How to Make Childhood Reappear

I noted in my first post on Neil Postman's book The Disappearance of Childhood that one thing I appreciated is his epistemic humility at the book's outset. Too often people reach too far in attempting to provide pat conclusions to complex issues. I appreciated Postman's reticence to do anything in his book beyond diagnosis.

However, upon finishing the book a clear suggestion is implicit: opt out. Postman's argument is that childhood is disappearing in our culture because we have replaced text-based literacy with image-based illiteracy. Whereas mass literacy prompted the development of childhood as an age distinct from adulthood--little kids can't read at advanced levels of cognition and adults can--our culture is removing the distinctions by flattening the differences. You can see these previous posts that spell out how Postman comes to this admittedly controversial thesis. 

But as I finished the book it became evident that a solution exists: resist the flattening caused by television and other mass media. Refuse to let your kids be indoctrinated into the world of the image and adhere to the world of print. In a move that would make the reformers proud, be iconoclasts. Smash the icons and idols of the modern technocracy.

Postman himself gets to this in the concluding chapter. He offers there a set of questions and responses for what to do if you happen to accept his thesis. His final question is "Is the individual powerless to resist what is happening?" The very wording of the question certainly implies that there might be a way forward (or backward, depending on your point of view). I'll quote his answer at some length:

The answer to this, in my opinion, is "No." But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.  

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.

There is much to unpack here and by no means do I intend to do justice by all of it. The parts that I have put in bold are indicative of what I am focusing on for now. I have long had the sense that parenting in the way I feel called to do it is both an implicit and explicit rejection of our culture at large and even some of the subcultures I inhabit. The values that my wife and I value are out of step with the pull of American culture. The way we pursue them strikes others as extreme and over-the-top. But you cannot subvert a decadent culture with half-measures. 

Moreover, as Postman affirms in dubbing this the Monastery Effect, the goal of such parenting is firmly rooted in this world. The parents who make the decision to defy the culture are doing so for the good of the culture, ultimately. Christians, and here I break from Postman's own classically liberal concerns, are to live our lives for the life of the world. We reject culture not to reject the people that comprise that culture but in order to better love and serve them. 

This is the solution Postman denied in the introduction he would give. And the solution must begin at the individual level, expand to communities of faith who unite together to maintain and reclaim what is humane in our tradition, and only then can it ever expand to enact mass change. All other paths of resistance are Luddites smashing the machines. That will not work as long as the majority love the machines. We have to restore a vision of the world that makes the machines superfluous. That will be extremely difficult. But if we value not only our children but childhood itself we will put our hand to the plow.

Last Chance U

I don't watch much TV these days. Between kids, work, and reading I don't have a lot of spare time. I still enjoy the periodic pleasure of falling under the spell of a show, though. And that happened last week, with the multi-part documentary on Netflix called Last Chance U. I knew virtually nothing about the show as I started watching, only that it came highly recommended from someone in my Twitter feed. 

The show follows a national champion junior college football time from East Mississippi Community College as they try to win back to back titles and their fourth championship in six years. Most juco players are Division I washouts or kids unable to land scholarships at a more prestigious school or kids whose grades or encounters with the justice system have kept them out of football's upper echelons. They come to EMCC in tiny Scooba, Mississippi for one last chance at making "the league" and thus fulfilling all of their hopes and dreams.

This show is unbelievably sad. One thing that becomes quickly apparent is that the players give absolutely zero shits about being students. The governing body stipulates that the players must maintain a 2.5 GPA. While it never outright reveals that these numbers are massaged by the athletic department and willing instructors, the implication is clear. One of the main characters of the show is the academic compliance officer for the school. She is frequently seen in the show rushing through the halls of the academic buildings escorting players to class, making sure they have pencils and notebooks, making sure they at least appear to pay attention.

Meanwhile the players are entirely uninterested in their scholarly pursuits. They often congregate in the compliance officer's office and sit, faces glued to the glowing screens of their smartphones, while she drones on (from their perspective) about the importance of attending class and receiving an education. They glance up from time to time and grumble a reply. School is clearly an annoyance to them, an obstacle to be overcome. They are football mercenaries, not students.

Race, too, is an undeniable feature of the show. Most of the prominent players on the team are black. Most are from bad backgrounds. Most don't have a fallback plan. Most are at the end of their line. And football seems to offer salvation. What's the point in going to class? They're not going to go on to run a bank or teach high school after they leave here. They repeatedly worry about having to return home and into a way of life they know is futureless. But football seems to them, despite the long odds, their only way out.

The coach is a petty tyrant, lording his small world and authority over a group of desperate man-children. One scene juxtaposes his daughters calling him a sweetheart and a teddy bear with him cursing vociferously at an 18 year-old for a minor infraction on the practice field. In another scene he is swearing at and arguing with an official to an embarrassing extent over a forward progress call in a game his team wins 69-20. In a later game he so provokes an official that the official responds to a shove from the coach by punching the coach (by this time in the show I expect most viewers are likewise lining up for their chance to take a swing). It is embarrassing to watch. This man's entire world is juco football. One of the culminating events of the show is a bench-clearing brawl in the final regular season game of the year. In response the coach lectures his players--in language dripping with racism--for being thugs and responding as if they were on the street (this as they are mostly defending one of their teammates who is literally being beat with helmets).  

After the brawl the team is disqualified from participation in the postseason and therefore unable to defend their national title. The last clip of the show is the coach recruiting next year's batch of hopeful athletes, promising the chance to attract D-I eyes and stressing the school's firm commitment to academics. While there is something slightly admirable in the coach's pluck, it made me want to throw up.

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The whole show made me sick to my stomach. I have felt estranged from sports lately. In our culture we don't let sports be sport. Everything is zealously managed and supervised and utilitarian. The goal is a college scholarship or acceptance to a good club team or the long shot professional hope. No one plays just because it's fun anymore. I've heard people complain about trophies for every player and the refusal of municipal leagues to keep score as hearkening some sort of death of competition in our culture. That's bullcrap, though. Competition is alive and well. Too alive and too well. What we need is a bit more relaxation and joy in our sports. They are games after all. 

Watching a grown man yell and curse at another grown man over the placement of a football in a game is a good reminder of how ephemeral sports actually are. And, to me, ephemerality is what makes sports glorious. They don't last. Every game is different. But our culture tempts us into thinking--with the myth making machine of ESPN and other sports media as zealous accomplices--that the glory of the football field (and the soccer pitch and the basketball court and the baseball diamond) is eternal. After my beloved Royals won the World Series last year, I realized that it wasn't actually that big of a deal. I woke up the next morning and went to work, much the same man as I was the previous day. In talking with my son about sports I have tried to communicate this to him. He learned the word ephemeral in The Wind and the Willows and has since been trying to think of things that are ephemeral compared with things that are more lasting. One night at dinner I told him sports fit into the ephemeral category. They are great and beautiful but very temporary. I told him that something sad in our world is how many people forget this. The cursing and the angst and the elation that fill my Facebook feed on a Sunday afternoon are inordinate to the importance of the event. They put more weight on sport than sport can possible hold. They blind us to the things that matter and last.

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One of the repeated lines from the school's compliance officer in Last Chance U--often used when a student can't bear the thought of attending class--is, "What's 'plan B'?" And no one has an answer for her. There's only Plan A: the League. But that is patently unrealistic for most of the athletes documented. There just are not enough roster spots in the NFL to accommodate the vast amount of athletic talent pumped through our system. But these kids are all trapped in this dream, thinking that it's just around the corner. This might be the saddest part of this series for me. There is actually very little hope for these kids.

The biggest hope, and sorry to sound all square and teacherly here, is the education they are spurning. But the program, as much as the coach might sweet talk parents with the idea of academics, ultimately doesn't care about anything academically apart from the players' GPAs. They are not being crafted into men--the goal of any sport worth its salt--but being used as tools in the quest for more banners in the stadium and gaudy rings on the fat fingers of a conceited man-child coach. And, like even the best tools, their utility at some point expires. Then they are thrown away.

Game of Thrones Sucks

Really, the post title says it all. I am hesitant to even add to it in case I dilute the core message. So I will return to it from time to time, lest anyone doubt the true meaning of this post. Imagine me intoning in my best Gregorian chant "Game of Thrones sucks. Amen."

I am not going to get into the nitty-gritty here of why I hate Game of Thrones, that ubiquitous piece of cultural trash that people try to pretend is anything other than deranged fantasy fulfillment. I had been happy to leave the show behind, but then I read an article about the sister-rapiness of the last episode, yep, you read that correctly, and felt the need to chime in for those who might be tempted by the omnipresence of the artifact to assume that it did anything other than totally suck. ("Game of Thrones sucks. Amen.")

By way of clearing my throat allow me to catalog briefly my experience with the show and book. Show: I watched the first two seasons, roughly. Book: I threw the first book across the room in disgust after 100 pages and then just threw it away. Literally, threw it away. I never do that, but I didn't want someone to pick up a copy at the Salvation Army under the assumption that the book did anything other than totally suck. ("Game of Thrones sucks. Amen.")

You will hear the defenders of the show, and they are legion, tell noobs like me that unless you have pored over every jot and tittle of the doorstop books, watched and rewatched every episode on HBO, and perused the Wiki page for the show than you have no business critiquing it. To which I say, posh. How many bites of an elephant turd sandwich must one take before we are convinced that it is an elephant turd sandwich? Maybe one more bite will redeem it all! Or, to stick with my theme, sometimes my suck meter just doesn't take that long to start blaring. ("Game of Thrones sucks. Amen.")

One of the common defenses of the show it that its "gritty" and "real." While I wonder if the people who praise its grittiness have ever done or seen anything gritty in real life themselves (nota bene: living in New York decidedly does not count), I also do not think this is in any way a credit to the show. In the latest episode, which again I have not watched, a brother rapes his sister over the grave of their incestuously conceived son. Can you taste the grit? Huh, can you? You know what else is real and gritty? Child pornography. Perhaps HBO should team up with NAMBLA for their next big hit. Ooh, ooh, ooh, or how about a real and gritty show about sex tourism in Thailand or forced prostitution anywhere in the world. Hey, hey, hey. Don't be shocked. This is real life, man. People rape their sister, people cut off other people's ding-dongs, people regularly use women of ill-repute for target practice. That's life, bro. ("Game of Thrones sucks. Amen.")

One of the defenses I read for the sister-rapey episode was that it was all from the book. As if this man somehow represented some moral standard. Indeed, people treat George R.R. Martin as if he were some modern day Dostoevsky. To which I say, maybe, if Dostoevsky was a bad writer, pure id, and a sexually-deviant imp. But so far as I know he was none of those things. Moreover, this defense is stupid. Just because a twisted sex act is described in detail in a book, there are probably 8 kabillion other things in the books that don't make it onto the screen. But penis flagellation and sibling on sibling rape made the cut. Because, for all anyone might say otherwise, the gratuitous sex and shocking violence of the show are precisely the point. Without regular and ample displays of breasts and rutting and without gory and over-the-top violence, this show is just some fantasy show. But people try to pretend that anything other than gratification draws them back. ("Game of Thrones sucks. Amen.")

Which brings me to my final comments and then I shall be done. People also praise the show for its shock value, not just with sister-raping, but with untimely deaths of beloved characters. And I will readily admit that the death of Ned Stark, the show's hero and moral center, at the end of Season One shocked me greatly. But here's the thing, shock can be shticky and predictable just like the happy ending of an episode of Full House. In other words, once you declare that everyone you love will die it is no longer surprising when they do. Further, it does not take creative brilliance to kill off lead characters. At a certain point it becomes a gimmick. Ned's death was shocking because unexpected. Can that really be said for any other character after that point? This ends poorly, then, carries about the same weight eventually as, this ends with smiles, hugs, and a nice life lesson. Again. . . ("Game of Thrones sucks. Amen.")

Part of me is always just kidding around writing things like this (as in the elephant turd sandwich bit). But part of me is deadly earnest. This show really does suck, really is corrosive to your moral sense. We like to pretend that unfettered media consumption has no effect on our understanding of the world, but we are naive to believe that. At least give art enough respect to acknowledge that it is affective. We are shaped by what we consume, what we love, and what we sacrifice to have. Horace issued a famous dictum for art a couple of thousand years ago: "The aim of the poet is to instruct or delight." I think he is precisely right and my fear in the popularity of shows like Game of Thrones is not that we have abdicated as a culture the ends of art as relayed by Horace, but that they are all too fulfilled in garbage like Game of Thrones. In other words, we are both instructed and delighted by things like Game of Thrones. Which is all the more reason to declare once more with feeling: Game of Thrones sucks. Amen.

Is Even Good TV for Dummies?

I read Liel Leibovitz’s recent article in Tablet, a magazine that even a goy like me can enjoy, provocatively titled “TV is for Dummies.” His basic thesis I am inclined to agree with: the great novels are more satisfying and intelligent than today’s great television. As a great lover of the great novel, and a great lamenter of the fact that people watch Two and a Half Men and whatever the show about physicists hanging out with a hot blonde is called, as well as 34 iterations of CSI and other acronym-based franchises, it is self-evident to me that Dostoevsky beats Chuck Lorre. But as I read on and reflected I realized that I didn’t agree with Leibovitz overall, and the examples he used of TV shows inferior to the novel displayed a lack of actual engagement with these shows.

Leibovitz assures the reader that he is fine with the high estimation of many of the modern prestige television shows, but that he loses patience when the contemporary TV proselyte utters what he calls “the Phrase”: “TV is so good now that it’s just as great as our great novels. Maybe even better!” First of all, I am not sure who has ever uttered that phrase seriously. I know lots of people who love these shows, but I have never heard anyone compare Mad Men to Middlemarch. I myself am a hopeless addict of many of the modern shows Leibovitz namedrops here, but I have never entertained the thought that they are better somehow than the great novels of the past. The new shows are certainly better than most anything that came on TV before The Sopranos put television on a trajectory to actually be more interesting than movies, but they are not great art like War and Peace or David Copperfield.

But television shows are a different medium altogether than the book and it is therefore not possible to compare the two side by side. It is like comparing painting to epic poetry. Leibovitz praises what masters such as Henry James can do with different perspectives and word choice and accuses television of not having the same power, but his critique is merely a fancier way of saying books are written on paper and television uses live action and spoken words. A kinetic experience such as television will of necessity be different than the static book-reading experience.

Moreover, what serialized television allows that comparable mediums like film do not is a chance to slow the pace down and let things happen at a cadence truer to life. So when Leibovitz writes “(i)n television narrative, any television narrative, the commandments are few and simple: Something must always be happening, for otherwise there would be little reason to tune in next week; and whatever’s happening must happen on screen, for this is a visual medium, and a shot of Walter White brooding in his kitchen isn’t quite as gratifying as a shot of Walter White shooting some guy in the head” he is ignoring the way in which the multi-episode structure of a show like Breaking Bad allows us to see Walter White brooding in his kitchen, which we often do see. In fact, we see Walter White brooding far more often than we see him shooting someone in the head, something which makes one question if Leibovitz was merely beginning from ignorance in his jeremiad against prestige TV. 

This slower pace is what makes the sudden and stark violence of the show all the more affecting—it is set against the backdrop of a much slower and far more human experience than the typical action movie with its ten minutes of beginning exposition and hour and a half of violence. In other words, the fact that there are 13-16 episodes in a season of one of these shows and they therefore get 585 – 720 minutes of run time compared to the 100 – 120 minutes of a movie allows them, despite the differences in medium, to more closely resemble the muted structure of a novel.

Another quibble I have with this article is a fallacy I will call reductio ad Dostoevskyum. If Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, is not an intellectual and storytelling heir and equal to Fyodor Dostoevsky than current television is for the people Neil Postman warned us about in Amusing Ourselves to Death. (A similar fallacy would be, in conversations about the dire straits of contemporary Christian music, reductio ad Bachum, in which modern musicians are berated for not being equivalent to the quintessential musical genius.) Listen, I am reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot right now, and it is incredibly brilliant. It is difficult, packed with philosophy and history and theology, incredibly slow-moving at times, and filled with such a list of characters (all of whom have three or four nicknames, Christian names, or last names they are referred to as at different times) that you really do have to make a list to keep everyone separate. But Dostoevsky is freaking Dostoevsky. An unparalleled genius. A man so amazing and with such a rich life and a catalogue of works of such depth that Joseph Frank of Stanford wrote a five volume biography of the man. Of course Vince Gilligan or Matthew Weiner is not Dostoevsky, but whoever was before him and whoever will be again?

I have my own problems with the state of contemporary television, but part of me wishes we could all get along—the TV lovers and the TV haters. Because, really, most of the people who watch Breaking Bad or Mad Men or The Americans are also people inclined to read a book and not really the people you need to encourage to pick up a copy of Dickens. You can tell by all of the people and outlets who cover those shows as compared to all of the critical analyses of, say, CSI: Omaha. And maybe it is a bit silly to imbue television shows with all of the meaning and creepy level of addiction that some people do, but there is nothing wrong at the same time with a little entertainment. You can’t read Henry James all of the time (and who in the hell would want to?).   

Out With a Whimper: The Death Knell of Community

It seems as if I have been writing about television a lot lately. Perhaps I need to work on my reading/television balance. Anyway. . . 

Community, like Arrested Development and Freaks and Geeks before it, is going the way of Janice Joplin and James Dean--untimely, youthful deaths that lead to beatific devotion by a committed group of fans who will forever wonder, what if? Granted, they are still making episodes of Community, but the show will never be the same without show creator and showrunner Dan Harmon and that has been fully evident in the first several episodes of the new season.

When news of Harmon's release from the show came out last year I let out an audible gasp, not unlike when I found out Bill Snyder retired for the first time as Kansas State's football coach or that Rage Against the Machine was breaking up (in retrospect I am a bit ashamed of being so moved by the latter). Why do the perfect things always end? (I am not talking about Rage Against the Machine anymore.)

Community is/was, as far as it goes for me, the most fascinating show on television. It was witty, parodic, meta. It basically took every convention of the sitcom and inverted it. There was a claymation Christmas episode, a clip show with clips never featured in an prior episode, two Glee sendups, a mockumentary of Ken Burns's Civil War series, an entire episode about Dungeons and Dragons, a bottle episode about a lost pen, two paintball wars, a zombie episode, John Goodman in a ponytail, and the dean (oh, the dean!). The Sam and Diane couple, Jeff and Britta, are revealed to having been sleeping with each other without the group's knowledge for an entire year. This was not a typical sitcom by any standard.

And now it is dying. Not because Season Three wasn't awesome. It was. It was totally awesome. But because America would rather watch eight incarnations of CSI and Two and a Half Men. And everything on television is subject to the tastes of a culture for whom Honey Boo Boo is an icon. It is hard for works of art, on network television at least, to survive in that environment. 

But part of me also thinks that Community will in the long run benefit enormously from its short run. Harmon will almost certainly benefit from this long term. He gets to be the genius who was kicked off his brainchild only to watch it founder without his guiding hand, only adding to the aura of his genius. Maybe it is because I am so naturally uncreative, but it is hard for me to imagine a show as different as Community sustaining itself for seven or eight seasons without descending into an unfunny caricature of itself. This is, in fact, what we have seen this season as the show is helmed by different talent. Perhaps Harmon could have kept up the brilliance for another season, but there are only so many other places a show like that can go.

I think of how terrible The Office has been without Steve Carrell, and let's be honest here, it was headed downhill before he left, and I can't help but be grateful that Community has been (likely) spared the same fate. It will die after this season and its first three seasons will sit on my shelf as artifacts of untarnished brilliance. And I will remembers its death kindly. It is not Janis Joplin's Cheap Thrills or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and the eternal "what if?", but Mickey Mantle retiring, not because he wasn't still good, but because he wasn't Mickey Mantle anymore. In that sense, and in those situations, you are glad that people called it quits, even if their death is somewhat forced. We remember Barry Sanders with more affection than Brett Favre for a reason. Quitting with grace is better than not knowing when to stop. So for your own sake, Community, just quit and die already and let us eulogize you properly. "Goodnight, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

House of Cards and the Narrow Imagination of Dramatic Television

Over the course of the past few months, since whenever it showed up in Netflix on instant watch, I have been slogging my way through Aaron Sorkin's early aughts drama The West Wing. I really have enjoyed the show. It is a liberal fantasy land, in many ways, (one scene where my smug meter nearly exploded was when the president dressed down a conservative radio host in a room full of radio hosts for her use of Leviticus to object to homosexuality) but an entertaining one. There is something thrilling about getting a look behind the scenes--however skewed that look might be--in the halls of power for our country. I am only a couple of seasons in so far, so I really don't know where it goes from here. I can safely assume, given its seven season run, that President Bartlet is reelected. I don't imagine they spend the final four seasons following the gang as they fan out to various lobbying agencies and sit on the boards for big campaign contributors to finally cash in on their years of overwork on Pennsylvania Avenue. But one thing about the show, something that strikes me as nearly entirely different from the great shows currently on television, is that it is positive. There is an occasional shady deal and sometimes bad stuff happens, but in the end it is hopeful. The people who staff the west wing believe in this country and believe in the policies they will spend their time in office fighting for. 

By contrast, during my recovery from surgery a couple of weeks ago I used part of my time to watch David Fincher and Beau Willimon's very different Washington drama, the freshly released House of Cards. Cards is the first full-fledged production sponsored, owned, and produced by Netflix. It stars Kevin Spacey as a completely immoral Machiavellian politician. The majority whip for the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives, the series begins by Spacey's character, Frank Underwood, being denied the cabinet post in the new administration he was promised. His pride hurt, he kicks in to revenge mode, seeking to run over everyone who has spited him, anyone else who might hinder him, and one unfortunate junior member of Congress with a substance abuse problem.

I don't really want to delve too deeply into Cards. I finished it Sunday night and am still forming thoughts--at this point it seems like another extremely well done show with a main character who I hope dies sometime soon. But I think the prominence of shows like Cards, and here I would lump in Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead, says quite a lot about how we think of heroes today. In short, we don't really think they exist anymore. We are no longer believers. Our heroes are antiheroes. 

It has been instructive to watch these shows side by side. I don't know what Washington is really like, but I imagine it is neither The West Wing nor House of Cards. But it seems to me as if people these days take the more negative interpretation of something as the truth of the situation. I have had people tell me, for instance, that Mad Men is an accurate reflection of the early 60s. But this is ridiculous. Mad Men is just as much of a caricature of that period as Leave it to Beaver. We just like the darker spin these days. It is somehow gratifying to think that all of those family men we at one point in collective history were encouraged to admire were really just cheating assholes. Sorry, well-dressed cheating assholes.

I don't know what to make of all of this, if anything. The only reason I bring it up is because I imagine that the audience that would have watched The West Wing in the early 2000s is roughly the same crowd who is watching the much different brand of TV today. The West Wing functioned as a sort of liberal escapism from the Bush years, though I don't imagine Jed Bartlet has anything in common with Al Gore. As easy as that is to mock, at least the escapism was tied to what people viewed as noble causes. What are these new shows helping us escape from? The boring world where most people are nice and nondescript? Does Walter White or Don Draper or Rick Grimes or Frank Underwood have any nobility, any quality which is worthy of emulation?

Maybe that is not the point, but to me Draper and Underwood especially are so bad they are no longer even interesting. The best character on Cards is/was (spoiler alert) the now deceased congressman Peter Russo. Russo wasn't a great man, but a good one undone by demons and played upon by a disgusting mastermind. There is nothing interesting about Underwood, he is one-dimensionally bad. And, as Grantland's TV writer Andy Greenwald pointedout, his wife Claire, a thinly-veiled Lady Macbeth, is the result of a character emerging fully formed from a "fire in a metaphor plant."

These bad male leads are all intended to shock, but shock can only be sustained for so long. How surprising is it to see Don Draper womanizing? It might have been somewhat shocking in Season One (I think of that great carousel scene in the final episode of the season), but by now it is beyond tired. Cards started with Underwood choking a dog to death: how can we be shocked by anything else he would do? Walter White went from mild-mannered chemistry teacher to murderer in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. While it was horrifying to see him complicit in the death of a child in the first half season of Season Five, it was not shocking or outside of his character. He has no character left. His descent from pushover teacher to criminal mastermind to sociopath wasn't the slow burn fans of the show, including me, liked to believe. It all happened rather quickly. The past few seasons have just been the aftershocks. Walter hasn't changed. He has been presented with new, sometimes increasingly harrowing situations, but his response has always been the same: calculated self-preservation. That the stakes are higher doesn't reflect a change in character; Walter is simply all-in at this point and will do what needs to be done to try and avoid the ignominious death he deserves.

Reading back through what I have written, it strikes me how disparate the comments are. I think my larger point, and what bothers me most about the current state of TV (and, really, there is a ton of great television out there; I hardly ever watch a movie anymore), of which these bad boy lead men are only an indicator, is that the two main traction points for drama on the avant garde television shows are infidelity and murder. Both are dramatic, yes, but only in a limited way. There are things in life that are dramatic that don't involve cheating or killing. I think this is why I loved the small screen version of Friday Night Lights so much, despite its myriad flaws. The most absurd moment of FNL was when they tried to interject a bit of good old-fashioned killing into the show. It is also why, at the end of a long day when Owen is in bed and Clara and I are tired, we fire up an episode of Parenthood, perhaps my favorite show these days, on Netflix and trust that, money problems aside, Adam Braverman will never resort to manufacturing drugs to make ends meet. Crosby, on the other hand. . .