figure it out, finally be comfortable in his own skin, and that all of his good qualities would rise to the surface and he’d become a better father, husband, employer, and stop wearing hats already in 1968. And if he slipped up a little, well – he’s only human and we’ve come to expect that. Betty is trying to throw Hansel & Gretel in an oven, she’s a lost cause. But there was still hope for Don.

Until this season. Now he has a loving wife, a wildly successful career, and he has become television’s biggest prick. It’s not enough he’s cheating on Megan, but he’s doing it with another woman in his building and he’s all buddy-buddy with her husband. They socialize together. He invites the guy to the office. What a fucking asshole! Meanwhile, he tries to destroy his wife’s dreams simply because they inconvenience him. He never talks to his children, even on Christmas. And he’s a cold distant boss to all his employees while still demanding total loyalty from them. Why should I care anymore about this miserable soul? Because he gets to his front door, slumps down to the ground, and feels sad?

And Ryan McGee, in a post about epochs of television that I don’t necessarily agree with otherwise, nailed this point:

That type of growth isn’t always linear, and it isn’t always pretty, and it quite often looks like defeat. Anyone rooting for Carrie and Brody to continue being the only sane thing in an insane world would have a hard time seeing the end of “Homeland”’s second two as progress. But it was still necessary for that to happen, not just for the storytelling of the show but also their growth as individuals. Hannah slipped something fierce after telling Joshua that she actually wanted to be happy, but that doesn’t mean her reunion with Adam at the end of the season was the end point to her ultimate journey. Boyd Crowder sees his dreams apparently squashed at the end of the fourth season of “Justified,” but neither he nor Raylan Givens traverse in pure misery. Both see a light at the end of the tunnel. They just are fantastically good at tripping themselves up on the way towards it.

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The Week’s entertainment editor Scott Meslow was kind enough to sit down with me to record an episode of Bloggingheads that touched on two subjects dear to my heart: Game of Thrones and Mad Men:

In particular we talked about the idea that television can be a novel, an idea popularized during the heyday of shows like The Wire and The Sopranos. I absolutely agree that television shows can function like novels, in that they can tell long-arc stories, develop characters in a rich way, and play with large themes. But there are technological divides that separate what they can do. In a book, you can stay within the medium and flip back and forth if you don’t remember who a character is, or need to check back in on an event that happened previously. Increasingly, large books hold character guides and world maps. The entire universe of the story is there in a single volume. And that means you can throw an enormous amount of material at a reader. But in a television show, if the world gets big enough, you may need to venture outside of the medium to refresh yourself, whether you’re checking Wikipedia for a character name, switching disks to see an old scene, or skimming through Netflix to find the right moment. If you can’t remember something, you may have to break the spell.

And I wonder if Game of Thrones, which has pulled together an enormous number of characters in a book, may be reaching the limits of the extent to which a television show can act like a novel. Alan Sepinwall, whose review of the third season we discussed in this episode, noted in that piece that “On The Wire, for instance, characters frequently crossed paths, and when they didn’t, you could tell how one person’s actions were affecting someone else far away. On Boardwalk Empire, the narrative strands don’t always seem clearly tied together at first, but they inevitably come together in satisfying fashion by season’s end. Both Martin and Game of Thrones are playing a longer game than that.” And I think that long game poses challenges. It’s hard to remember the names of more than 200 characters you aren’t seeing every episode and as part of the same storylines, especially when you don’t see them written down, and especially when ten months pass in between the last time you’ve seen them and the next time you do. And as someone who obviously read the books before the show started, I wonder if it’s not just harder to remember these characters in the glut of information, but whether it’s hard to get attached.

Now, obviously Martin’s books have been released on a cycle that by the standards of television look leisurely. But they’re also able to give much more space to each character—sometimes for good, sometimes for ill—unconstrained by the production budgets, writing, production, and editing cycles, and standard length of a television episode that inevitably provide structure to the show. That means he writes a fair amount of digression and worldbuilding into the books, but also that he’s not bound by anything except how many pages his publishers can bind into a single volume, and even then, if he’s got to spill over into more volumes, they’re going to be nothing but happy. And those digressions, and the amount of time it takes to read the books, just give readers more hooks into the stories, the characters, and the settings. Sprawl, for good and ill, is a characteristic of books in a way that it never can be of television. I’m not saying that means the books are better than the show. But I do think that they expose some of the irreducible differences between reading and watching television once you reach a certain scope.

This post discusses plot points from the April 20 episode of The Americans.

“None of the agencies are working to share the information,” Phillip in his guise as Clark tells Martha in last night’s episode of The Americans. “Each one wants to be the hero.” His weary description of bureaucratic breakdown and self-interest is a perfect framework for the episode. Interagency communications troubles have created the problem that Elizabeth and Phillip have to solve tonight, stopping a KGB agent who isn’t available to have his orders countermanded. Stan and Nina’s relationship is first enabled by the needs of one bureaucracy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then complicated by the workings of another, the Rezedentia. And Elizabeth and Phillip, after a thawing in their marital Cold War, are forced to reckon with the extent to which their relationship is a bureaucratic arrangement rather than an organic, living thing—and to confront the possibility that they may need to engage the legal bureaucracy to dissolve their union.

“We have to stop an assassin,” Elizabeth says when she explains their assignment. “They need to straighten things out at the Center. Ordering hits, then countermanding them?” Phillip asks her in the understatement of the year. Part of his reaction is to the Center’s apparent incompetence—how do you hire an assassin and not retain the ability to stay in touch with that person? And part of it is that the organization is acting emotionally rather than rationally, making one decision and then changing its mind. It’s hard to devote your life to fulfilling the missions you’re given if they can alter at a moment’s notice, forcing you to be as dedicated to one goal at one moment as you were to its antithesis a moment before.

And the KGB’s display of incompetence is juxtaposed with the FBI’s reaction after three of its agents are murdered by the explosives expert Phillip and Elizabeth could shoot, but not neutralize, given his penchant for time bombs. Stan and his colleagues are personally shattered by the news, and how could they not be? Working for a large bureaucracy doesn’t actually strip the component employees of that organization of their humanity or capacity to react. But they don’t allow their feelings to dramatically shift their mission or operational playbook. You don’t go to war over the loss of three men, however badly you might feel about their deaths in your personal capacity as a functional human. If the Soviet Union and the United States are locked together by the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, a concept that’s more promise than threat, the United States just demonstrated a command and control that could help it avoid self-destruction.
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During the first episode of CBS’s new police procedural Golden Boy, which premieres tonight at 10 PM, Walter Clark (Theo James) tells a reporter who is interviewing him about his rapid rise from street cop to police commissioner, “Inside me there are two dogs at war. One good and one evil. Now which one wins?” The reporter knows the answer immediately: “The one you feed the most.”

The language might sound a bit stiff. But it’s a great premise for a television show. Many major problems in law enforcement today are the results of gorging the evil dog, from the profits police departments can make from asset forfeiture, the kinds of quotas that were the subject of the third season of The Wire, and an arms race between police departments and criminals that have made it more likely cops will bring military-style force to bear on civilians. Golden Boy, which flashes back and forth between Clark’s arrival in the Homicide department seven years before his appointment as Commissioner and his early days performing his duties in that new post, sets itself up as the story of how Clark acquired the principals that guide him in his post. It could have been a fascinating—and dark—look at how someone acquires the sense of power that allows them to become former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who is currently in jail for committing conspiracy, mail fraud, and lying to the Internal Revenue Service, or to see how The Wire‘s Ervin Burrell turned into the kind of craven career-hound he was.

But Golden Boy doesn’t have the guts to go there. Instead, the show is the story of Walter Clark’s journey from hotheadednes to sober spouter of aphorisms. Commissioner Clark is the kind of man who says of confidential informants “They’re an important part of the job and they die forgotten…It’s doubtful his associates know he was a snitch. It might bring trouble to the family,” failing to acknowledge the kind of pressure that police departments put on suspects to turn them into confidential informants, and once they’re doing that job, that the incentives can encourage such sources to bring in false information. He is, apparently, the police brass equivalent of television’s bevy of moderate Republicans, a guy who turns his back on the Mayor to meet with victims’ advocates because he’s appalled by the suggestion that he’d “Blow off a victim’s advocate for a guy I don’t like?” As a fantasy of police immunity from political pressure goes, this dream practically comes spangled in My Little Pony-style rainbows and sparkles, it’s so sweet optimistic. And the show seems to exist in a world where there’s no such thing as a bad police shooting like the ones we saw in the Los Angeles Police Department’s hunt for Christopher Dorner—Walter’s shooting of a suspect in the case that made him a hero was good, and as Commissioner, he tells a shaky female cop not only that “Preliminary investigations indicate it was a clean shooting in a difficult situation. In my view, that makes you a hero,” but that she should get all the PTSD treatment she needs before coming back to work.

This is an irritating enough framework. But Golden Boy, despite its innovative framing of police questions, falls into cliches in its execution. Initially, it looks like the show’s use of Chi McBride as Detective Don Owen, Walter’s older partner, is promising. When the two of them first go out on assignment, Walter leaving their office building through a haze of reporters eager to cover him as a tabloid-moving Hero Cop, Walter mistakes Don opening a car door as a courtesy. “Who am I, Morgan Freeman?” Owen asks him. “Open your own damn door.” And when Walter breaks into a suspect’s apartment to try to advance the case against him, Owen tells him that “All this information: useless. If this gets out, this guy is going to walk,” and points out that Walter’s endangered Owen’s prospects for a secure retirement, being careless with the man who is suposed to mentor him in an already-difficult situation. But he quickly devolves into aphorism, revealing himself to be Walter’s union delegate when he’s caught talking to a reporter, an event that apparently has no real effect on their relationship. Owen, it seems, is mostly there to admit minor personal flaws for the sake of drama and to steer Walter in the right direction.

Structurally, the show couldn’t have him reject his protege or really dislike him, but I wish it would at least engage with why someone like Owen couldn’t be police commissioner while Walter can. Is it race? Ambition? Does Walter’s willingness to bend the rules to bring in big collars and more media attention make him a more attractive candidate than someone who wants to do the job with integrity? Golden Boy would be a much more interesting show for posing these questions, and for offering up a different, but more discomfiting, end result.

Grantland’s Alex Pappademas recently hit the road with Dan Harmon, his girlfriend Erin McGathy, and various and sundry other people as they put on Harmontown, Harmon’s podcast, as a live national tour. Depending on the level of attention you’ve been paying to Harmon’s life and person outside his role as the creator of Community, reading the resulting chronicle of the trip will be either a profoundly dispiriting experience, or a reaffirmation of things you already knew. But the part of it I found perhaps most disconcerting was a long rant Harmon goes on about television that Pappademas reproduces in order to give readers a sense of “what it’s like to talk to Harmon, who’s one of the most exhaustingly brilliant people I’ve ever had a conversation with.” Harmon apparently said:

When 30 Rock lands on the cover of Rolling Stone, when any television show is lionized for being “smart,” someone’s laughing all the way to the bank — some company, it used to be General Electric, but now it’s Comcast. That there’s a difference between any of this shit is the greatest joke that television ever told. I mean, as the creator of Community, I’m telling you: It’s all garbage. And the idea that my garbage, y’know, needed a better time slot or deserved an Emmy or didn’t deserve an Emmy, the idea that it was better or worse than 30 Rock or Arrested Development or Freaks and Geeks and all that shit — you only have to take a couple steps back before you realize that you’re looking at a bunch of goddamn baby food made out of corn syrup. It’s just a big blob of fucking garbage. The medium is dispensed to people who can’t feed back, can’t change it, who only get it in 20-minute chunks interrupted by commercials, and you’re watching either really well-written jokes or so-so-written jokes or terribly written jokes, but you’re just watching jokes written by a bunch of people who all have one thing in common: They’re not allowed to say whatever they’re thinking! They’re not allowed. You’re definitely not getting truth; you’re getting lies.

Now, so why does this concept of “meta” and smart TV and snobbery — like, why does it offend people? Why can’t you just say, “I don’t like that show; it’s not my cup of tea. I prefer this show”? Because we’re programmed to hate ourselves for being stupid. We are told that the goal is to be smart, and to differentiate between good and bad, and then we are told, from left to right, what is good and bad, and then we are told to go at each other’s throats. And that’s why, if a television show like Community has an element to it where someone says, “This feels a lot like a television show,” you can’t just ignore that — you can’t just take it or leave it. You have to violently — like, it’s a political issue. It’s like, you gotta fight it; you gotta hate it.

If you’re a critic, you have to write your 90-page review of it that takes longer to read than it does to watch the episode, prattling endlessly in this pseudo-intellectual way, filling the next tier down’s head with this language that they can use to talk about the show over coffee. The conversation we’re not having is: “Hey, there’s 250 million of us watching an average of six hours a day of a one-way transmission that only ever tells us that we are all animals and that we should buy Cottonell.” That’s the one conversation no one is having, not a single one of us. Well, I mean, there are a couple people having it; they’re on street corners covered in tattoos with their dicks pierced, and they’re holding signs saying, “Honk if you want to burn down the White House.” Those people are not marketable; we put them in the same drawer as homeless people; they’re weird characters, putting flyers on your windshield and walking around barefoot and freaking out about the fact that this Orwellian nightmare is happening, and we’re all inside having these debates about whether or not liking 30 Rock makes us smart or stupid.

Now, I say everything that follows as someone who believes even more than the average, 90-page-review-writing, critic that television matters, that movies matter, hell, that Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series of romance novels is a delightful and important critique of the genre while also still being a successful example of it. So Dan Harmon can feel free to ignore as much of this as he chooses. But in my defense, I’m also someone who wrote a long meditation on NCIS and Americans’ relationship to government, so I’m not sure I’m guilty of trying to sort out whether I’m smart based on my love of both Anthony DiNozzo and Chris Traeger.

But beyond the questions of my investment in a system Harmon thinks is nonsense, and of Harmon’s own self-regard and how it pairs with his self-hatred—which was a striking element of this piece even for someone who suffers from substantial self-image dysmorphia—this…was not quite the visionary statement I expected? For all that it’s absolutely true that all television that is broadcast on cable or networks is produced in a corporate environment, to say that “It’s just a big blob of fucking garbage” is the equivalent of arguing that there’s no substantive difference beween the Democratic and Republican parties. It may be true that there isn’t as much variation as we’d like in the offerings available to us. But the corporate money that’s gone into our politics has actually homogenized the party system much more than the corporate money invested in television development has ever homogenized content—and the differences between the parties remain easily discernable. To stick with the comparison, there genuinely is a difference between the smarmy cynicism of House of Cards‘ garage-murdering, sex-having, amoral power brokers, and the optimism of Parks and Recreation‘s argument that local government can genuinely make life better.

And for all that television’s a one-way medium, it’s not alone—and it has more capacity to adapt over time than either novels or movies. Girls is to television as Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be is to novels, an almost pathologically open dispatch from a young woman’s perspective. While Heti’s novel will only ever be what it is, Girls has actually gotten substantially stranger in its second season, and more willing to test the limitations of our affections for its characters, whether Hannah’s upping the self-regard factor, or Jessa’s being called out as the golddigger that she is, even as the show expects us to continue to sympathize with her. Parks and Recreation actually got more optimistic about government, and more committed to showing its main character as competent and engagingly strange, after its first season, the opposite direction from the one you’d expect a corporately-controlled product to travel. The Wire may be the Great American Novel, but it also switched settings and main characters, growing and changing in a way a movie or novel never could have done.
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I was reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ column about Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city in the New York Times yesterday, and was struck by his description of the way that much of the hip-hop canon that’s concerned with violence (which, of course, not all of it is) situates its speaker in relationship to that violence:

Hip-hop originates in communities where such hazards are taken as given. Rappers generally depict themselves as masters, not victims, of the attending violence. Their music is not so much interested in exalting to our preferred values as constructing a fantasy wherein the author has total control and is utterly invulnerable.

When your life is besieged, the music is therapy, vicarious mastery in a world where you control virtually nothing, least of all the fate of your body. I had a friend in middle school who would play Rakim every morning because he knew there was a good chance that he would be jumped en route to or from school by the various crews that roamed the area. But, in his mind, the mask of rap machismo made him too many for them.

I think that passage hit me in particular because of some of the thinking I’ve been doing lately about the way violence operates in film and television. I’ve been showing my boyfriend The Wire, and I think both of us were hit pretty hard, him for the first time, me in new context, by the opening of the ninth episode, “Stray Rounds.” To my mind, the sequence, in which Bodie’s crew’s beef with another set of dealers spirals out of control, is one of the most effective critiques of Hollywood treatment of guns ever filmed:

No one on either side of the gunfight gets hit. No balance of power changes in the slightest. And even more to the point, no one is any good at using the guns they’re brandishing so casually. Much of the time, they’re not looking when they pull the triggers on their handguns, much less aiming at actual targets. Even if they were taking aim, it’s not at all clear to me that any of the participants would be decent shots. Part of the reason they’re not aiming, though, is because they’re terrified, and hiding behind cars. This is a world where bullets don’t miraculously breeze pass our heroes, or where our heroes have the uncanny ability to know when to dodge and are fast enough to actually do it. When Bodie needs a new clip in the middle of the fight, he fumbles awkwardly for it in his sock. Nothing about this is sophisticated, much less effective.

While this scene is a particularly striking sequence, this attitude is relatively common in The Wire as a whole. Even Omar, the character in the show who possesses the most virtuosic ability with a gun, fails a lot. He misses when he tries to assassinate Avon and gets shot himself, though mostly through his assailant’s good luck. As Maurice Levy points out during his testimony against Bird, most of Omar’s assaults are “by pointing,” rather than involving Omar actually pulling the trigger. When Omar shoots Brother Mouzone, it isn’t a single, accurate killing shot: it’s painful and non-fatal and Mouzone survives. Later, when Omar and Mouzone team up to kill Stringer Bell, the same is true: there’s a chase, and fear, and it takes more than one shot to bring their collective enemy down.

In other words, The Wire makes a series of points that Hollywood almost always ignores. Guns are hard to use. Firing them accurately takes a significant amount of skill, and even then, is extremely difficult to do in moments of stress, or fear, or when a gun is being fired at you. Even given all of those things, guns are extremely lethal, and getting shot with one, even if you don’t die, is extremely painful and frightening. At a moment when we’re hearing a lot of talk about the magical abilities conferred by simple possession of a gun, those are things worth remembering.

The Wire and Treme creator David Simon has a tremendous post up about President Obama’s reelection that is also a back-door explanation for why Simon’s own work in television. He writes, among other things, that:

America is different now, more so with every election cycle. Ronald Reagan won his mandate in an America in which 89 percent of the voters were white. That number is down to 72 percent and falling. Fifty thousand new Latino citizens achieve the voting age every month. America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political irrelevance…

This election marks a moment in which the racial and social hierarchy of America is upended forever. No longer will it mean more politically to be a white male than to be anything else. Evolve, or don’t. Swallow your resentments, or don’t. But the votes are going to be counted, more of them with each election. Arizona will soon be in play. And in a few cycles, even Texas. And those wishing to hold national office in these United States will find it increasingly useless to argue for normal, to attempt to play one minority against each other, to turn pluralities against the feared “other” of gays, or blacks, or immigrants, or, incredibly in this election cycle, our very wives and lovers and daughters, fellow citizens who demand to control their own bodies.

This phrase stuck out at me, the idea of people “who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference.” My friend Tyler Lewis and I spend a lot of time talking about the real losses that would come to culture from being “post-racial” if such a thing were possible. It makes characters flatter to insist that their experiences living as a person of whatever race they are have had as little influence on their character and outlook as a sip of water has on the tongue, just as it does so to create characters who represent only racial tropes, uninflected by generation, or geography, or profession, or groups of friends, or cultural exposure. David Simon’s work has always occupied a rare space in between the colorless of race neutrality and the obscurantism of race as the only important fact about a character: his characters lives are shaped by race, including, and sometimes even especially in the case of Jimmy McNulty, their whiteness. And Simon is interested in how living as members of particular races and ethnicities have shaped his characters because he’s interested every single thing about the people he conjures to life on screen.

That ability to be interested in difference rather than intimidated by it, and to approach the things that make someone different from you not as a matter of anthropology but out of desire to know them, is critical to the political distinctions Simon is drawing here. For so long, our politics have been split between ideas like Mark Penn’s theory of microtargeting, which aimed to divide up the population into easily comprehensible interest groups based on shared characteristics, or the uglier, more pervasive strain of thinking that President Obama’s blackness, like that of all African-Americans, is the most defining thing about him. It’s time to abandon that tendency to predict–or diagnose–behavior from a distance maintained out of distaste and fear. And it’s time to embrace a politics oriented towards a genuine desire to understand and appreciate difference, a process that allows for mistakes and clarification as a necessary precondition for growth. It’s made for astonishing television. It could make for transformative politics.

James Woods’ review of Thomas Wolfe’s latest novel Back to Blood is a fairly comprehensive dismantling, taking on everything from the way Wolfe overcooks every sentiment until they blend together in a grey mush to some of the creepy racial attitudes in Wolfe’s depictions of the overmuscled physiques of his characters of color. But beyond the novel itself, Woods makes an argument about how research can serve fiction, or undermine it:

Over the years, Tom Wolfe has campaigned strenuously on behalf of the journalistic role in fiction. In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” and elsewhere, he has argued that American fiction since the nineteen-sixties has fallen into sterility and irrelevance, because American novelists aren’t looking at the world. According to him, they’ve retreated from the traditional calling of writers like Balzac, Zola, and Sinclair Lewis, because they’ve exchanged the labor of reporting for easy fictional games (postmodern self-referentiality) or for a few dull inches of ivory (minimalism, dirty realism). The American novel will be reborn, Wolfe claims, when the novelist gets out onto the street and starts copying. Not only will such reporting produce the little details, “the petits faits vrais that create verisimilitude”; it is essential for literature’s greatest effects. American fiction, grounded in “a highly detailed realism,” will properly emulate the Zola who went down into the mines in Anzin, in 1884, to do research. While underground, Wolfe says, Zola discovered that the pit horses lived and died in situ; when he transfers this found detail to the pages of his novel “Germinal,” the reader is moved and aghast….

Very occasionally in this novel, Wolfe gives evidence that he knows the difference between those French prunes and “Hotchkiss, Yale . . . six-three.” At one point, Nestor, fleeing the opprobrium of his community, ends up at a favorite Cuban bakery, where he enjoys “a whiff of Ricky’s pastelitos, ‘little pies’ of filo dough wrapped around ground beef, spiced ham, guava, or you name it. . . . He had loved pastelitos since he was a little boy.” It’s a rare passage without exclamation marks, and superficially it resembles Ivan and the prunes. But the detail about the pastelitos has the whiff not of pastry but of research. Like everything else in this book, it is imparted information, and is thus the expected detail, the properly stamped sociological receipt. Ivan’s French prunes come out of nowhere, and surprise us with their singular surplus: Why prunes? Why French prunes?

This is something I consider a great deal, and I tend to think that research should serve three main purposes in fiction, whether it’s fiction that means to comment on the real world, or to dream beyond it, both equally valid aims:

1. It should identify conditions and conflicts that provide rich drama: So much of what’s important about research, whether it comes through formal reporting or new life experiences, is identifying new stories and conflicts in the first place. David Simon’s reporting is the reason he could identify bureaucratic tensions and criminal rivalries that would be the basis for The Wire. Thomas Mann might not have seized on sanatoriums as a subject, one of the examples Woods offers up, had his wife not ended up in one. Whether you think they should have happened at all, t’ll be interesting to see how Kathryn Bigelow’s conversations with the Obama administration end up affecting Zero Dark Thirty.

2. It can be a source of unexpected details that make characters more fully-rounded people: Woods’ complaint about Wolfe’s use of pastelitos is not that the description of them isn’t accurate, but that it’s unsurprising. Knowing that a Cuban character enjoys traditional Cuban food doesn’t necessarily add much to our sense of that character as a distinct person. But learning, as was the case with the opening of this season of Mad Men, that Madison Avenue advertising executives were stupid enough to throw water balloons at Civil Rights protestors, both creates a powerful little anecdote and exposes the gap between the sophisticated facade of self-appointed masters of the universe and the reality of their behavior.

3. It should avoid errors that take knowledgable viewers out of the story: It may be a little thing to complain about, but one of the most irritating things that television, in particular, does, is name a location where something is happening in the name of credibility, and then show a place that is patently not that location. Homeland committed a particularly egregious violation of this sort last season when it said an attack was going to take place in Farragut Square in Washington, DC, and then used a location that had precisely nothing in common with the block-sized park. Slips like that may not matter for the majority of viewers of any given cultural artifact. But it’s silly to gesture at realistic detail and immediately undermine the attempt. I’m not saying that everything in fiction has to function exactly the way it does in the real world—fact-checking is an awfully boring way to watch television. But if you’re commenting on the world as it is, or putting characters in a familiar world, considering whether the choices you’re making and the details you’re including pull consumers out of the universe you’ve created or create internal contradictions will serve you as well as them.

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.