Masters of Sex, at its best, is a lot like Arizona: extremely dry and extremely hot. When it works it’s fueled by the R-rated Rosalind Russell vibes of Lizzy Caplan’s Virginia Johnson, the strength of its premise — a historical battle the eventual victor of which is obvious everywhere you look today — and its tasteful yet provocative clinical eroticism, which is another way to say it’s super fucking sexy to watch people fuck for science. When it doesn’t work it’s weighed down by its protagonist’s lack of charisma, its supporting cast’s ‘90s-network-drama two-dimensionality, its repetitive relationship dynamics, and its use of throwaway characters who exist simply to spout the prejudices and since-rejected conventional wisdom of the day. Tonight’s Season Three premiere, “Parliament of Owls,” most definitely did not work. What does this tell us? Let’s make like Masters & Johnson and observe & report.

Masters of Sex’s main problem is its title character. Bill Masters is a singularly unappealing figure, bold and forward-thinking about precisely one thing, his sex research project, and a drip in every other way. Imagine if Don Draper were just as good at advertising as ever but weren’t also charming, frequently kind, and unbelievably handsome, and you’ve pretty much got the good doctor covered. This makes a show about a small army of people who rearrange not just the entirety of their own lives but also science and society in general around the guy a tough sell indeed.

I reviewed tonight’s season premiere of Masters of Sex, which I did not care for, for the New York Observer. It’s kind of a write-up of my feelings about the show in general.

What was it like going from live action—film, TV, live shows—to a book? How did you translate what you do?

Heidecker: It’s sort of this mixed blessing with Adult Swim where whenever we make stuff for them, it’s their property. Whenever we do something outside of that world, we have to start fresh again. You can’t just recycle stuff. A lot of people would put out a guide to Awesome Show Cinco products or something.

Wareheim: Yeah, we could easily have done a chapter on Business Hugs.

Heidecker: So this was a challenge. You have to start clean and make stuff up from scratch, which is ultimately more satisfying. There was a period where we thought it could be a hybrid of a real story about us that then it turns into this thing, but it just felt more fun to keep it wide open. Zone Theory is so general that you can cram any idea in there and make it work.

Wareheim: It was definitely a new learning experience, but at the core of it, it’s a somewhat similar process, creatively. One of the greatest parts of this is Tim and I getting together and having lunch, laughing about how we were gonna structure this thing. It’s sort of like doing a Bedtime Stories or a movie: “Here’s what we have to do to get enlightened, here are all the steps,” and then we’d go off on our own and write a little bit.

Heidecker: It was a blank slate: ”You guys wanna write a book? Let us know what you wanna write about. It could be anything.” It could have been the history of Tim and Eric, or our guide to being a dad. That was the hard part: focusing what we wanted to do, then populating it with enough jokes and ideas that it felt like something you could sit with for more than ten minutes. Making sure it went somewhere, had a point of view, that it was its own universe and not just total nonsense.

Wareheim: We knew we wanted to have a visual style that’s similar to some of the TV or video elements. We knew we wanted to work with the same designer [Duke Aber] who’s done all of our DVDs and posters. His design is like a character in the book. It really stands out.

You can also show a giant two-page spread of a penis in a book, which you can’t do on a TV show. I got to that part and thought “I’m so happy for these guys! They can take it as far as they want!”

Wareheim: [Laughs] Besides the penis thing, it’s not that much further.

The penis kind of stands out.

Wareheim: Absolutely. We were hoping for that. With that particular thing, I talked to our graphic artist about it. We can’t legally take a penis off the internet, and he didn’t want to photograph one, so he molded that penis out of all these other penises so that it can legally exist. Just that we made some poor guy do that is great.

Heidecker: It also was meant for to you open up the book to that page and go “Gahhhh—they did it again, those assholes!”

I interviewed Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim about their Scientology-inspired new book Tim & Eric’s Zone Theory for the New York Observer.

What if an actual crazy person got his hands on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and only America’s horniest men could stop him? That’s the basic premise of The Brink, HBO’s alleged new comedy. In theory, it’s not a bad set-up for a satire. If anything, this country’s gang-who-couldn’t-drone-straight foreign policy in the Muslim world deserves an even more ruthless roasting than its comedians have given it, and anxieties about the so-called “Islamic bomb” and the impenetrable nexus of militant groups and secret agencies that surround it on all sides are ripe for Strangelovian spoofing. Homeland Season Four, but funny on purpose? Starring Jack Black, Tim Robbins, Aasif Mandvi from The Daily Show, and Pablo Schreiber from The Wire Season Two? Sure, this could work.

Alas! “Pilot” (the default title for a series-premiere actually fits the story) gets no closer to Kubrick than the trisected structure that creators Roberto and Kim Benabib cribbed from the good Dr. Looked at in the most generous light imaginable, Black’s low-ranking Islamabad-based diplomat Alex Talbot is a bawdier version of Peter Sellers’s Colonel Mandrake, Robbins’s even randier Secretary of State Walter Larson is a less macho take on George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson, and Schreiber’s Navy fighter pilot Zeke “Z-Pak” Tilson is a pill-popping, civilian-casualty-avoiding echo of Slim Pickens’s Major Kong; together, it seems, they’ll have to help Esai Morales’s President Julian Navarro—handsomer than Sellers’s Merkin Muffley but just as ineffectual—keep a powerful general with paranoid delusions about enemy plots against his nation’s reproductive capabilities (yep, it’s that direct a swipe) from igniting World War III. I don’t remember Strangelove having this many dick jokes, though. Okay, this many bad dick jokes.

Strangelove on the rocks: I missed linking to it at the time, but I reviewed the series premiere of The Brink for the New York Observer.

Now I get to feel all the nervous anticipation, stomach-churning dread, and jaw-on-the-floor shock everyone else does each Sunday at nine—or that I did, for that matter, every time I sat down to watch new episodes of Breaking Bad or Mad Men or The Sopranos or any other seminal New Golden Age drama you’d care to name. Much has been made of the excesses of spoiler culture, and complaints about the constant demand that not so much as a peep about the plot be uttered in advance of a viewer’s initial encounter with it are thick on the critical ground. But deciding what to reveal and when to reveal it is a core component of narrative fiction, every bit as deliberate and valid an aesthetic choice as the casting or cinematography or score — doubly so for a show that derives as much of its artistic heat from spectacle and shock as Game of Thrones does. Only now that the TV version has jettisoned its rocket-booster books and truly taken off, in other words, are book readers like myself genuinely seeing the show the way it was meant to be seen.

In practical terms, this is nerve-wracking as all hell. I greeted the ominous avalanche that signaled the arrival of the army of the dead with the same what-fresh-hell-is-this bewilderment as Lord Snow. I watched the White Wedding of Sansa and Ramsay with a mounting mix of queasy repulsion and vain hope that the coming catastrophe could be avoided. And by the time poor Princess Shireen took her long walk to a tall stake in the snow after an episode full of foreshadowing and fakeouts, I felt like I was being marched to the flames along with her. On the flipside, I got to witness the big When-Dany-Met-Tyrion moment with its full holy-shit power preserved. This is a show that’s all bass and treble — as Cersei put it, “you win or you die; there is no middle ground” — and I feel like I’m hearing it for the first time.

You know nothing, book readers: I wrote about Game of Thrones going gloriously off-book this season for the New York Observer.

This is the problem with Outlander, really: It always feels like just a TV show. Rooting Randall’s torture of Jamie in the undeniable facts of physical — their nude bodies streaked with blood and spit and tears and sweat and lube — may have alleviated this fact, or obscured it if you want to be less charitable about it, by creating a sense of terrible intimacy. But who are they, really? Randall’s a one-dimensional sadist and Jamie’s a heroic hunk with more scars than facial expressions. The take-no-prisoners treatment of rape in all its horror, the sociopolitical ramifications of its emphasis on masculinity or recovery — neither factor matters all that much if the characters are ciphers, their story stays so predictably linear, and music and voiceovers tell you exactly how to feel about all of it at all times. Grading it all on a curve because the sex scenes are strong, or this sexual assault sequence was strong in an entirely different way, does no one any favors.

I reviewed last night’s Outlander finale, an ambitious failure, for the New York Observer.

There’s a quote attributed to Star Wars impresario George Lucas via his ex-wife, Oscar-winning editor Marcia, that speaks directly to what you and I and everyone who watched Outlander this week subjected ourselves to. As Peter Biskind tells it in his classic history of American cinema in the ‘70s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, “Emotionally involving the audience is easy,” George is said to have remarked. “Anybody can do it blindfolded, get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.” No kittens, I’m happy to report, were harmed in the making of “Wentworth Prison,” this week’s installment. But what happened was just as lopsidedly sadistic and nakedly manipulative, the only difference being that the target wasn’t a housecat, but a character with all the three-dimensionality and disposition of one. Like an episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys directed by Hostel auteur Eli Roth, “Wentworth Prison,” tonight’s installment of Outlander, is an experiment designed to see how badly cheese can bleed.

[…]

There’s no sense in pulling punches here: It’s infuriating to be asked to suffer through the extended torture and humiliation of characters who, at every other juncture save perhaps their creatively choreographed sex scenes, are trotted around like action figures and posed like romance-novel covers. Outlander’s insistence that Jamie Fraser as a character, or Sam Heughan as the actor playing him, possesses the smoldering and unpredictable charisma required for him to make sense as the anchor of a crazy centuries-spanning love is as wholly unsupported by the on-screen evidence as the show’s claim that he has red hair. (It’s brown! We can all see it!) The man doing the humiliating and torturing has no shades of grey (ironically), no characteristics that make him feel human, or even just interesting as a complete black-hat villain. The less said about the legion of interchangeable dudes in beards and kilts, the better. Only Claire herself stands out, which makes watching her cry for this cipher a surefire way to undermine her power, and a genuinely maddening act of “emotionally involving the audience” by the Lucas definition. Dump her into a pile of corpses, make a mute goon sexually assault her, subject her to whatever indignity you can come up with in lieu of creating characters who equal her depth — it’s not going to suddenly make the show worth taking seriously. Quite the opposite! Calling Outlander soft porn has never been a fair critique. Now it’s torture porn, too, though. And it’ll leave you limp.

I reviewed this week’s Outlander for the New York Observer. Turns out torture and sexual violence aren’t a shortcut to seriousness.

If I’m spending more time on plot recap than usual, it’s because the plot here is this episode’s distinguishing feature, for better and for worse. Outlander is built on a herky-jerky rhythm of reveals and reversals — people are captured and freed, threats are made and rescinded, people fight and make up, over and over and over. Since those plot points so rarely rise above the level of cliché, a storyline that takes things this far in the direction of the unusual and unexpected deserves spotlighting, if not outright praise. The problem is that only on a show this frustrating would a raunchy 18th-century rewrite of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” be seen as a bold storytelling maneuver, instead of what its in-world performers intend it to be: a novelty act.

I reviewed this weekend’s odd episode of Outlander for the New York Observer.

There are only three sure things in this world: you’re born, you die, and somewhere in between you’re betrayed by an Irishman. It’s the circle of life, and it’s what “The Watch,” this week’s episode of Outlander, is all about. And as is too often the case when universal themes are addressed, the specifics wind up mattering very little. If you’ve seen a complicated labor, a botched raid, or feckless Fenian in any TV show or movie before, nothing done with them here will cover new ground.

The birth storyline is the most perfunctory of the three. The moment Jamie’s very pregnant sister Jenny cries out in pain, you know you can kiss at least fifteen minutes of screentime devoted to a woman screaming, another woman saying “push!”, a baby crying, and a mother weeping tears of joy goodbye. To the show’s credit, a couple of scenes in the otherwise standard sequence stand out: The closeup of Claire’s hands on Jenny’s belly as she attempts to palpate the baby out of breech position provides a tactile, physical link between the Miracle Of Birth and the flesh that produces it, while Jenny’s speech about how it feels to be pregnant — featuring a lengthy comparison to the sensation of vaginal intercourse and delivered with her body’s curves silhouetted through her translucent gown — directly connects conception and delivery. But there are no surprises otherwise — certainly not the biggest potential surprise of all: an easy, happy labor, which remains all but unseen on television — and the crosscutting between Claire and Jenny during the birth and their husbands Jamie and Ian en route to an appointment with a redcoat ambush is a shopworn cliché.

I reviewed this week’s Outlander for the New York Observer.

With so much story that’s either rote or nonsensical, the early exchange in which Claire explains airplanes to her awestruck husband stands out, for all the right reasons. What would a time traveller from 200 years into the future tell the man she loves about the world to come? Here’s the thing: I have no idea! That’s an exciting feeling! Stories should head into the great unknown wherever possible. Instead of a boring family feud and superfluous Black Jack flashbacks, we could have had an episode in which the two of them talk about electricity, The Wizard of Oz, indoor plumbing—or on a far more serious note, the World Wars, the atom bomb, the endless struggles and successes and setbacks that the oppressed will experience long after the Jacobite Rising is a distant memory. If only Outlander were as interested in pushing the envelope in its main characters’ heads as it has been in their beds.

I reviewed the latest dire episode of Outlander for the New York Observer.

“I feel like shit all the time.” So says Philip Jennings in “March 8th, 1983,” the season finale of The Americans—and that’s before he murders a man whose prize possession is an adorable toy robot collection. Philip is talking about Annalise, the woman he and Yousaf both had a long-term sexual relationship with before Yousaf killed her and they stuffed her broken naked body in a suitcase. But he could be talking about almost anything he did this season: semi-seducing a teenager; driving a woman he tricked into loving him to the brink of collapse; inducting his daughter into a lifetime of danger and duplicity. Philip has a horrible fucking job, but none dare call it evil. None except someone equally horrible.

Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech, delivered on the date that gives the episode its title, is the act of rhetorical violence this season finale uses as a substitute for the physical kind. It’s a skincrawling suck-up to evangelical Christianity, and a gobsmacking exercise in false equivalence between birth control and Stalinism, delivered by a grown-ass man who cops lingo from Star Wars and whose hunger to refer to teenage girls who have sex as “promiscuous” is as self-evident as his hypocrisy on this point is well-documented.

But The Americans juxtaposes this address, which we sophisticates in the 2015 New Golden Age of TV Drama recognize for the religious and chauvinistic fanaticism it is, with the intimate and heartbreaking and damn near identical characterization of the Soviet Union and its agents by a teenage girl. Paige Jennings echoes the Leader of the Free World’s condemnation of the USSR when she calls up her own evangelical audience, Pastor Tim, and is born again in the truth.

I reviewed the season three finale of The Americans, which is as good as anything on television right now, for the New York Observer.

…at every opportunity, the show takes the low road, populating the trial with one-dimensional enemies and mindless hordes fit only for the audience’s contempt. The judges and prosecutor are straight out of Old Fashioned Asshole central casting. Laoghaire MacKenzie, the star witness, enters the courtroom to the sound of an ominous gong, just in case you wondered if she was a bad guy. But if you missed that bit because you were in the bathroom or something, don’t worry: Later, she actually tells Claire “I shall dance upon your ashes.” If she had a mustache, she’d twirl the shit out of it. Then there’s the fanatical priest, who fakes a change of heart about Claire so complete that everyone’s convinced it was witchcraft—instead of what it was, which is an unnecessarily complicated plot twist with a whopping 15-second payoff. The guy looks and sounds like the parish’s personal Pinhead. There are no surprises here, no nuances, so sense that anyone’s doing anything for any reason other than “this is this kind of story, and that’s what that kind of person does in this kind of story.”

I reviewed this week’s Outlander, as frustrating a show as ever, for the New York Observer.

“People love hearing how right they are.”—Agent Stan Beeman, The Americans

Last year on Game of Thrones, Jaime Lannister raped his sister Cersei. At least that’s what he did in the scene I saw. Statements on the matter by actors Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Lena Headey and director Alex Gravestalked about two people in a deeply dysfunctional relationship having sex they knew they shouldn’t be having, not that one person was refusing to have at all. Co-writer and showrunner David Benioff appeared to disagree in an interview taped prior to the episode’s airing, before adopting total radio silence on the issue. The show’s subsequent handling of the characters, author George R.R. Martin’s comparison of the scene to its equivalent in his original books, and further discussion by the actors provided still more complicated and confounding context. We could perhaps conclude that either through communication breakdowns between the players or a failure of execution to mirror intent, the scene — rooted in complex and destructive sexual dynamics between two habitually secretive and duplicitous characters and interpreted by half a dozen artists each with their own ideas about the event — simply got away from them.

Few of us did. Fans of the books lambasted the scene as yet another horrendous, story-destroying decision by Benioff and his creative partner Dan Weiss, two people frequent treated as singularly unsuited to the task of adaptation. Admirers of Jaime bemoaned the damage done to him by the event at least as much as his sister, the victim. Critics saw the scene as a romanticization of rape, using the show’s long and contentious history with female nudity, sex, and sexual assault to support the argument. And while the wider world focused in the latter of these three critiques, the former two were no less self-assured or severe in their respective corners of the critical firmament.

On one level, the reaction to what happened between the Siblings Lannister in the Great Sept of Baelor is just a standout example of the golden rule of arguing on the Internet: interpret with minimum good faith, attack with maximum rhetorical force. But that rule applies to discussions of everything from politics to fly fishing. In terms of art and art criticism, something else is going on—a phenomenon of which the social-justice framework for criticism is just the most well-publicized, hotly debated embodiment.

The past decade-plus has been a time of dispiriting uncertainty and powerlessness: an era of endless war, economic erosion, class disconnection, and political disillusion. At the same time, our approach to art and entertainment has become all the more unequivocal in its assertions about content and quality. We pore over TV shows for clues about their outcome, which we present with power-point precision. We treat all art like editorial cartoons, interpreting it the way we would a drawing of a fatcat politician holding bulging moneybags in each hand, and accept or reject the story accordingly. We treat the comics and novels that form the basis for our blockbusters as holy writ, we insist that fiction hew inerrantly to the facts that inspired it, and we punish those who stray from the path. We elevate our favorite characters and relationships to the point where the stories they inhabit are mere vehicles to get them to the place we’d like to see them go.

In all four cases—the Theorists, the Activists, the Purists, and the Partisans—we’re treating the inherently subjective fields of art and art criticism as things we can be objectively right about. We’re taking work that’s complex and capable of conveying multiple contradictory meanings and reducing it to a simple either/or, yes/no proposition.

In other words, we’re fucking up.

I wrote about the four worst types of TV critics for the Observer.

There’s Martha’s tearful call to her parents, during which she realizes she can hardly get the lies she’s been forced to swallow back out of her own mouth anymore. And there’s her final confrontation with “Clark,” when she tells him she wants to end their marriage, and he reveals just who it is she really married.

There’s almost no way to heap enough praise on that scene, but I could bury it with blandishments and actor Alison Wright would still tower above it. What an incredible season she’s had, investing a character who so many people, including herself, see as mildly pathetic with totally convincing charm, courage, loyalty, confusion, disillusion, and terror. Wright played Martha as someone who’d rightfully come to appreciate herself as a pretty interesting and successful person. She has the kind of job that makes people say “Wow, what’s that like?”, she has a secret husband doing top-secret work of the highest importance, and they have a genuinely terrific and imaginative sex life, the kind that requires real emotional labor to create, especially after years of romantic neglect. How nightmarish would it be to see so much of that undone so dramatically? Her tenacity, her denial, her grief, her fear—there’s your answer.

“Clark”’s unmasking itself is simply the last in an episode-long string of “oh shit!” scenes that included a suspicious Stan’s visit to Martha’s apartment and an equally suspicious Agent Aderholt’s accusation that something went on between Stan and his former mole Nina, and it’s staged like something out of a horror movie. No, really: Watch this scene from splatterpunk genius Clive Barker’s cult movie Nightbreed, if you can stomach it, and tell me there isn’t something equally nauseating in how Clark peels off his wig to become Philip. Tearing off the false face to reveal the true one is a staple of the genre. So is the wide-eyed, mascara-streaked woman’s face, staring back in horrorstruck awe, or awestruck horror — and that, in the form of Alison Wright’s Martha, is the final sight we see. There’s not another shot on The Americans’ three seasons that I’ve found that striking, that disturbing. Whether she accepts or rejects this revelation, some part of her has been irreparably devoured, by a predator wearing the face of the man she loved. She can pack all the suitcases she wants. So, we’ve learned, can he.

I reviewed this week’s The Americans, featuring my favorite scene ever on the show, for the New York Observer.

A partial inventory of things that made me say “This is exactly why the good Lord gave us pay-cable period pieces” on tonight’s episode of Outlander:

• Opening the episode with a full minute and a half of simulated cunnilingus

• Fart jokes

• Half-naked pagan sex-magic rituals

• Morbid Game of Thrones–style magic baby abandonment

• A duel at ten paces devolving into a bloody swordfight over “yo mama” jokes

• Simon Callow in stockings

If it’s entertainment value you’re after, you could do a whole lot worse than “By the Pricking of My Thumbs,” this week’s installment in the ongoing unstuck-in-time adventures of Claire Beecham. Let’s start with the sexy stuff, because hey, if the show can do it, why can’t we? Unmoored from the overhyped wedding-night episode and the baffling tone-deafness of last week’s sex-and-violence cocktail, Jaime and Claire’s chemistry is at last free to just kind of establish itself as its own thing. And from Claire’s high-pitched sighs of pleasure, to Jaime’s refusal to answer the door until they’re finished, to the non-TV-standard positioning of their bodies at the beginning of the scene, that chemistry burns hot. But once you’ve finished fanning yourself, you realize it communicated character, too. Jaime goes down on Claire with the same earnest eagerness and insistence with which he does pretty much everything in life; Claire is relaxed and languid on the receiving end, comfortable and confident in her own skin, just as she is in virtually every situation she encounters. By all means, Outlander, keep ripping those bodices if you’re gonna find that kind of quiet insight underneath.

I reviewed this week’s Outlander, now with 100% more Simon Callow, for the New York Observer.

Agent Frank Gaad is making a list, and with the help of Stan Beeman, he’s checking it twice. He knows there were times he discussed highly sensitive information in his office, when such conversations are supposed to be held in the Vault, a soundproof, bugproof room designed for just that purpose. His office may have felt like a sanctum sanctorum, but the security provided by its closed door was just an illusion, shattered by a microphone hidden in his pen. So now he’s in the Vault, (un-bugged) pen and paper in hand, writing down everything he remembers about everything he shouldn’t have said outside its confines.

To Stan’s surprise, his boss isn’t doing this at the behest of the inscrutable internal security officer Walter Taffet, but out of his own guilt and desire to reform. To put it another way, he’s taking the fourth step for any counterintelligence workaholic and making a searching and fearless moral inventory of himself. “I coulda been more careful, a lotta times,” he explains. “Well, you assume you’re okay in there, we all do,” Stan reassures him. “Yeah, well,” Gaad retorts, “that’s why we’ve got rules. They built us a vault for it.”

It’s a striking line, and an ironic one: a paean to secrecy that reveals so much about this show. The concept of the Vault is the key that unlocks “One Day in the Life of Anton Baklanov,” tonight’s predictably great episode of The Americans, and many other episodes besides. It cracks the code of how many scenes in the series are shot and staged to emphasize the structures, literal and metaphorical, people employ to keep others out, and their secrets in. Breach them at your peril.

I reviewed tonight’s preposterously good episode of The Americans for the New York Observer. That was one of the best sex scenes I’ve ever seen on TV, by the way.

Bad as “The Reckoning” was — and it was bad, alright — this episode merely illustrated problems Outlander has displayed for most of its first surprise-hit season. And many of those weaknesses lie precisely where supporters of the show locate its strengths. This makes for a hugely frustrating, even confusing viewing experience. How can a show that supposedly gets so much right go so wrong?

Granted, not everything’s a misfire. It genuinely is pretty great that Claire’s enthusiasm for sex is depicted as, you know, fun. In the immortal words of Maude Lebowski, sex can be a natural, zesty enterprise, but too often highly sexed people are depicted only as sluts, freaks, addicts, or predators. Don Draper, Theon Greyjoy, and Elizabeth Jennings are all well and good, but characters like Claire Beecham, Ilana Wexler on Broad City, and Martha Hanson on The Americans treat sex as a central and important part of their lives not out of compulsion or self-destruction, but due to the simple fact that fucking is a fucking awesome way to spend your time, like reading or brunch. Just as some people use their library cards or drink mimosas more often than others, there are folks who build perfectly normal, happy lives around frequent orgasm opportunities, and there shouldn’t be shame in that.

Similarly, there’s nothing inherently wrong, or even odd, about BDSM, an integral part of the make-up sex Claire and her Scottish husband Jamie have after that horrible long day finally ends. You don’t need dress up, lash out, or invest millions of dollars in a private playpen called the Red Room of Pain to employ power dynamics and extreme sensations in your sex life. Nor does emotional, psychological, or sexual trauma of any kind necessarily preclude you from exploring this aspect of sexuality. On the contrary, consensual and safe sadomasochism can help its practitioners take difficult, destructive parts of their lives and harness their power in a positive way. As a very wise person once told me, we think about these things, we talk about these things — why can’t we fuck about these things? Think of it as psychosexual judo, where you’re using the weight and momentum of your opponent — in this case, your own bad experiences and emotions — to win. BDSM can help people earn a black belt against their own suffering.

Moreover, I’m even open to the idea that Outlander, as a romantic fantasy, can get away with behavior we wouldn’t accept in real life. Such an acknowledgement always seemed strangely absent from the great debate about 50 Shades of Grey. Discussing issues of consent, abuse, and stalking as if Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele were real people instead of characters in a work of pornography doesn’t make sense. In fantasies, we can think about and get off on doing things, and having things done to us, that we’d never want to actually experience. 50 Shades is just such a fantasy. Safewords and restraining orders are as out of place there as a physics lesson in a flying dream.

So the problem with Outlander isn’t in addressing these complex, adult issues. Rather it’s in wedging them into a show that otherwise displays all the sophistication of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. (Posh medical expert journeys to the frontier and falls for a long-haired he-man? The parallels are seriously uncanny.) Quick: Name a difficult or demanding moral or ideological topic the show addresses when the characters have their clothes on. Ye ken as well as I that there’s no such animal, sassenach. And no, “Black Jack Randall is really fucked up” doesn’t count; tone down the gore and the gleeful sociopathy and he’s just one of those Army guys who chased the A-Team. A show with ideas as wafer-thin as Outlander’s simply can’t handle heavier fare.

Spanks but no spanks: I reviewed the return of Outlander, which is not good, for the New York Observer. Covering the show this season is going to be…interesting.

You’re just about to hit the end of the story that George R.R. Martin has published so far. Did you see this coming?

Well, I think, in the first couple of years, it was really just about getting each season right and hoping people would watch. By the time we got to planning out and shooting Seasons Three and Four, David & Dan started really thinking about the overall shape of the series, since we knew we were going to be able to see this thing through. In the end, the show has to go at its own pace and George has to write the books at his own pace. He and D&D are obviously in close communication the whole time about both. But the show is its own thing, as it has to be.

There’s a segment of the fandom that’s freaking out about this, saying that the TV series will “spoil” the remaining two volumes of the book series. Is that a concern the show shares?

I think we just have to make the best Season Five, Season Six, and beyond that we can. Not sure I’m at liberty to comment more specifically than that.

“New” material aside, it also seems from trailers and casting and locations and so forth that this season will change some existing storylines sort of dramatically. When you do stuff that’s not in the books, for whatever reason, what’s the vibe, creatively? Is it a “with great power comes great responsibility” thing, or “woo-hoo, we’re goin’ off-book!”

Well, I think at this point, we do have great responsibility to the viewing audience, whether they’ve read the books or not, to try to produce 10 hours of outstanding television. All sorts of factors go into why a particular subplot, character, story beat, etc. might differ from the books. Again, it’s all tackled and debated on a case-by-case basis. Ultimately, it always has to come down to what David & Dan feel is best for the show.

I interviewed Game of Thrones co-producer/writer and friend of the blog Bryan Cogman about the process behind the coming season for the New York Observer.

…at this stage in its evolution, The Americans is a show that can not only sustain but reward a close reading of its formal technique — never empty formalism, always a method of revealing character and articulating the unspoken, occulted moral and emotional meaning of a scene. From my notes: “god this is good”; “keeeeee-rist”; “these fades are killing me dog”; “jesus that was harrowing.” I’m talking about camera movements, not chase scenes. This show excels at both.

I reviewed last night’s The Americans, which, hoo boy, for the New York Observer.

In Hubbard’s native territory of science fiction, “worldbuilding” is a term used to describe the way writers construct the elaborate sociopolitical, scientific, geographic, and historical framework for the imaginary world in which their stories take place. In a way, Hubbard may well have pulled off the greatest act of worldbuilding in history. Imagine if J.R.R. Tolkien, or George R.R. Martin, or Stan Lee & Jack Kirby had not stopped at merely creating and writing about Middle-earth and Westeros and the Marvel Universe, but overlaid those fictional worlds atop our own until they became indistinguishable not just to their tens of thousands of followers and fans, but to the creators themselves.

It’s reminiscent of Going Clear’s showstopper scene, a Machiavellian game of musical chairs Miscavige imposed on disgraced Church officials to determine their fates, played to the tune of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?” Going Clear’s central assertion is that in art and life alike, thinking people must make that determination, and must be trusted to do it for themselves. It denies its viewers the certainty Scientology itself promises to provide, which may be its most subversive act of all. Heroes to be worshipped, villains to be eradicated—Going Clear asks us to leave them to the pages of fiction and the fever dreams of fundamentalists. Neither are in short supply, inside Scientology or out.

I reviewed Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief for the New York Observer, with a focus on how the film dismantles black-and-white thinking both as journalism/activism and as art. The movie airs tonight at 8pm on HBO, and I hope you’ll watch it.

Once upon a time, Carmela Soprano walked into a psychiatrist’s office. Her mobster husband Tony was depressed, angry, unfaithful. Could their marriage be saved? Her therapist’s answer was not one she wanted to hear: To hell with the marriage — it’s her soul she should be worried about. Tony is a monster, and she’s morally responsible for helping him feed. “You’ll never be able to feel good about yourself,” this Dr. Krakower tells her, “never be able to quell the feelings of guilt and shame that you talk about as long as you’re accomplice.” Carmela equivocates, backtracks, rationalizes, wriggles away from the words, but with no more success than a worm on a hook. “What did I just say?” he says, not budging, not allowing her to budge either. “Leave him. Take the children—what’s left of them—and go.” She frets about child support, and he interrupts. “I’m not charging you because I won’t take blood money, and you can’t either.” Then comes his final line, the last one we ever hear from this character, who never appears again and whose advice ultimately goes unheeded. “One thing you can never say: that you haven’t been told.”

On “Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?”, tonight’s grim episode of The Americans, Elizabeth Jennings met her Dr. Krakower, and killed her.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Americans, which keeps getting better and better, for the New York Observer.