Spoilers, for people who struggle maintaining the maturity levels not to hold the entire internet responsible for your inability to work through what's saved on your DVR.

Last week, I published a piece where I adopted the role of the bearer of bad news: TV's silly-but-loveable feminist Leslie Knope is getting defanged by NBC, probably in a last-ditch attempt to get the ratings up. Since the show is a spin-off of "The Office", which started off as a sharp satire of ordinary American work life but devolved into an unfunny but typical sitcom about the glories of the patriarchal family, I wasn't particularly surprised. Americans love the comfort of unfunny sitcoms that romanticize this stuff. It's our comfort food. Applying sharp comedy to gender role-playing is especially unwelcome; we don't want to come home after a hard day's work and have some snooty TV writers make us all uncomfortable with the sexism we perpetuate and rationalize by wrapping it in a blanket of romance. "Parks and Recreation" has shitty ratings, and as I've pointed out before, they clearly have no desire to blow a raspberry at the almost-inevitable helpful network suggestions that they dumb it down a little like "Community" did, so seeing them move in the direction of "The Office" isn't surprising. 

However, my article, which came out the same day that the Valentine's Day episode came out, was controversial, with Maya at Feministing offering a rebuttal. This didn't surprise me, so I wasn't upset. The evidence that the show had taken a turn was far from conclusive, and my hope in writing the piece was to start dialogue, not offer the final word about it. At the time I wrote it, the show's direction was ambiguous enough to really allow for multiple readings, as it were.

But the episode that aired on the same date that my piece was published, titled "Operation Ann", removed all doubt. That episode was a fundamental betrayal of both the characters of Leslie and Ann, and of the show's quiet but persistent feminism they're now selling down the river in a desperate bid for ratings. 

Since when is Ann Perkins one of those women who has so little going on in her life that the mere idea of being single sends her into a spiral of self-loathing? As far as I remember, Ann has never once suggested that being single is such an awful thing that one should seriously consider lowering your standards to rectify the situation. As recently as last year, in fact, Ann was having a fun time tearing through every dude in Pawnee, having fun sleeping with them but refusing to settle down. Nor was Leslie ever Ms. Everyone Should Have A Boyfriend. Sure, both characters like having boyfriends, but they've never considered it more important than having a full life with lots of friends or meaningful work. Nor have they ever thought that having a boyfriend is so important that considerations like compatibility or attraction should be shoved aside. Old Leslie, if Ann had been in a funk about being single, would have bucked her up like she did to Chris in this very same episode: reminded her that she has a lot going on and there's no rush. But now the show has a double standard. If Chris is sad about his single status, he needs to just cheer up and remember life goes on. Ann, however, should hurry up and settle down with the first person that she can have a halfway reasonable conversation with. Who turns out to be Tom. You know, the resident douchebag of Pawnee. I love Aziz Ansari, of course, but the whole point of Tom's character is that he's an insufferable douchebag. 

Maybe the show will right itself. But right now, I'm skeptical. While I doubt that they're going to capture a bigger audience by abandoning the feminist subversion for more mainstream sexist romantic cliches, I can see that it might seem like the only hope of getting ratings up. 

By the way, it's just telling that we live in a world where Zooey Deschanel has her own show, but no one can ever figure out what to do with the beautiful and talented Rashida Jones.

I finally had a chance to watch the holiday episode of "Community" last night, and like most everyone on the internet who gives a shit about quality TV, I'm now wailing and rending my clothes in frustration that this show is being put on hiatus and possibly facing cancellation before they even get to finish out the season. "30 Rock" probably doesn't have many more seasons in it, "Parks and Recreation" has been declawed, and it seems that even NBC is just going back to unfunny-but-safe laughtrack-dominated sitcoms. "Community" was our last great hope for network sitcoms. Of course NBC had to take it away. Ugh. 

Spoilers, of course.

One of the best parts of "Community" is that, even though it's a fantastical show where things that can't really happen in real life happen all the time, it is perversely also one of the few sitcoms I've seen that happens in the real world as we know it. Like Alyssa Rosenberg recently wrote, one of the most frustrating things on TV is that characters just never seem to acknowledge that they are eligible voters in a democracy, and subsequently they seem to have no political opinions. I will add to that this observation: in most of TV-land, you would think feminism never happened. Sure, some of the results of feminism are evident, such as female characters holding jobs or delaying marriage and childbirth until they're in their late 20s/early 30s, but they never say the word "feminism" and you never hear anyone discuss the stresses of male/female relations in terms other than personal and resigned. "Parks and Rec" and "30 Rock" are exceptions: characters not only use the word "feminism", but seem to understand the phrase "the personal is political". And while "Community" doesn't get much attention for its politics in this way, it's a definite example of being a show where the feminist movement happened, the characters are aware of it, and they behave in ways that show it. It's not just that Britta is an outspoken lefty and feminist, but also that she defies certain gendered expectations about sex and dating, and every other character knows better than to judge her openly for it. But---and this is why the show is so genius---you discover in subtle ways that some of them judge Britta quietly for it. And that they do so is their problem, not hers. The Annie character also owes a lot to feminist writings about "perfect girl syndrome". If you read Courtney Martin's Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, and used it to create a template for a comic character, you would get Annie: an immature perfectionist who has bought wholesale into the Britney Spears-style pressure to be a sexy virgin. I also like how the way the guys ogle her is portrayed on the show, as a genuinely dehumanizing thing to do that Jeff, at least, has the maturity to strive to get past. Plus, and I just really appreciate this about it, the female characters develop in ways that aren't about being someone's girlfriend. Even Shirley, who is a character the writers struggle to find stories for, is still more that a wife/mother figure. Her biggest struggle is the conflict between a humanist morality that tugs on her and her Christian beliefs.

There's a branch of online feminist comedy criticism that basically recoils at making fun of anyone, so I can see how some might disagree that I see a feminist sensibility in jokes such as having Annie throw a screaming, childish temper tantrum when she doesn't get her way. (They pull a neat hat trick of making you feel angry at her, bad for her, and hopeful that she's eventually going to learn to chill out a bit.) But I love being able to watch a show where women get to be just as goofy and wrong and hilarious as the men. I like that "Community" shows Britta as being well-meaning but constantly fucking up; characters who are ciphers for audience insecurities are pretty much all male. Just changing it up and making that character female is a subtle but marvelous bit of subversion. "P&R" and "30 Rock" also do this, but they pull their punches by making their main characters enviably competent. Britta is more of a pure fuck-up.  

But as the holiday show demonstrates, they are willing to go for the throat on occasion. The holiday episode borrowed its plot from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", but intstead of being infected with aliens, the study group all gets infected with a desire to be in the glee club. The show was an epic takedown of "Glee"---and really, does any show deserve it more at this point?---but the musical numbers were about more than mocking musicals. They also had some great jabs at some of the more odious aspects of American culture in general. Such as Allison Brie's remarkable performance mocking the whole "sexy baby" thing.

I can't say I've ever seen a bigger middle finger raised on TV to objectifying women. More than that, I really thought hard about how Annie's character is a commentary on how women really struggle with objectification, since there's so little space in our culture to be sexy and attractive without being seen as inviting negative attention. Of course, that sort of challenging humor is exactly the sort of thing that a lot of people don't want in a sitcom, thus the show's low ratings. Which is an incredibly depressing thought.

I'm a little disappointed that none of the atheist blogs I read have addressed the controversy over Lowe's pulling their advertising from the show All-American Muslim, after being deluged with mail from a bunch of hateful Christian bigots. Now, there's nothing I hate more than people trying to score points by claiming that since you didn't blog about X, you must not care about X. I'm not doing that by any means; I'm sure a lot of atheist bloggers saw the story and took a pass because they didn't really think it falls in their wheelhouse. I get that. A lot of atheists probably think, "Well, we don't believe in Islam, so it seems a little strange to defend people who do," even if you do think that Lowe's did a really stupid, vile thing. But I would argue that this occasion is a perfect opportunity for atheists to speak out on behalf of the program and against the bigots who are trying to get it off the air. So I put a quick list of three ways that speaking out on this issue is not only the right thing to do, but to the benefit of atheist activists.

1) Hated religious minorities should stick together. Muslims are, after all, the group competing with atheists for the title of Most Hated and Misunderstood Religious Minority. So we have that in common with them. But, more importantly, secularism is something that benefits way more than people who don't believe in a god or gods. The rights to individual conscience and to not have the government favoring Christianity above other beliefs help Muslims out just as much as atheists, and by defending All-American Muslim, we can send the signal that we're open to working for a secular government for the good of all. Religious freedom should be our number one priority, because without it, we're shit out of luck actually getting people to listen to our arguments about why god claims are illogical and should be abandoned.

2) To show that there's a difference between ideas and people. Atheists are often being accused of oppressing Christians when we try to boot religion out of politics or criticize religious ideas.We deny this, repeatedly, by pointing out that there's a difference between ideas and people, and saying, "You are wrong about religion" is not the same thing as saying, "You're a bad person". By vigorously defending Muslims as people, and pointing out that most Muslims are ordinary people just like most Christians, Jews, and atheists, we send a signal that we really do get the difference between criticizing a belief and harboring bigotry against a person. 

3) Increased understanding of different religions is good for atheism. I suspect there's two reasons that Christian groups oppose All-American Muslim. One is that they hate Muslims, and fear that their followers might feel their bigotry lessen in face of evidence that Muslims are mostly ordinary and downright boring folks like the rest of us. But the other is that they fear their followers discovering that perfectly nice, normal people believe in Islam in the same way that Christians believe in Christianity. That realization---that different religions make claims that directly contradict each other, so they can't all be true---is the first step on the path to atheism. The next realization is that what someone believes, religion-wise, is rarely due to having weighed various beliefs against each other and choosing the correct one, but basically is a matter of what religion your parents believed in when you were born. Since your average Muslim and average Christian believe what they believe for exactly the same reasons---i.e., that's what they were always told---some Christians exposed to this idea will start to think about their own beliefs and why they hold them. Which, in turn, will cause some to de-convert. Granted, that path isn't the common one, because  most people have defenses and rationalizations that keep them from really thinking this through, but it will be true for some. I firmly believe that a major reason non-belief is on the rise in the U.S. is because of our increasing religious diversity. The more you're exposed to competing faith-based claims about the world, the more likely you are to decide that none of them actually has the answers. So, weird as it is to say this, I think that one of the best ways to grow the atheist movement is to educate  more Americans about what non-Christian religions actually believe. 

Plus, like I said at XX Factor, all of us benefit if non-exploitative reality TV aimed at actually educating people gets produced, instead of the crap that fills the airwaves now. 

I was recently alerted to the fact that this is what ABC considers an edgy, "high-concept" sitcom:

Yep, two men who, facing a horrible world of anti-male oppression that prevents an ordinary guy from getting jobs that are solely reserved for women by employers who blatantly discriminate in direct violation of federal law, decide to dress up like women in order to get those cush, high-paying jobs, presumably instead of being relegated to low-paid work like child care or working as hotel maids. Which are jobs that are dominated by men, you know, because getting a job while male is so hard. Sure, these guys provoke people to wonder if they're "really" women, but that's no big deal, because hey, the only people who have better access to high-paying employment than cis-women are trans-women, amirite?

This is all irritating shit, but honestly, my first thought was, "Uh, lazy ripoff much?"

But upon reviewing the evidence, I realized that "Bosom Buddies", while still sexist and transphobic, was actually less sexist and transphobic than "Work It" appears to be. The assumption underpinning "Work It" is that men are so heavily discriminated against in the job market that they have to dress as women to get jobs. On "Bosom Buddies", the rationale was more plausible: they wanted housing in a women's hotel. Affordable women's temporary housing has a long history in NYC and apparently, these places still exist. They have a long history that has nothing to do with anti-male discrimination, but are more properly understood as a response to some of the economic and social constraints put on women, as well as the expectation that single women are in a holding pattern until someone marries them. So that's interesting.

But beside the larger point. The larger point is that there's continuous hunger for mass entertainment that is predicated on the outrageous and utterly false claim that men have to endure living in a matriarchy where the mere fact of being male means they constantly suffer from domineering women and, now, employment discrimination. "Work It" is just the most obvious example, of course, but there's also the new Tim Allen sitcom "Last Man Standing", which is about a man whose life is constrained by a cadre of oppressive female forces. You know, to follow up "Home Improvement",, which was predicated on the idea that there's intense pressures for men to give up being "manly" and that power tools were a form of resistance. And that's not even touching the long list of domineering and ever-competent wives pushing their childlike husbands around on pretty much every other sitcom on television. 

In real life, while cis-women have made great strides (and trans-women are actively fighting for equal rights), men still dominate at home and in the workplace, and any responsible social science will attest to that. Women, not men, are expected to change their names upon marriage and expected to roll back their presence at work in order to care for children. Women make only 77% of what men do, and that's after you control for work hours. (In other words, full-time female workers make 77% of what full-time male workers do, and so claims that women "choose" to work less are irrelevant.) Men who transition to women make 32% less on average than they did while still publicly identifying as men, which means that the men on "Work It" would, in real life, be rewarded for moving from publicly male to female with a paycheck that's only 2/3 of what they had before. 

It's just a stupid sitcom, blah blah, but the reality is that shows like this that present the world as if it were completely opposite of how it actually is do a great deal of damage. People do turn to fiction to ponder what real life is like, and good fiction responds by showing characters who behave like actual human beings do. Unfortunately, bad fiction can legitimately confuse people and give audiences the sense that there's "evidence" for conservative claims that women are not only not discriminated against, but that it's men who are. 

I really appreciated the humor and insight of this piece from Cord Jefferson on how he got it into his head that Community is a popular show, and so, even though he had never seen it, was as surprised as anyone at its sudden hiatus and no doubt cancellation. He points out that his online networks were positively obsessive about Community, giving him the impression that it's a big hit show, when it was turning over bad ratings for a network sitcom. He proposes a couple of reasons this might be that don't make sense at all---floating improbable reasons such as torrenting and there being some people who don't use the internet much but who watch TV---before settling on what I think is the sole reason that this happened to him:

While technology allows us to access news and opinions from hundreds of millions of diverse people around the world, the reality is that we cull our Twitter and Tumblr groups to match our sensibilities, just as we do with our offline friends. Many of the people I intentionally follow online like Community, and I made the mistake of assuming that my Twitter and Tumblr associates were a cross-section of America. Offline I'd never dare think that what my friends and I like is representative of everyone else's preferences. But on the internet, we've convinced ourselves we're seeing the world, while actually seeing tiny subcultures we've created around the same biases and preferences we have offline.

That last bit caused a small butthurt reaction in me---who are you calling "we", dude?---but I squelched because my life resolution is not to imitate the tedious culture of butthurtness of the internet that makes it hard to sift out legitimate criticism. It's clear that "we" is a rhetorical device, and a useful one at that, because he's probably right that this wasn't a minor brainfart of his, but a human tendency. I'd also point out that Cord may not make this assumption based off his real life friends, but that's more common than you'd think, as well. It's the "everyone else is just like me (and my friends)" phenomenon. I see it a lot when I'm blogging. I could write something like, "Women are generally socialized to be excessively apologetic", and I'm going to get a bunch of comments from women protesting, saying, "But I'm not!", not considering the possibility slightly that they could be an outlier. I can't really account for how hard it is for people in general to gauge where their tendencies or opinions fit on a spectrum, but it is a real phenomenon, and I can see how the internet makes it worse. 

So I'm pretty sure I'm somewhat unusual in that I didn't really relate to this piece, not because it isn't true---it is!---but because I'm probably a weirdo. I not only don't think my tastes are an indicator of broader American tastes, I'm fairly convinced that if I like something, the majority of Americans don't. I call it the "mediocrity rules" phenomenon, after the kickass Le Tigre song that perfectly describes it, right down to the incuriosity and outright fear of difference that keeps most people preferring the safe and uninteresting to the daring and truly creative. There are exceptions to every rule, but in general, being truly interesting requires taking risks, and most people are risk-averse, especially when it comes to entertainment, which they look to as a way to soothe instead of challenge themselves. I mean, I look to it to be soothing, too, but since I have a weird personality, pablum gives me gas, so it's not soothing at all. I'm not alone in this, but those of us who enjoy a little riskiness in our entertainment are simply less common than those who don't.

This is how it just is, and until a few years ago, this was never presented to me as a problem, not really. I mean, I had a kid snarl at me in high school that I was a "New Waver", which didn't hurt my feelings so much as make me wonder how someone who was probably born in '79 or '80 and found anything that had even a whiff of hipness to it alienating learned that term and used it in 1994.  But in recent years, I've felt a shift in the zeitgeist. It's just a hunch, but it feels like the belief that mediocrity, by dint of being "populist", is somehow more pure and honorable for it. Terms like "elitist", "snob", and the dreaded "hipster" are flung around with zeal. I suppose that was always true, but now people who do that aren't just implying that you're a weirdo for having certain tastes, but that you're somehow morally inferior because you aren't one with the people or some such crap like that. It seems that mediocrity is literally beginning to rule. This Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal piece on excreable Lana Del Rey is a good example; it's all sneer at "hipsters" for disliking Del Ray for being "inauthentic", as if there's a monolithic hipster view of authenticity and monolithic hipster hatred of pop music, both of which are easily disproved by a trot through the various rock clubs of Williamsburg that feature more than their fair share of gleeful love of pop-ness as a concept. Could it just be that Del Rey sucks? Not all pop music sucks; I hardly imagine you'll meet many hipsters who denounce Prince simply because he's pop. It is true that there's a streak in indie rock of mistaking quiet for quality and earthy for deep, but it's a little more complex of a problem than simple rejection of anything "pop", nor is it a monolithic tendency. Some music snobs (*cough*) dislike that trend strongly, but we're not going to conflate it with old-fashioned elitism, which still has value. If anything, a lot of it is less elitist, more like making indie music for people who stopped caring when they had kids. Elevating something as better for garnering mass appeal by being mediocre pablum isn't any better than disliking something just because it's popular, and it may be worse in a way because you have to endure a lot of stuff that just sucks. 

Or maybe I'm overreacting to a tendency that's simply common on the internet, where a few loudmouths who have a vendetta against the risky, the cool, and the bohemian have had an outsized effect on the conversation and caused everyone to tiptoe around the commonly accepted idea that white bread is an insult for a reason. 

Anywhere, here's hoping that "Community", a show that has really been fun to watch take a number of risks without a net, at least gets to finish out this season in style instead of simply being yanked without any kind of closure, as Britta might say. 

There's a basic problem with The Walking Dead: its premise allows a lot of leeway for being awful.

The average episode goes something like this: some personal story is set up with stilted dialogue, then zombies, then another 40 minutes of poorly written and poorly paced plot development happens, then a short zombie scene, another scene where the characters attempt to feign personalities, and then some zombies, explosions, or exploding zombies.  

Is there an overarching point to this? Not yet. The living walk, and so do the dead, and periodically something happens to someone where they get hurt or something. We're now in the middle of an interminable plotline where a dude is hurt and a kid is hurt, and - of course - there's a cool setup where zombies are threatening a couple of other people.

The way I measure an episode of Dead is whether I'd watch it if you took out the zombie attacks. I'd watch an episode of The Wire where all they did was sit around and talk about stuff, because the characters on that show just talking about stuff was fascinating. Same for Breaking Bad. Same for a half dozen other shows that could use recurring plot themes as a safety net, but are (usually) well-developed enough to avoid that pitfall.  Breaking Bad could get by if it consisted of fifty minutes of waiting for Walt to use chemistry to get out of a jam followed by ten minutes of Walt using said chemistry to get out of said jam.  

But then it would just be a procedural drama on CBS.

Zombies are The Walking Dead​'s version of Urkel. You wait until they show up, you're mildly entertained, and then you patiently sit there waiting until they either show up again or you realize you're too old for this shit. Right now, I'm still nine years old, and still waiting to hear a "did I do that?" before I turn off the set and go to bed happy.  Except now it sounds more like a thousand guttural moans periodically interrupted by gunshots. 

That would have been the best ending to Family Matters imaginable.  Oh, to dream...

Spoiler babies: If you're not all caught up on all shows on NBC, just skip this one. 

The excitement over Breaking Bad last night was sadly undermined by the fear that we'll soon be having to put Parks and Recreation to bed. I was thrilled when the show was renewed--- from what I understand, it was touch and go there for a bit---but now I'm beginning to think that they had to sell out big time to get that renewal, and it may become unwatchable. Thursday night's episode, which we watched on DVR last night, felt like a big time shark jump, the moment when the writers gave in and stopped making a show for smart people who are quick to get a joke, and started to make the show for people who don't get a joke unless you explain it to them. 

Example #1: the joke at the top of the show, which you see in the first part of the full episode here. I was excited that they were going to send up NPR and just general quiet, pretentious public radio, and they did do that with the joke about "Nefirtiti's Fjord". Old P&R would have simply had her read the bit about the lesbian funk-Afro etc. band and played the music and gone out, trusting that the audience gets why that's funny. New P&R has the characters explain the joke to you with Leslie complaining that the music sucks and the DJ explaining that "lesbian" trumps "quality". Which in turn makes the joke kind of offensive, instead just a funny poke at public radio for the overall pretentiousness of their music, instead of zeroing in on the "lesbian" thing. 

Example #2: After Ann finally gets Ron and April's attention with a gross medical story, Ron calls her by another name to put her in her place. Not that funny a joke, but at least a joke. But then they cut to him explaining what he did, in case you didn't get it. Here's an idea: instead of riding every joke into the ground for fear that one will get by the slower people in the audience, why don't you just keep making jokes, figuring some have to hit? That's what you used to do!

Example #3: I think we get why the birth certificate nonsense was stupid, and the people of Pawnee are stupid to care. There was a recent event in our history that would be a helpful reminder, in case we didn't get that. So why do you keep explaining it, over and over again?

There are more examples---I counted at least 7, and that was after I started counting, so there were probably more---but it's too depressing to watch it again and count them up. Plus, I have other complaints!

Complaint #1: Bad characterization. For no real reason, they've made Chris stupid and Ann even more so.  The whole subplot with Ann trying to get Ron and April to talk to her is the dumbest thing they've ever done with Ann, and Ann is by far the weakest character on the show, story-wise, of any of them. Ann used to be there as a bit of a no-nonsense character who was baffled by the red tape and politics of city government. Now Ann....gives a shit if two people she doesn't even like that much make small talk with her? We have had zero indications to date that Ann is a person with a perverse love of small talk, nor do we have any reason to think she's an attention whore. I think this is an attempt to get Rashida Jones onscreen more, which I can appreciate because she's cute and funny, but if you don't have anything good for her to do, don't just make up out-of-character weirdness that has no relationship to human behavior.  

Also, old Leslie would have asked her mom about her birth first.

Complaint #2: Sentimentality. Old P&R had a healthy sense of humor about Leslie's attachment to the shithole they call Pawnee. One of the best running jokes on the show is how the ungrateful citizens of Pawnee ruin every public meeting by being irrelevant and cranky. Leslie's sense of scale is supposed to be out of wack, even if other parts of her personality are admirable. But now she's giving impassioned speeches about why she loves Pawnee, and instead of it being a joke, we're supposed to get sentimental with her about her fictional town that has been routinely portrayed as Backwardsville, USA? No, thank you. This is especially fucked up in light of the birth certificate storyline---since it was a reference to the President's situation, there's an unpleasant whiff of suggesting that the racist screeching about the birth certificate should be written off as relatively harmless eccentricity instead of a toxin that's eroding our political discourse. That's unforgivable in a show that usually has a swift grasp of the realities of politics.

These are my complaints, and I'm only issuing them because the only thing that's made me laugh all season was the torturing-Ann-with-penises joke. That said, I don't blame the writers fully for this downward dive that P&R has taken. I blame NBC. Towards the end of the show, I turned to Marc and said, "I'll bet this dumbing down wasn't the writers' idea. I just can't imagine you get so stupid so fast. I'll bet NBC had a come-to-Jesus meeting where they were told that either they make the show much stupider and less harsh towards the assholes in our society to reel in a larger audience, or they will be canceled." I'm a firm believer in the mediocrity principle, and I think that Hollywood executives have turned making mediocre but popular shit into an art. And they're not wrong! Shows that are sharp in their critiques of American society will be turned off by people who cherish the unjust status quo, as well as people who get uneasy about "mean" humor, which probably kills off more of an audience than a network show can afford to lose. Shows that assume an audience that's paying attention and is smart enough to get rapid-fire humor also lose a huge audience chunk, which is why 30 Rock can't pull it out in the ratings no matter how many Emmys they get. (And the only time they surged in ratings was their worst, stupidest season, season 3.) I get why networks see sharp, pointed humor and want to reel it in. So that was my theory of what's happening to P&R. 

And then, right after I floated this theory, I got a confirmation from the universe, in the form of the writers of Community. See, we had only caught up to the end of season two last week, so we watched the season premiere of season three right after the latest episode of P&R. I had heard in the rumor mills of the internet that Community is also hanging by a thread, under threat to tone down the weirdness by NBC, with cancellation looming. I worried that they, too, would rob the show of everything odd about it I love in order to appeal to people who don't like sharp humor and prefer predictability in their sitcoms. But instead I got this:

If that's not a "fuck you" to NBC executives telling them to tone it down, I don't know what is. This confirmed all my suspicions that the showrunners and writers are getting immense pressure to produce more generic, sentimental, unfunny crap that has a mass appeal. It's a shame to see P&R give in to that pressure, but I suppose predictable, since The Office went there years ago. Let's just hope 30 Rock keeps riding their Emmys off into fuck-you land, because for some reason they've managed to come back to the humor that made them so great in the first place without getting cancelled. 

Spoilers.

1) WTF.

2) I had a three-way debate with some folks about where all this was headed, and was the most wrong. I believed Gus poisoned Brock, straight up. Lindsay believed that it wasn't ricin. She was more right than I, but we both underestimated Walt. He's now, I believe, the most evil protagonist of a major TV show ever. "Profit" tried to do something similar, but their problem was they started with him being evil. This way---having a character devolve into evil---gets audience buy-in much better.

3) This episode was good at putting you on the "is he or isn't he?" roller coaster. The trick with the old lady, and his willingness to put her in danger, was supposed to initially make you think he's gone all in. But his palpable relief that she was safe makes you think he's still Mr. White, the reasonably decent human being. Twice more in the episode he seems to put innocent people in danger, but then you find out that he didn't really. First was the bomb in the nursing home, where you wonder how on earth he can be so evil as to put innocent nursing home patients in danger, and then you find out he made the bomb just big enough to kill people in the immediate vicinty, but not so big it hurts anyone else. Then they set fire to the lab, and if you're me, at least, you're worried about the laundry employees and their escape. But they made a big to-do about pulling the alarm and making sure no one got hurt. Sure, Walt shot those two thugs in cold blood, but hey, they kidnapped Jesse! So when the big reveal comes, it was genuinely a shock.

4) One thing I struggle with is the notion that Jesse would still have doubts about killing Gus. Gus threatened Walt's family. The "no kids" thing, I would think, is still in play when it comes to, you know, Walt's kids. But it is true that Brock's near-death would make the problem more real for Jesse.

5) I was wondering when Gus would just force them to cook at gunpoint. Glad that was cleared up, because duh. 

Important update: Matt Zoller Seitz has corrected the page to explain his long-shot theory of what's going on with Hank and Walt.  He originally wrote "Gus" instead of "Walt", but clearly he meant Walt, and it's been corrected.

Second, I want to highlight the idea that Hank isn’t blissfully ignorant of the possibility that Walt is Heisenberg, but is in fact banking on it, and is trying to rope Walt via the law enforcement version of a long con.

I love the idea of Hank playing Inspector Porfiry Petrovich to Walt’s intellectually arrogant Raskolnikov. I wouldn’t put it past this show to set Hank up as a guy who habitually fails to see what’s right in front of him, only to reveal later that he was just playing dumb all along. “Breaking Bad” is filled with characters who do slightly mystifying things for reasons that are explained in detail later, after they’ve gotten what they wanted.

I think my point stands. I don't think Hank is onto Walt, because if he was, the logic of the show would break down completely. The point of Walter White is that he's the last guy on earth you'd expect to be running a meth lab. There's been very little indication from Hank that he thinks of drug dealers as anything but the scum of the earth, which makes the cognitive dissonance of assuming this about a beloved family member---who I may remind you, pays for Hank's physical therapy---too great a burden to bear. 

Spoilers.*

I love reading Matt Zoller Seitz on "Breaking Bad", but sometimes I just have to strongly disagree with his unspoken assumptions on characterization.  His recap of "Breaking Bad" this week describes many of the characters' choices as out-of-character, and he thinks that means there's another shoe that's about to drop. I disagree. One of my favorite things about "Breaking Bad" is that the writers actually understand the characters better than pretty much anyone in the audience, and thus the characters frequently make choices that violate your expectations, but when you think about it, they make perfect sense given what you know about the characters. In other words, they act like people in a way that TV characters often don't.  (Even my beloved "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" had characters that were more hyper-real and perfect than real people are.) As surreal as the plots get on the show, the characters' very humanness keeps it grounded. 

There are two choices Matt sees as out-of-character: Jesse's choice to blame Walt for Brock's poisoning, and Gus's (possible) choice to poison Brock to get the upper hand over Jesse. In fact, he's so skeptical that Gus would poison a child with ricin that he argues that it basically didn't happen, and that there's another explanation that will become clear in the last episode. I disagree.  I think both choices make sense, given what we know about the characters. Let's take it one at a time. 

1) With Jesse, I think the key to understanding how quickly he blamed Walt depends on a couple of factors. For one thing, the Walt we're seeing onscreen now has become more sympathetic than the Walt a few episodes ago. He had an emotional breakthrough regarding his son and his conscience is starting to creep back. He's remembered that he's a family man, and that should be more important than his own massive ego.  But Jesse hasn't been witness to any of this, since they haven't been speaking. When Jesse last spoke to Walt, Walt was at a moral and emotional low point in his life. He had become quite naked with his willingness to manipulate Jesse, and for all Jesse has known, it's gotten worse. Jesse is acutely aware of how much of a control freak Walt is, and so, with a little added paranoia and emotional peaking, it's easy to see how he could leap to the conclusion that Walt would really go this far. Plus, as far as Jesse knows, Walt is the only person who knew about the ricin. I think Matt's hope that Brock isn't sick from ricin poisoning is a stretch; they went out of their way to make sure that Brock had the symptoms and treatment of someone suffering from that. The CDC has a breakdown of how ricin works, and you'll see that the show's portrayal of it is accurate. Remember, too, that Jesse thinks Walt called the DEA in on the plant, putting him in direct danger of being arrested and put away for roughly forever, which looks pretty vindictive from Jesse's point of view. 

One more thing: Jesse is talked out of his belief that Walt did it fairly easily, which shows that he only half-believed it anyway. The show wasn't really arguing so much that "Jesse sincerely believed Walt did it" as they were arguing "Jesse got it in his head that Walt did it, because no one else knew about the ricin, but he couldn't really imagine Walt doing it, so he was talked out of it." Jesse demands that Walt admit it when he comes over to kill him. He wouldn't have done that if he was sure of Walt's guilt---if he got Gus in a corner, it's unlikely he would be raising the burden of proof to "allow" himself to shoot Gus. 

2) Gus would kill a kid. I don't think that's disputable at this point. The cartel-killing episode was there to served a number of functions. One was to take the cartel out of the picture in the most entertaining way possible, but it was also to show that Gus is one crazy motherfucker. In case this wasn't obvious, the scene where Jesse has to fetch a bag of blood and sees one labeled for himself proves it, to Jesse, if to no one else. They've gone to great lengths to show that Gus is a childless bachelor who seems to have no real friends.  He is purely invested in winning and will go to great lengths to beat anyone he sees in opposition to himself.  He was willing to risk his own life to wipe out the Mexican drug cartel's leadership. You get the impression he gets off on manipulating these situations and people's assumptions. The other thing the cartel scene showed is Gus is has a firm hand with the poison himself.  Remember: out of Walt and Gus, only one of them has successfully poisoned an enemy to death. 

There was one detail with the cartel-poisoning sequence that struck me as interesting and not accidental, as well. It was the presence of the strippers and party girls at the party where everyone is poisoned. Now, if I recall correctly, all of them escaped with their lives. But the director went out of his way to show them fleeing the scene in terror, driving home the fact that they are basically innocents who happened to be there on a bad day. I think you're supposed to realize Gus put them in danger of poisoning, as well, and just got lucky he didn't have innocent blood on his hands.

Not that he would care, of course. Gus threatened to kill Walt's son and daughter, who are just as innocent as Brock. Does anyone here think he was just bluffing? I didn't think so.

I strongly agree with Matt here:

I want to highlight the idea that Hank isn’t blissfully ignorant of the possibility that Gus Walt is Heisenberg, but is in fact banking on it, and is trying to rope Gus Walt in via the law enforcement version of a long con.....

I love the idea of Hank playing Inspector Porfiry Petrovich to Gus's Walt's intellectually arrogant Raskolnikov. I wouldn’t put it past this show to set Hank up as a guy who habitually fails to see what’s right in front of him, only to reveal later that he was just playing dumb all along. “Breaking Bad” is filled with characters who do slightly mystifying things for reasons that are explained in detail later, after they’ve gotten what they wanted.

It's a funny idea, but I think it's beyond dispute that Hank thinks Gus is Heisenberg. The German corporation thing doesn't change that. I think it's clear Hank's theory is that Gus is Heisenberg and that this German corporation is an investor in Gus's operation, which is close enough to the truth. The only thing that Hank doesn't see is the role Walt plays in all this. Matt has routinely complained about that aspect of it, because Walt is such a bad liar, but this is where I think the show's writers grasp its characters better than even the smartest members the audience. There's just no way that Hank would see Walt as a meth cook unless there was overwhelming evidence presented to him. The show has gone out of its way to show Hank as a really sharp guy with a good sense of intuition, but with one major blind spot: Hank sees people who deal drugs as The Other. He routinely calls them "scumbags" and other colorful nicknames, and doesn't regard them as fully human. As soon as he figured out that Gus was behind all this, he stopped seeing Gus as a person and started seeing him as a conniving scumbag. But Walt is his brother-in-law, and Hank's desire to be close to him is so overwhelmening that it blinds Hank to many other aspects of Walt's personality. For instance, Hank doesn't seem to grasp that Walt doesn't like him very much, because Walt sees him as a dipshit. Both Walt and Hank routinely under-estimate each other. Walt, I think, has come around to actually liking Hank more now that he sees how sharp Hank really is. Hank wanted to drag Walt on his spying missions because he misses the masculine camaraderie of working at the DEA, and is trying to replicate it with Walt. Everything about their relationship pushes Hank away from seeing the realities. But I don't think he'll be carrying the idiot ball forever. One of the best parts of this show is wondering what piece of evidence Hank will turn up that will make him see Walt for who he really is. 

*Every time I give in and write a spoiler alert about something that's already aired, I seriously consider stopping this. It's just so condescending in its assumption that readers are literally too stupid to realize that if they are DVR-ing a show, it's on them not to read recaps that spoil it. It's treating your readers like children. Of course, YOU SPOILED IT people act like children with the temper tantrums, so perhaps it's an age-appropriate response to their ability to take personal responsibility to avoid spoilers instead of expect the entire world to avoid discussing a show because they haven't seen it yet. 

I'm always a season behind on "True Blood". My response to this is to avoid spoilers by assuming anyone writing about an episode that has already aired is going to reveal plot points. I don't read their writing about a show I haven't seen and then scream "SPOILERS" in comments, like an idiot who grabbed the cookie and then yelled at you when it was discovered to have sugar in it. 

Via Ta-Nehisi, an interview with Matthew Weiner about the new spate of TV shows set in the 60s, clearly influenced by the popularity of Mad Men. 

A lot of critics are saying that The Playboy Club and Pan Am are trying to rip off Mad Men. Do you think that's the shows' aim?

Define "ripping something off." I don't own the period. I see the whole experience as a vindication. The same people who are green-lighting these shows hated [the notion of a period drama] when I pitched it eleven years ago. It's a thrill that these same people now are seeing something commercial in it. I wish them the best. We're not competing. I lived through Far From Heaven, and people saying, "Oh, they did your [script]." So I can't worry about it. I'm not being magnanimous, either: I don't own the period.

People always seem to be skeptical about period shows working, especially on broadcast.

When I was growing up in the seventies, the two biggest shows were Happy Days and M*A*S*H. I kept saying,"Period shows can succeed." And people were like, "No, they can't."

I agree with Ta-Nehisi when he says that these shows are just running with the idea that people like looking at the clothes, adding that Mad Men is special because it's well-written and actually critical of the 60s.  And hell, maybe that will end up being true. It's important to remember that Mad Men doesn't actually get a huge share; it's not even AMC's biggest show and its rating compared to what the major networks expect is tiny.  I doubt there's a big audience for something as complex as Mad Men. 

With that in mind, there may really not be an audience for period shows.  Mad Men's relatively small but critically aware audience is able to get into the show because it reads like a novel.  They are classic niche marketing, straight at the teeny tiny audience share that actually reads challenging fiction and/or watches arty movies, and was thrilled to have TV shows that replicates that experience. Happy Days and M*A*S*H were successful in part because they minimized the cultural differences between the period they were covering and the period they were airing in. When an article I wrote about Mad Men was run at Jezebel, half the comments were from people who basically didn't like the show because it wasn't "relatable".  The way that literary novels are written and the way that most people watch TV are just very different; a lot of people watch TV to avoid being challenged and instead hang out with people they kind of wish were their friends. I don't relate to that at all---I don't like TV shows that pander by making previously interesting characters more "lovable", for instance---but I get that's what gets the ratings.  I suspect if these shows are successful, they will gradually and subtly modernize the clothing so that it seems less foreign, and they'll have the characters acting like they were people in 2011 instead of the 60s.  

This has been a pet theory of mine for awhile, and I even tried to sell a book that was based partially on it some time back, so I'm thrilled to see Richard Florida embracing it and really spelling it out in easy-to-digest terms. 

Though this shrieking sprawlscape is not his preferred haunt, the celebrity urbanist Richard Florida will admit to occasionally cruising reality TV’s endless subdevelopments. Also, the author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The Great ­Reset watches the Today show while he’s working out, and “when it changes over to Hoda and Kathie Lee, it’s suddenly all about these people on reality shows, so I hear about it there.” What he’s seen has led him to develop a working theory about the genre. It’s not just that a lot of the shows are set in suburbia—suburban life actually creates the appetite for them. “Reality TV (from the Kardashians to the Jersey Shore) is the product of isolation & sprawl” is how he put it when floating the notion via Twitter (tweets being the new white paper).

The way I always put it when bullshitting with friends is that tabloids and reality TV have replaced gossip.  People are so isolated in their little suburban cells and while they may have connections, their connections may not be connected to each other, which makes it impossible to really conduct a satisfying round of gossip.  You really do need a group of people who all know each other.  Tabloid celebrities fill this need.  They create a false "community" that we can dish about over the water cooler, since we all know the general characters.  Or even if we don't, we know where they come from, so it gives you that sense of familiarity gossip requires to work.

I came up with this theory not because I'm a well-trained urbanist, but because I grew up in a small town.  Living in a small town makes you an amateur sociologist of gossip, at least if you're the over-analyzing stuff.  Doing my time in a everyone-knows-everyone community made me realize that gossip is about more than being nosy and whiling away the time.  I would argue that gossip is one of the primary ways that human beings communicate social values.  Living in a gossip-heavy community, I would rank gossip as a values-transmitter far above religious teachings, the admonishments of community leaders, and other forms of moral education like books and whatnot. Gossip seems up there with parental influence in terms of shaping values---at least if you have a steady stream of gossip.  (And parents use gossip to impart values.)  Gossip is one reason I realized early on that the belief that men are superior to women persists and is often much stronger than the belief in equality, even though even the biggest sexist pricks in our culture officially claim to believe in equality.  But jaw-flapping in public about how you're supportive of women's equality has no power compared to the whispers in kitchens and lunchrooms about who's a big slut and the day to day fawning over and privileging of men over women. 

But that doesn't mean gossip is inherently bad as a social values transmitter either.  It's neutral, I'd say.  I've seen positive social values transmitted through gossip.  Cheating on your spouse is particularly discouraged in the gossip mill.  Domestic violence has become more of a fodder for tongue-clucking disapproval.  in some communities, the social price of raping someone is finally going up.  (In my community growing up, people automatically sided with the accused rapist, and I suspect this is still more common than not. See: Cleveland, TX.) Instead of just acting offended at the very existence of gossip, I think progressives would be wiser to see it as an opportunity to inject their own values into the gossip mill.  

Anyway, the situation as it stands, however, is that suburban isolation is keeping people from scratching that gossip itch. Enter: reality TV (and tabloids, I might add).

But Florida says he’s not trying to stuff burb-based reality TV into a cities=good, suburbs=bad rubric. Instead, he’s tracing a continuum that looks something like: sprawl+isolation=the substitution of televised, crazy-eyed pods of frenemies for actual human communities. “The knee-jerk reaction to reality TV is that it’s dumbification,” Florida says. “But it’s not, and the people watching aren’t dumb. They’re just looking for connection.” Florida uses Cambridge University psychologist Peter J. Rentfrow’s concept of communal consumers to describe reality junkies. “These are people who want stories about people and who used to rely on gossip, or on the little mini-dramas in their community,” he says. “And when you’re isolated in the suburbs, you don’t have that.”

The prospect of having to settle for the sniping of a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills (which has taken on darker overtones following the suicide of a cast member’s estranged husband) in place of a real drama-dishing housewife from down the block is pretty bleak. But such, Florida argues, are the results of picket-fence-bounded displacement. “Think of it this way,” says the New Jersey–bred Florida, setting up a comparison from his own upbringing. “My parents, growing up in Newark, had no need for these types of stories. They could get all the interaction and the drama they needed right there in the neighborhood.”

I completely agree with this. However, I'm going to add that reality TV is a really poor replacement for actual gossip. For one thing, reality TV producers go out of their way to tweak the story to "say" certain things, making the interpretative field for the gossipers really narrow.  And all too often, this nose-tugging is pointing you in the direction of beliefs such as "women are shallow gold-diggers" and "men only want one thing from women". 

Even worse may be that the characters in tabloids and reality TV have an unreality to them, which is partially deliberately induced by producers, but partially just what happens when you mediate life through the narrative structures of TV and magazines. What happens is that the people you're gossiping about when you watch and discuss reality TV cease being real people to you.  The way people go on about their artificial gossip objects online makes this incredibly clear. While the real world gossip mill can be really cruel and judgmental, I don't think it's so indifferent to suffering; on the contrary, a popular form of gossip is to talk about other people's woes and feel bad for them.  ("Did you hear so-and-so's in the hospital?" "Such a shame the way he just ran out on his family." Frowns.)  Reality TV and tabloids provide all the entertaining judging of gossip but very little of the empathizing.  

I honestly do think the spread of suburban isolation has done major damage to our national ability to feel empathy, in part because the chains of communication that keep empathy alive have broken down.  Which is why I was unsurprised to see, at the debate, Tea Partiers cheer wildly at the idea of letting the uninsured just die.  Despite all the "country boy" preening, the Tea Party is really a product of the suburbs, and the way they breed limited, non-inter-connected social circles.   (I suppose cities can, too, and yet in the two I've lived in, I would often exist in an urban tribe, usually formed around common interests---you have enough people on hand to do that, and the travel time to see friends was significantly lower than it was in the suburbs, for the brief period I lived there.)  When most of your understanding of how other people are and live comes not from person-to-person interaction or from the gossip mill, but from tabloids and reality TV, your ability to feel empathy for others really recedes. I think this goes a long way towards explaining how anti-choicers are getting more severe in their judgments of the sexually active, as well.  They think of a "woman who has sex" as being Snooki, and completely forget that actually, "sexually active" describes moms and church ladies and working professionals and neighbors.  That's because those women's sex and romantic lives are completely invisible to them.  As weird as it is to say that gossiping about other people's sex lives can actually make you more sympathetic to their health needs, I think there's a lot of truth to that.  When the person who has an STD is someone you know, it's much easier to feel that person deserves treatment, because hey, despite their flaws you like them and don't want them to suffer.  When the pregnant teenage girl is your neighbor's daughter, that's easy to relate to, and you can feel their need to have readily available abortion services.

But if the majority of your exposure to other people's sex lives is a bunch of reality TV stars having one night stands, you're probably not exercising your empathy muscles.  And as we all know, if you don't use it, you lose it. 

I've been really happy with the reception I've gotten for a piece I did on masculinity and high-quality TV drama.  (It got reprinted on Jezebel, which I think may be my first byline for them, believe it or not.) Alyssa Rosenberg calls it "prestige TV", and I think that's exactly the right term.  It explains in part why I didn't talk about some shows people asked me about after I published this, such as "Lost".  "Lost" is actually a decent example of writers working similar themes about the crisis of masculinity---Jack's personal problems were overtly patriarchal in an often anvilicious way---but I was more interested in why this particular theme of men facing the demons of traditional masculinity was so compelling on highbrow television.  

Alyssa does write about one piece of prestige television that was definitely not on my list, even though it really did belong in many ways: "Deadwood".  I dropped it for a couple of reasons, one being that it failed to capture enough of an audience to become a successful series.  But it definitely belongs on the list.  How could it not, when it was a rewriting of the most traditionally masculine of genres, the one most wed to patriarchal definitions of a good man that are failing modern men?  Alyssa's got some interesting comments about the women on the show:

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

I think the other reason I dropped "Deadwood" is that it literally takes place before any modern version of feminism came into being.  Every other show I write about has characters who actually have dealt with the basic argument of feminism, that women are equal to men in the political, social, and economic sphere.  In the world of "Deadwood", feminism as we know it would be an anachronism even on a show known for them.  That said, the show comes the closest to "Mad Men" in terms of beginning with this interrogation of masculinity and ending up spending more and more time on women's reactions and lives.  Like I said in the original piece, there's often this slow drift in these shows towards looking at the women more, and I think part of it is once the writers get invested in the characters, women's dilemmas of survival in a patriarchy become more interesting.

Still, maybe it's because I'm watching it now, but I really do think "Breaking Bad" is increasingly the most ruthless of the shows in its examination of the failure of the patriarchal worldview to really explain reality.  Walter is just such an asshole.  

Spoiler alert for the most recent episode.

My sense that they're being deliberate about their gender criticism was only enhanced in the most recent episode.  It was implied in the final scene that Gus is gay, or at least bisexual, and that he was hardened when his partner and lover was murdered.  It was simply implied; it may have been that they were just friends.  But I don't think so.  If I'm right, then they're doing something similar to "The Wire" in making one of the hardest characters on the show gay and queering the whole notion of masculinity.  One that I'll point out that Walt is deeply invested in, both in the sense of his role as the patriarch who controls and provides for his family, and in his sense that by being a badass criminal, he's finally proven himself as a man in a way that he could not as a schoolteacher.  

I love most of this review of the double episode of "Louie" by Alyssa Rosenberg, but I have to object to this:

I should note that I tend to hold jokes made by liberals about evangelical Christians to a higher standard. If you’re going to venture into an arena of humor where it’s easy to take low roads and cheap shots and still be rewarded fairly handsomely for it by your audience.

Now maybe Alyssa objects generally to low roads, and expects all humor to be on a higher plane, but I see this attitude a lot coming from liberals, and I think it's coming from the wrong place.  It's generally coming from a mistaken belief that mocking evangelicals (really, fundamentalists) is punching down.  Liberals who don't get a lot of direct exposure to fundamentalists, in other words, buy fundamentalist myths about themselves: that they're outcast, that they lack social power and wealth, that they're somehow underpriivileged as a group.  Which goes back to what I was saying yesterday, about the illusion that the Tea Party is predominantly economically stressed people.  In reality, Tea Partiers tend to be wealthier than average.  

And for all their posturing, fundamentalists are not oppressed.  On the contrary!  Their political power outstrips their numbers, to begin with.  But more importantly, they hold often unchecked power in red state communities.  Actually walking through a parking lot of a megachurch on a Sunday morning will do a lot to quell any misconceptions that they're just earnest, beleaguered, underprivileged people who happen to have kooky beliefs.  Far from being the oppressed class, they are they are the oppressors.  In their communities, they terrorize queer people, atheists, anyone perceived as outside their norms, and sexually active women, even those sexually active women sitting in their pews.  In the South, Bible-thumping is also intertwined with racism and the continued devotion to segregation in many communities.  I think a lot of liberals who haven't done much time in these areas think of fundamentalists as ruling the trailer parks, but in reality, they rule the suburbs that are stuffed with McMansions. Believe me; for a lot of us when I was living  in Austin who are definitely on the outs with that community, if we found ourselves stepping outside of the city limits into the suburbs that are ruled by Bible-thumpers, we made damn sure to minimize our time there.  For much of the audience of any TV show or comedian that mocks fundies, a shot across the chin to fundamentalists is big time punching up.  What outsiders might perceive as a low road could save the life of young people stuck in these communities who question evangelical beliefs. 

They have social, political, and economic weight.  The only thing fundamentalists don't have is cool.  Of course, the social capital of cool is often complicated, since so much of cool comes from subcultures that have no social capital outside of cool.  Cool is a very real threat to fundamentalist communities and their ability to pass on their beliefs to their young, which is why they spend so much time trying to keep their young separated from pop music and youth fashion.  But so what?  Cool is really the only weapon we have against a group of people that actively and gleefully oppresses other classes.  Fuck 'em.  A sneering, mocking low road can actually be the road out for those ensnared in the culture who are having their doubts.  We shouldn't tear up that road on the grounds that it's a low road. Some times just pointing and laughing at someone can deprive them of a lot of power to do harm to others.  

Which isn't to say that I objected to that episode of "Louie".  But I don't think he was taking the high road so much as he had to have the fundamentalist Christian be a certain way for the events of the episode to unfold the way they did, since the episode was more about him and not really about her.  

Spoilers of the most recent season.

"Breaking Bad" is back with its fourth season, and it's causing some interesting writing about the moral universe of the show. Alyssa Rosenberg is close to my view of it.  Chuck Klosterman, who has this amazing knack for being thought-provoking and interesting while so regularly drawing just wrong conclusions, also weighed in on the morality of the show.  He singles it out amongst the Four* Big Important Shows That Make TV A For-Real Art Form---the others being "The Sopranos", "Mad Men", and "The Wire"---as the only one that has a steadfast moral point of view.  The rest are more interested in the gray areas between right and wrong, but "Breaking Bad" is clear on what is right and what is wrong, and is more interested in what causes people to do things they know are morally wrong. 

Fair enough.  I was with him on that.  But this is where we have a fundamental disagreement:

The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man "bad" — his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3. So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television — because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most — the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who's no longer good.

I don't think it's that simple.  I agree that the conventions of television are being used to put the audience in a situation where they hope Walt gets away with it yet again.  But it's not necessarily because we sympathize with Walt.  I, personally, look forward to the day Walt gets what's coming to him.  What the show lays bare is the difference between wanting the story to keep going and wanting the main character to keep on keeping on.  Most shows conflate the two (though Don Draper is also a character who fucks with this convention---a close watcher realizes he deserves to lose, but he's still sympathetic enough that you don't feel bad rooting for him), so your desire to get more story is entwined with your desire for the protagonist to survive.  "Breaking Bad" breaks the two apart.  You realize when someone is menacing Walt that you simultaneously believe that Walt should be shot in the head and that you don't want that to happen, because you want the story to continue.  The show makes you complicit in an even more fucked up way than Klosterman is acknowledging.

Part of why I think Klosterman doesn't get this is he doesn't spend any time on the characters who have a more moral worldview than Walt.  It's  only if you start to invest in Skylar, Hank, and Jesse that you start to realize that you really think Walt should die.  All of these people would be immediately better off if he quit destroying their lives.  They may not see it that way, but that's why he has to die. To set them free from the horrible trap he has them in.  

The show acknowledged this conflict in the last episode, by the way, by having Gus's bodyguard beat the ever-living shit out of Walt.  It was gratifying to see Walt get a taste of what he deserves, but it was done so in a way that doesn't bring an end to the story.  I personally was gleeful that Walt was getting beat up, which is another way the show can totally warp you. 

But all of what I said, I think, is debatable.  This is not. 

It's not just that watching White's transformation is interesting; what's interesting is that this transformation involves the fundamental core of who he supposedly is, and that this (wholly constructed) core is an extension of his own free will. The difference between White in the middle of Season 1 and White in the debut of Season 4 is not the product of his era or his upbringing or his social environment. It's a product of his own consciousness. He changed himself. At some point, he decided to become bad, and that's what matters.

Klosterman is just dead wrong about this.  The show isn't about Walt becoming bad when he used to be good.  The show is about how Walt is becoming the evil person he always was, but until now has managed to hide from everyone, including himself. The show isn't about how people can fundamentally change.  It's more about the conflict between what is expected of someone versus what someone really, truly is.  Walt is a fundamentally bad person who has managed to front his whole life because he lived an average, suburban life that made being good easier than being bad.  Jesse, on the other hand, is a fundamentally decent person who is stuck in a criminal underworld and he's simply not emotionally cut out for it.  Walt is becoming more himself.  Jesse is falling apart because the choices he makes are in conflict with who he is.

The show drops frequent hints that Walt has always been an asshole, but he managed to get by without people noticing because people's mental image of an asshole doesn't encompass the nerdy professor type.  But let's look at the evidence:

1) Walt's high school students dislike him strongly.  It's suggested he's a bad teacher because he's imperious, disdainful and easily bored.  Jesse's initial reactions to him confirm this.

2) We don't know how Walt's business dealings fell through, but we've since learned that he's a self-pitying sort, and so the self-pity he feels about how all that went down could very well be evidence that he brought it on himself. 

3) As Alyssa notes, the most distressing thing that Walt does routinely on the show is he abuses Jesse.  He gives Jesse just enough reason for Jesse to love him and want his approval, but he also keeps Jesse dependent and afraid, so he can control him.  There are hints that this is a pattern with Walt.  After all, he's married to a much-younger woman who is a bored housewife, and his first inclination when things go south for him is to withhold information from her and try to control her.  I think we're supposed to imagine that Walt was initially attracted to Sklyar---maybe she was a student of his?---because he thought she was easy to control.  Every time she asserts herself, he gets irrationally angry about it, and her forebearance implies that this is their pattern.

4) Walt is contemptuous of his in-laws, though there is no reason to think that they're any better or worse than he is and in fact, we discover that Hank is a pretty good guy that always has your back. No matter; Walt takes every opportunity he can to sneer at them.

I think Alyssa's got a more interesting take on Walt:

But it’s also a larger part of Walt’s social interactions that, as I’ve thought about them more, seem characteristic of a nerd who never quite recovered. I think it’s a major plausibility issue for the entire show that the reasons for Walt’s split from Gray Matter Technologies aren’t really explained, and that it’s not particularly clear why someone with his skills isn’t, say, working at DARPA. But I suppose if the show isn’t going to sketch in the specific mechanics of his self-destruction, I can accept Walter’s anger at the world as somehow familiar, the rage of a man who will always see himself as victimized whether he’s ensnaring his former friends and lovers in a lie, getting kicked out of his house by his wife, who is understandably upset that he’s cooking meth, or lashing out at his partner for forging ahead in the criminal enterprise he walked away from. If Walt had been demonstrably wronged in any of these circumstances, we could sympathize with him. Instead, Jesse was wrong when he asked Walt in the first season “Some straight like you, giant stick up his ass, age what — 60? He’s just gonna break bad?” Once we know Walt, it’s relatively clear that manufacturing drugs is the thing he was looking for all along: he didn’t break bad, he always was.

My one quarrel: I don't mind the mystery.  If the backstory was completely fleshed out, the themes about good and evil would be anvilicious.  The pleasure of the show is the gradual realization that Walt was always a bad person, and that he just hid it well---even from the audience.  If, earlier in the show, we found out, as I suspect, that Walt broke with Gray Matters because he's an irredeemable asshole, that would have taken the punch out of the gradual revelations.  Now that it's four seasons in and it's inescapable that Walt really is a bad person, I bet we find out more about what happened, confirming that Walt didn't become this, but that Walt was always this. 

*What's interesting about all the coverage these big dramas get is that there's very little comparative coverage in how comedy is also having a resurgence on television, and that it's really just as interesting and good.  "Louie", "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia", "30 Rock",  "Parks and Recreation", and before it went off the rails, "The Office" are all shows that have really pushed the creativity envelope and demonstrated that television comedy can rise above the hackneyed and become sublime. I laugh harder at all these shows than almost any movie I've seen in theaters in the past decade, with the exception, of course, of much of Judd Apatow's output.  But Apatow and crew lay a lot of stinkers, while Tina Fey continues to kick major ass with more airtime to fill.  So there you go. 

It's been interesting reading feminist responses to both the end of "Harry Potter" and "Friday Night Lights", because it really demonstrates the limits of viewing art and pop culture through an ideological lens.  Sarah Seltzer's dual response article and Feministing's separate pieces fell into what I think is the same trap---because the writers really like the stories and characters, they try to see feminism in them where it doesn't really exist.  The less said about "Harry Potter" and trying to make it seem feminist, the better.  Sure, Rowling has a couple of subversive moments, but seriously, the mother love is the greatest power in the world stuff is just straight up gender essentialism.  

What is more interesting to me is reading Eric and Tammy Taylor as somehow liberal or feminist characters.  They are intensely likeable characters, but c'mon.  In the first season, she was a lifelong housewife who basically had to do all of the socialzing work that his job requires for him, for free.  He immediately balks at the idea of having a girl in the locker room, even though it's obvious that she's got a lot of talent and could be really useful for more than washing stuff.  I would suggest that as characters, they're on the moderate-to-moderately-conservative scale.  They're not right wingers, by any means, but Eric especially has a moderately conservative worldview.  I mean, the show isn't even subtle about it, since Eric's mantra is "Clear eyes, full heart, can't lose."  What I take this to mean, and the series has really driven home is that Eric sincerely believes that if you work hard and play by the rules, things will work out for you.  Tammy believes similar things, but she's more liberal and believes that people with disadvantages need a little more assistance.  But what the show has done is far more remarkable than to show a functional, feminist-friendly couple on TV.  What they've done is shown a well-meaning, moderately conservative couple constantly being challenged by the limits of their philosophy.  Which is probably more effective and interesting anyway. 

Now, I'm only 2/3 the way through the last season, but I can say with confidence that much of the show has been about disillusioning Eric Taylor when it comes to his belief that hard work and clean living is all you need.  Take the rivalry between Vince and Luke, for instance---by any measure, Luke wanted it more and worked harder for it, but Vince simply has more talent.  Sometimes that's how it goes.  There's also the struggle between Eric and Vince, and it's demonstrated that Eric's belief in the power of setting clear rules and enforcing them isn't enough.  There's many scenes where it's clear that all Eric needs to do is talk to Vince in depth about why he believes his way is better than Vince's dad's way (which is an easy case to lay out), but instead he just barks orders and then is frustrated when Vince is more willing to listen to his dad, who actually does him the favor of explaining his point of view.  As much respect as the show has for Eric, let's face it.  Much of the show  has been about the limits of his philosophy.  He isn't even able to keep Tim Riggins out of jail, and Riggins was a layabout but basically a good kid.  

I found it interesting that both Sarah and the ladies at Feministing responded to the "Julie sleeps with a TA" storyline with disgust and disinterest.  Yeah, I get that it kind of dragged on and it certainly made me flinch a lot, but it really revealed what the writers are trying to get at, which is, "Tammy and Eric are good, well-meaning people, but there are limits to their philosophy."  The fact of the matter is that Julie's problems reflect somewhat poorly on Tammy and Eric.  It's clear, especially in the fights over the affair between Eric and Julie, that they thought they just had to keep her relatively sheltered and express strong moral values, and she would then turn into a functional adult who clearly understands why you don't sleep with older, married men.  When that doesn't work, Eric is literally unable to think of how to handle the problem.  He's just angry.  They can't handle her well at all, because the only tool they have is disclipinary---make demands, make rules, enact punishments.  Nothing works.  They're just ill-equipped.  And it's the same story with Vince.  Explaining the situation would be smarter than just yelling at him all the time, but "yelling" is the main tool Eric  has.  

Now, Tammy is much more of a liberal than Eric.  Subsequently, she's more effective, but there are limits imposed by the system on her choices.  And she's got a lot of privilege-blindness.  I'm guessing Tammy wouldn't think it's all that great for Becky to move out of her dad's house to live with a stripper and a guy who barely escaped felony auto theft charges, for instance, but in context, it's clearly the right move for Becky.  (Or that's my read on it; I haven't seen the end of the series, though.)  Tammy's moderation comes out in the abortion storyline, where her defense of herself isn't, "I'm pro-choice, screw you," so much as, "I took an approach that centered around what the girl needs, why do you have to bring up all this uncomfortable abortion stuff that I don't even understand that well anyway?"  

And all that's great, in my book.  I like having likeable but deeply flawed people driving the narrative.  But the "Eric and Tammy are feminist role models" thing doesn't work for me.  They're more models for why eschewing overt feminism can really limit the effectiveness of your good intentions.