Fall TV Watch: Tonight the new season can be said to be truly underway

I haven't watched this official season preview of Season 5 of Homeland, which launches tonight, for fear of of spoilers. I started watching one of the series of preview clips CBS has posted in advance of tonight's Season 7 premiere of The Good Wife, and within about three seconds star Julianna Margulies had revealed more than I wanted to know before watching the show.

by Ken

However bleak the new TV season becomes, it doesn't seem to crap up Sunday night. Tonight we have the season premieres of both The Good Wife and Homeland, and it's a good bet that, however I finally decide to finagle my DVR schedule -- it's complicated by the usual start-time derby CBS puts people who insist on watching The Good Wife through with their goddamn NFL game pushing the schedule back -- I expect I'll have watched both by the time I go to bed.

Plus there's the start of Season 2 of Showtime's The Affair (I had very mixed feelings about Season 1, but I watched the whole thing, and I'll probably stick with it, at least for a while). And a new episode of HBO's Project Greenlight, And of course a new episode of John Oliver's HBO Last Week Tonight.

By the time I go to bed I'll likely also have watched the new episode(s) of the current Masterpiece Classic offering, Indian Summers (at least on my PBS station), about life among the rulers and the ruled in the Raj of the '30s, as the independence movement was only beginning to form. By the end of last week's episode, I would have liked nothing better than to be able to go right into another episode. There were enough characters whose situations had grabbed my interest to the point where I really wanted to see more. And I still do!

Which is sometimes the best test of my relationship to a show. How badly do I want to see more of it?

I've already suggested my answers in the cases of The Good Wife and Homeland. Both shows are such familiar commodities that there seems hardly any point in going into them now, except perhaps to make the basic points:

• In its six seasons to date, The Good Wife seems to me to have cemented its standing as one of the all-time great TV dramas.

• I divine from (a) my enthusiasm carrying over from the end of Season 4 of Homeland and (b) my eagerness for the start of Season 5 that I think it's a substantially better show than most people seem to.

In both cases, the explanation seems to me basically the same: a core cast of characters I'm really interested in and care about -- both people who've been with us the whole way and people who've been brought in at the relevant opportunities -- and stories that make me want to see how they react and what happens to them. Chalk it up to the overriding vision and season-by-season vigilance of the creative overseers, and of course to the teams of writers and actors.

As I mentioned the other day, The Big Bang Theory is another show that involves me in this way -- to such an extent that I usually manage to block out the hideous un-laugh-like noise that disfigures every episode. It doesn't surprise me that this ghastly intrusion may cause many viewers not to realize how good a show this is that's trying to happen while its producers seem to be apologizing for the crap they're fobbing off on us.

I did actually watch the premiere of the show CBS has paired with BBT, Life in Pieces, an extended-family comedy that obviously makes you think of Modern Family, and I thought it wasn't terrible. I thought, this is something I would watch again. And I almost certainly will, but I have a feeling Episode 2 may sit on the DVR for a while until I get around to it.

The same sort of thing happened to me with HBO's Doll and Em. I somehow missed its whole first season, and didn't become aware of it until HBO posted the whole thing on On Demand, obviously in anticipation of the launch of the second season. And via On Demand, I loved the first season. I devoured it.

Em (Emily Mortimer) and Doll (Dolly Wells)

In Season 1, Emily was about to start production on a film that, whatever its problems, has the professional attraction of riding squarely on her shoulders (and in the course of the season -- spoiler alert! -- we got some glimmering of the kind of pressure that puts on an actor) when she was confronted by Doll back in England in crashed-and-burning breakdown mode, and asked her to come to L.A. to work as her assistant on the film, and tensions built into all those years of separate evolution begin to surface.

I congratulated myself on my unintentionally brilliant timing: I would be able to segue right into Season 2.Only it didn't work out that way. I thought the first episode of Season 2 was interesting, as Doll and Em resolved to create a project they can work on, together, as equals. But I noticed that I didn't pounce on Episode 2. And now I seem I'm falling behind, in what is, after all, only a six-episode season. Oh, I'll get to the others eventually. But I'm in no rush. Maybe I'll pick up at a point where the show once again really grabs me, and we'll finish together, the show and I, in a rush.

I'm in sort of the same situation with the CBS drama Limitless, about a guy Jake McDorman) who stumbles into an experimental drug that for a limited time makes his brain work like gangbusters. He winds up in trouble with the law, in the person of an FBI agent played by Jennifer Carpenter, our old friend from Dexter, who was so good as Dexter's succeeding-but-always-fucking-up cop sister Deb. The thing is, the drug -- unbeknownst to the guy -- has devastating side effects, except the other thing is that he appears to be somehow immune, which makes him invaluable as a test subject. If you're not quite believing this, neither am I, quite. But I'd probably have an easier time with it if I was being made to care more about the characters.

In the case of Doll and Em, for example, I wonder if my current less enthusiastic reaction has to do with the fact that, for me at least, Emily Mortimer as an actress usually has strong personal appeal; it's a cinch to care about most of the characters she plays. And Dolly Wells, not so much, and if I have to work to muster emotional support for the emotionally needier Doll character, it's apparently a challenge I'm not rushing into.

As a matter of fact, the show that, before the return of The Good Wife, I've found myself most looking forward to this summer is Showtime's rerun of the whole of its Queer as Folk, its many-season drama, developed for American television by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, about a group of largely LGBT folk in Pittsburgh, but also including a fair number of non-LGBT characters, of which the network has been showing back-to-back episodes Monday nights into Tuesday mornings at 11pm and midnight, at least in my time zone. Earlier on, Showtime was showing whole masses of episodes on a couple of weekend nights, running into the wee or even not-so-wee hours of the morning, and I waa having the TV on, drifting in and out of sleep, watching as much as I could, and wanting more. Since they scaled back to the two episodes per week, I've been feeling majorly deprived, having to wait till late nigh Monday each week for a mere two episodes.


The North American Queer as Folk gang: Standing: Peter Paige (Emmett), Scott Lowell (Ted), Gale Harold (Brian), Robert Gant (Ben), Thea Gill (Lindsay), and Hal Sparks (Michael). Sitting: Randy Harrison (Justin) and Michelle Clunie (Melanie). Unaccountably missing: Sharon Gless (Michael's mother, Debbie).

When I started rewatching the Queer as Folk episodes, I found that the more I watched, the more I became reinvested in the characters, and the more personally I took each succeeding episode. This might be worth talking about at some point, especially in connection with the English Queer as Folk on which the American version was based, especially since almost everything I've heard about the two versions, purporting to "compare" them, seemed to me -- once I finally caught up with the U.K. version -- idiotic. But for now what matters about the American Queer as Folk is that it presents a large and diverse cast of characters I find it ridiculously easy to care about, and scripts and direction that make me want to see what happens next.

I think it's worth noting that when Queer as Folk aired originally, my understanding was that it had a significant core of non-gay fans. I'd like to think this was partly because some people were genuinely curious about what the lives of gay and lesbian folk looked like, but probably even more because the characters and stories made a lot of viewers really wanted to see what happened to these people next.

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"Why is it not OK to kill people in the name of a religion, but it is OK to kill people in the name of a nation?" (Ian Welsh)

Showtime's Homeland has been one of the few mainstream media places where consideration has been allowed for the implications of murder by drone -- or even that there are implications.

by Ken

I should have had occasion before now to direct attention to a string of posts Ian Welsh has written in the wake of the events in Paris, because Ian has been insisting on questions that hardly anybody else has even been hinting at, namely the wild disproportion between the furor over those events and regularly occurring series of events in various parts of the world that have been taking lives in quantities many orders of magnitude greater, and not as plots by bands of terrorists but as the official policy of eminently "respectable" and "legitimate" agencies like, you know, governments -- including guess-which.

So I would encourage you to take a look at "In light of Charlie Hebdo, are some lives worth more than others?" (Jan. 8), "Charlie Hebdo and the Moral Moment" (Jan. 9), and the quickie "The Effect of the Charlie Hebdo Attacks Will Be Less Freedom" (Jan. 11).

I think many of us have the gut reaction that we're comparing apples and oranges here, that the Charlie Hebdo massacre is somehow different. But I know I sure can't explain in any remotely satisfactory way how or why they're different from government actions that knowingly, intentionally result in masses of deaths of people just as innocent as the Paris victims.

Now Ian has backed the discussion up and framed an even more basic question, "a simple question for those who read this" -- one that's even harder to answer satisfactorily. He asks us to "spend some time thinking about it," and I think this is an excellent idea.

For this purpose I'd prefer to have Ian frame the question his own way.

People are very strange: murder edition

2015 JANUARY 20

by Ian Welsh

I have a simple question for those who read this:

Why is it not OK to kill people in the name of a religion, but it is OK to kill people in the name of a nation?

I’ve always had a great deal of trouble with the way most people run their morality and ethics. Objectively, the Iraqi blockade of the 90s killed vastly more people than 9/11. I once got to see an Iraki pediatrician writing in real time about all the children who died in the 90s, whom she could have saved, if she had had the medicine the West was denying Iraq.

The Vietnam war killed more people. The Chechen war killed more people. The (insert war here) killed more people.

I can run through the intellectual arguments, but on a fundamental level I don’t understand: why is it ok for nations to kill on a mass scale but no one else can? (Well, except some corporations. See Bhopal, India and Union Carbide.)

The true decline of religion in the West is, in fact, indicated exactly by the fact that many people think it isn’t OK to kill in the name of your religion. The Crusades, and the religious wars of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation would like to chat with you about that.

For that matter, austerity has certainly killed more people in the West than religious-based terrorism has. Heck, practically everything that does kill people, kills more.

Humans are just very odd. Very, fundamentally, stupid and foolish. Barely conscious.

Spend some time thinking about this. Because it’s a question that is more important than it seems (and it should seem important enough as is.)

Note that what Ian is asking for is thinking about it, not knee-jerk mouthing off. They're not the same thing.

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Republican Clowns Want You To Think Women Don't Have What It Takes To Protect America

Yesterday and again earlier today, we looked around the Republican Party war against women. Some interesting reporting from Toby Harden at Real Clear Politics, The CIA's Real Drone Queens, leads one to conclude there certainly is not discrimination against women in the CIA workplace-- and that the basis of the relentless Republican attacks against women's capacity is completely misplaced and just plain wrong, based on nothing but Bronze Age prejudices. Who's knew?

The CIA is now almost 50% female. Its director is a man but the next three posts below him are filled by women. They are instrumental in waging the CIA’s anti-terrorist war, playing a disproportionate role in some of the most lethal and morally ambiguous tasks of an organisation that has long been regarded as a bastion of outdated machismo.

More enlightened employment practices have contributed to this. But could it be, as some senior intelligence officers argue, that the true-life drone queens are simply better than men at stalking terrorists and deciding when and how they should die?

“It's a reality,” said Bruce Riedel, who spent 29 years in the CIA and later became an adviser to Obama. “Girl power. That’s what they call it within the CIA.” Women, he posited, tend to be better “at seeing connections than most of their male counterparts” when they are dealing with data.

“I’ve seen it, particularly on issues where there’s a tremendous need for precision in remembering enormous amounts of very detailed information. It seems there’s an advantage in having female chromosomes.”

Cindy Storer, formerly one of the CIA’s senior al-Qaeda analysts, was part of a “band of sisters”-- in the words of General Michael Hayden, the director from 2006-9-- who contributed to bin Laden’s demise. Bin Laden first came to her attention in 1992, when her job was to monitor jihadist veterans of the Afghan war with the Soviets.

“My role was to say, holy crap, this is a terrorist group and this is how they’re structured, this is what they do and this is where they are.” Storer believes that the success of female CIA officers could be down to “brain science.”

“Men tend to be linear thinkers-- it’s the hunter-gatherer thing, right? Women tend to be all over the place and can hold a whole bunch of different stuff in their minds at the same time. Some people will say that women tend to be more patient and tenacious . . . The men I worked with, I did see a difference, with women being more comfortable with ambiguity. A lot of the men wanted things to be in neat boxes.”

...Storer said she and her compatriots had sometimes been denigrated for adding a feminine touch to their austere workplaces. “After 9/11 . . . we still made birthday cakes for each other. It’s not like you stop being a woman.”

Avril Haines, 43, is the CIA’s deputy director. She studied judo in Japan, worked as a car mechanic in Chicago and once hosted erotica readings at a Baltimore cafe. As Obama’s top foreign policy lawyer, she would often be summoned in the middle of the night to help decide whether a terrorist on Obama’s “kill list” should be killed by a drone strike.

Now Haines can sometimes be seen at Starbucks, buying an iced latte. Waiting outside is a black armoured Jeep bristling with aerials and manned by security officers wearing earpieces. If need be, Haines can make secure phone calls from the vehicle and watch video of drone strikes.

Under Obama, 349 drone strikes in Pakistan have killed almost 4,000 people, an estimated quarter of them innocent civilians. It is five years since Obama’s visit to CIA headquarters to meet the real “drone queens” for the first time. Several have risen to more senior positions in the CIA’s killing apparatus.

The next time Obama authorises a strike in Pakistan, the odds are that it will be a woman who gives the green light moments before death is delivered from a drone stationed several miles away.

Now juxtapose what we just read with Heidi Przybyla's report for Bloomberg about how Republican Party hacks are manufacturing fears of women being too incompetent to deal with terrorism. The Republicans are trying to paint Democratic women, particularly Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kay Hagan, Michelle Nunn and Jeanne Shaheen as unable to deal with the fears the right wing media has been using to terrorize low-info voters, stuff like ISIL and Ebola particularly.

At least 60 terrorism-- or national security-related ads have aired in congressional contests in such states as Georgia, Kentucky and North Carolina. They’re running with the most intensity since President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, when the airwaves were full of ads depicting Democrat John Kerry as weak on national security, data provided by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group show.

Of the top five Democratic targets, four are women.