I’ve been excited for FX’s The Bridge, an adaptation of a joint Danish-Swedish television production about detectives from each country investigating the death of a murder victim found on a bridge that marks the border between their two nations. FX made a smart move in transferring the countries in question to Mexico and the United States, and in casting Demian Bichir, nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as an undocumented immigrant in A Better Life, to play the Mexican detective and Diane Kruger to play his American counterpart who, in keeping with the original interpretation of the character, is somewhere on the Autism spectrum:

I can understand why those of you who are feeling overdosed on violence against women as a means of generating drama might be wary of The Bridge. But I’m willing to give it a chance precisely because it’s addressing a real-world epidemic of violence, the murders of at least 370 women in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, since the spate of killings seems to have begun in 1993. The crimes are ongoing, and the investigations of individual murders that have resulted in prosecutions and convictions have raised serious questions about police misconduct. And it’s possible that there are multiple perpetrators who are killing women who come to work in the clothing industry that’s grown rapidly in the wake of the North American Free Trade agreement, or that some of the homicides are related to drug trafficking.

It’s one thing to take on real crimes that have taken place and are continuing to take place, especially those that have had their moment in the public eye and then receded from view, and particularly ones that raise valuable questions about flaws in the criminal justice system. It’s another to bring new visions of atrocity into the world, which is one of the reasons I find the proliferation of increasingly baroque serial killer shows such a turn-off. I’m all for confronting the world we actually live in, or for images and storylines that remind us of realities we’ve tried to put solidly in the past. But I’m losing my desire to imagine what it could be like if there were many more of the most violent sorts of people living in it, for the aesthetic pleasure of consuming that violence. I don’t know that The Bridge will be immune from television’s fascination with the gruesome details of the crimes its main characters are investigating. But my hope is that the focus will be less on a luxurious exploration of the specific acts of violence done to women in Ciudad Juárez and more on the social conditions that make them vulnerable, and the structural problems that make it harder to bring their killers to justice. In other words, I hope that The Bridge and its very different detectives will be a vision of the way the world could be better, rather than a celebration of the means by which it could be much worse.

On Saturday, at the first baseball game in Boston after a suspension of the one that was scheduled to be played as city police and federal officials were hunting for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, David Ortiz declared at a pregame ceremony, “This is our fucking city. And nobody gonna dictate our freedom. Stay strong. Thank you.” Normally, this is the kind of thing that would have invited a fine, but Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski tweeted on the agency’s official account: “David Ortiz spoke from the heart at today’s Red Sox game. I stand with Big Papi and the people of Boston.”

It was an apparently inconsistency with agency policy that lead Lawyers Guns and Money blogger Erik Loomis to note: “It would be nice if the FCC would more generally assume people are grown-ups and allow the language used in everyday life to be part of mass media on a more general basis. I’m not sure that reserving the word for political occasions where the agency’s head deems it appropriate has much value.”

He may not precisely get his wish. But the good news is that the FCC is opening up comments “on whether the full Commission should make changes to its current broadcast indecency policies or maintain them as they are.” As Eriq Gardner explains further in The Hollywood Reporter:

According to an advance copy of a document set to be published on Friday in the Federal Register, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau and the Office of General Counsel is seeking comments on whether it should maintain current protocol or change with the times on issues including isolated expletives on TV and fleeting instances of non-sexual nudity. The call for comments will surely invite attention from broadcasters who have fought several high-profile legal battles in recent years. Broadcasters believe that it’s time for a change.

In 1978, in FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation, the Supreme Court took a look at comedian George Carlin’s famous monologue, “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television” and considered the government’s role in regulating indecency over the public airwaves. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens upheld the FCC’s authority while preaching some vague restraint. “We simply hold that when the Commission finds that a pig has entered the parlor, the exercise of its regulatory power does not depend on proof that the pig is obscene,” he wrote.

This is a significant opportunity to reassess an area of broadcast policy that’s shifted back and forth over time and that observers on every side of the debate have found frustrating. It’s an area where I’ll almost be as curious to read the comments and see how they break down as to see where the final ruling lands, particularly given our current debate over the impact of depictions of violence in the media on real-world acts of violence. And I hope one area of the conversation that emerges is the relative treatments of sexual content, sexual violence, and other categories of violence. If parents really believe that violent media has an enormous real-world effect on their children, I’d expect to see more people writing in to suggest that depictions of violence be treated with similar care and suspicion as depictions of nude bodies or consensual sexuality. And I hope we can have a discussion about the actual relative harms of these depictions, and of fleeting language, uttered in instances in which public figures behave a lot more like human beings than most of the people we actually see on television.

Over at Vulture yesterday, Margaret Lyons did a great public service, sorting out television dramas that have aired on both broadcast networks and cable this season by which ones featured rape or murder as plot lines, and which ones don’t. Unsurprisingly, the shows that include rape and murder—even as a one-off plot rather than a regularly featured occurrence, as in Nashville—dramatically outnumber the ones that find their stakes elsewhere, 109 to 16. As NPR critic Linda Holmes wrote last year, it’s exhausting to have a world of television where the only stakes that are treated as if they’re worthy of long-form exploration are “avoiding being violently killed.” And so I thought it was worth looking through the list of sixteen shows that haven’t gone to the rape or murder well to see what other kinds of stakes seem to be playing well—or at least moderately well—on scripted drama.

1. The realization of creative ambition: Bunheads, Glee, Smash, The Wedding Band, Nashville, Underemployed, to a certain extent The Newsroom are all shows that fall into this category. Creative ambition works well on television for a couple of reasons. Writing a song or story, preparing for a performance or a broadcast, or going after a contract or a part is an essentially procedural process: it has a beginning, middle, and an end point. Having creativity as the stakes also lets television dramas do what the most popular reality shows of the modern era of TV have done: invest audiences in big musical performances. Creativity shows run into trouble, just as reality programs like American Idol do, when they try to sell us on people who aren’t compellingly talented on their own merits, as has been the case with Smash, and is true to a certain extent with the dramatic overemphasis on the goodness of Will McAvoy in The Newsroom. But just as murder and sexual assault turn ordinary people into people who are worthy of dramatic consideration by injecting extraordinarily high stakes into their lives, creativity shows focus on people to whom we assign an extraordinary amount of societal capital in real life.

2. Period pieces: We’ve got a modest, but not extraordinarily large number of period dramas on television right now: Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife, Mr. Selfridge, and The Carrie Diaries. And it’s no mistake that three of those four shows air on PBS, which has built its brand in part in opposition to the prevailing winds of television, and is ahead of the curve on programming to viewers who are burned out on violent storylines elsewhere. It’s also done so with imports: Downton and Call The Midwife are both British shows that PBS has the rights to air. Other period shows, like The Americans, make heavy use of violence. But situating characters in the past tends to lend a sheen of significance to ordinary lives by letting those characters stand in for larger forces. Lady Mary and Cousin Matthew may be just ordinary rich people we’d find sort of irksome if they were will-they-or-won’ting-they through the twentieth century. But from a distance of decades, the reasons that it took them so long to get together, questions about their relative sexual experience, and the importance of Lady Mary’s pregnancy become unfamiliar and newly exciting.

3. Family stories: This is a category that comedy seems to be doing better, or at least with greater frequency, than drama at the moment. But NBC’s Parenthood, and ABC Family’s Switched at Birth have both been useful illustrations of how making whether or not family gets along or holds together or finds its way together can elevate other conflicts. Parenthood and Switched At Birth have been staging grounds for all kinds of other stories, including recognition of creative ambition plotlines, political involvement arcs, and illness and autism stories. If audiences get hooked by what happens when individual characters’ actions influence their group of friends, the consequences are even more significant when their actions can blow up or restore the bonds of family.

4. Procedurals with below-death stakes: In this group fall the quickly-cancelled Emily Owens M.D. and the hardier Necessary Roughness, Suits, and The Client List. The middle two are USA Network shows, which, with its Blue Sky brand, works somewhat like PBS in programming to people who want a different, but relatively predictable, tone from much of what they’re offered on networks and cable. Often the problems characters face on USA’s procedurals are engaging precisely because they’re sort of silly, or because the people who have the problems are silly, or because the means in which they’re resolved are silly. Maybe the cure for television’s rape and murder epidemic isn’t just getting more creative about the stakes involved, but in how main characters solve crimes or medical problems and reach resolutions.

This post discusses plot points from the third and fourth episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

Noir is mannered, but I admit through the first several episodes of Veronica Mars, the show’s stylized nature was keeping me at a bit of a distance. That all changed with these two episodes of the show. It’s not so much that the cases got to me—I suspect that after the first two episodes, which used crimes to pull the basic cast of characters together, that Veronica’s clients will be a little more disposable. It’s that the, despite its use of private eye conventions, and in fact because of them, Veronica Mars became piercingly emotional in these two episodes, which focused substantially on the relationships between parents and children. In noir, everyone has secrets, but in Veronica Mars, the gap between public and private selves takes less time to unravel, or at least to become apparent. But that doesn’t mean that Veronica is free to send clients on her way faster than Sam Spade—instead, mysteries matter less than the consequences they open up.

In her first case, Veronica is employed by a boy named Justin to find his father—except that as far as Justin knows, his father is dead, and the gig is just an excuse for him to talk to Veronica and to give her mix CDs built around 311 releases. But instead of pulling off a successful ploy, Justin ends up discovering something that requires much more maturity from him than the quota that’s required to hit on a cool, older girl. His father’s transitioned and is living as a woman named Julia, played beautifully by Melissa Leo, who regularly patronizes the movie rental business where Justin works so she can have a chance to talk to him about film and take his recommendations. In one of the slyest, most impressive arguments for tolerance I’ve seen, she is clearly and deeply loved by the man she lived with. And Justin is in terrible pain not just because he’s discovered that his father abandoned him, but because his mother couldn’t trust him to react well to the truth.

“This is hard, I know. I wish I could have found a way to tell you,” Julia tells Justin. “This is something I had to do. This is who I am.” Justin is focused on the betrayal rather than the rare opportunity he has not just to be loved again, but to act like the kind of man Veronica would admire, until Veronica explains what it would mean to her to know that her mother wanted to visit her, even in disguise. “90 miles,” Veronica tells Justin. “That’s the distance your dad travels every week to see you for a few seconds. Look, my mom’s been missing, too, and I would give anything to feel that she cared enough about me to do that.” The case ends, and Justin’s resolution begins, with him tentatively calling his mother to tell her that the copy of Body Heat he recommended to her and special ordered for her has arrived—and giving her his regular schedule. The mystery matters far less than the emotional landscape that it opened up, noir’s secrets giving way to the complexities of contemporary life, which is difficult enough even before you introduce guns, gumshoes, and dames to die for into the mix.

As Julia’s taking the risk that Justin can love her as his mother, rather than his father, Keith Mars is confronting his daughter’s maturity, rather than his worries about her lack of it.
When he’s called into the principal’s office because she wants to tell him “We’ve noticed a dramatic change in [Veronica] over the last year. She’s late, a lot. She has attitude with certain teachers. She falls asleep in class. And socially she seems a bit isolated,” Keith downplays these changes. “I’d say Veronica is doing pretty well given the circumstances,” he tells the principal. “I can handle it, thank you.” But while he can manage Veronica’s behavior in limited ways, he can’t exactly arrest the forward march of time. When he asks Veronica about her first date with Troy, he’s rattled by her explanation that it was “Lousy conversation, but the sex was fantastic.” He gets territorial when the two keep seeing each other. “If he’s going to be kissing my daughter on my front porch for eight and a half minutes, I’m going to have to meet him,” Keith demands. “He’s taking up a lot of daddy-daughter time.” And Keith can even use his private-eye skills to put the kibosh on Veronica’s plans for homecoming. “You won’t mind, then, that I cancelled your reservation at the Four Seasons?” he tells Troy over Diet Cokes. But tracking down hotel registers one at time can only go so far—Keith’s business, in fact, depends on the idea that the world will stay richly supplied in venality. He can intimidate Troy out of sleeping with his daughter on one occasion, but he can’t predict her slipping out of her red dress and racing into the water in Lily Kane’s memory, can’t stop her from being exposed to hurt and seeking out new forms of joy.
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Since Independent Women’s Forum advocate Gayle Trotter testified against gun control on the grounds that guns give women a necessary means to defend themselves, the debate on this question has gotten heated and often ugly. When Zerlina Maxwell said, entirely reasonably, on Fox News that perhaps it made more sense to try to minimize the risk of rape by educating men and teaching them to seek consent more rigorously to prevent assaults like date and acquaintance rape, she became the target of a vicious coordinated campaign to silence her. Into this space, though it’s not likely to change Trotter’s mind, or convince the chorus of trolls threatening Maxwell with rape, comes Loves Her Gun, an unusually thoughtful movie about firearms ownership, violence against women, and the impact fear has on our decision-making, that premiered at South By Southwest yesterday.

Directed by Geoff Marslett and set and shot significantly in Austin, Loves Her Gun follows Allie (Trieste Kelly Dunn), a young woman working menial jobs in New York who, on the way home from a concert, is robbed and beaten two blocks from her East Williamsburg apartment. Met with suspicion from the police because Allie insists that her attackers were wearing animal masks, or because her extreme fear transmuted them into animals, angry at the boyfriend who ditched her to attend a concert, and feeling unsafe in New York, Allie abruptly decides to decamp for Austin with the band she saw before she was attacked. On their beautifully-shot road trip back to Austin, Allie seems to have achieved a measure of peace. But once settled in Austin, crashing first with Zoe (Ashley Spillers), then with Zoe’s best friend Clark (Francisco Barriero), and taking a landscaping job working for Sarah (Melissa Bisagni), Allie’s unable to sleep, terrified of country noises unfamilir to her in New York, the neighbors quarrelling next door, what she believes to be the expectation that she have sex with Clark, who nurses a Nice-Guy crush on her.

Allie is a nightmare for both responsible gun owners, and for gun control policy advocates. She has neither a criminal record or a history of mental illness that would trigger a background check and prevent her from buying a firearm. She pays careful attention to and appears to take to heart Sarah’s instructions about handgun safety, including Sarah’s injunction that “You never point the gun at anything you don’t intend to destroy.” But Allie’s reasons for wanting a gun are themselves the kind of warning sign that policies could never be designed to catch.
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Given that efforts are continuing to pin blame for gun violence on violent media culture, the content industries are responding proactively with a new and voluntary campaign to help parents understand the tools that already exist to help them keep their children from consuming media they find disturbing:

In the news release on Wednesday, representatives for the industries said they would “make a positive contribution to the national conversation on violent behavior by launching a national educational campaign through communications channels including television public service announcements, educational and informational websites, in-theater advertising, and other media.”

The industry representatives include the lobbying groups for filmmakers, theater owners, broadcasters, and cable operators. They said the public service ads would appear on television and on the Web in the months to come. The ads will remind parents about the existing television and film ratings systems and the parental controls that are built into most television sets. Ads about the film ratings system will also be shown in movie theaters.

As someone who was very effectively kept away from violent movies, television, and video games as a child—though not from an extremely violent graphic novel version of Frankenstein, which gave me nightmares for months—I’m genuinely curious as to what options the parents in the audience wish they had to regulate their children’s media useage that aren’t available to them now. I totally understand that it can be jarring to have advertising for violent or sexual content come on during or in front of programming that itself is rated for general audiences. And I imagine trying to prevent content creep both at school as children get older and have more autonomy over how they spend their time, and as kids visit other people’s houses where video games are more widely available or certain channels are unblocked, must be a constant source of frustration.

The first problem is one that could be fixed by voluntary self-regulation on the part of movie theaters and television broadcasters, in coordination with movie studios and video game manufacturers. The second is harder, and involves lots of conversations with your children about what hard, scary things mean, and what makes you uncomfortable, and what makes them uncomfortable. And the latter probably involves some limits-testing and kids encountering things that upset them, and that they decide they’re not ready for. That’s a risk I think some parents don’t particularly want to take, but it seems to me to be a fairly necessary part of children and young adults developing their own internal set of limits, which are likely to be more effective than simply asking them to abide by parentally-determined ones.

But beyond those ongoing efforts and voluntary regulation by the industry, and excluding the idea of bans on certain kinds of content on the grounds that censorship is neither desirable nor implementable, what are the resources you wish you had? Better channel-blocking and web-monitoring software? Guides to talking about certain kinds of images, like gun violence or sexual assault? Or are you all set?