Manpocalypse Now: The Top 25 Female Characters on TV

I know I’m a couple summers late on my “Men Are Over” trend piece, but I keep coming across complaints about the relative lack of interesting women on television. It’s like nobody watches Bravo any more. While my personal tastes tend away from Walter White’s bluster and toward Skyler’s more conflicted descent, even I’d admit Breaking Bad is the poster child for the manly men shows like Luck, The Walking Dead, and Sons of Anarchy with relatively few, albeit strong, roles for women (particularly Gemma Teller, Andrea and now the mysterious Michonne). Walt, Jesse, Hank, Gus, Mike, and Saul simply overshadow whatever Skyler and Marie are left with, and I hasten to add that this is hardly a criticism of a show about masculinity. That said, if there’s inequality, it’s almost certainly confined to serious hourlong dramas, and I stipulate "serious" because soaps, dramedies, and young adult fare are run by women.

I Watched Every Best Picture: An appreciation

Like a junior high dare involving a blender full of mostly expired ingredients now mingling in my stomach, my brain has finally taken in every last extant frame of the miasma that is Best Picture, and all without hazard pay. Until a few weeks ago, I had 25 left, a whole uncharted KFC bowl liquefied for my consumption. My gaps were evenly distributed across the decades with two obvious exceptions: recent history starting with 1990’s Dances with Wolves, the start of my (if not Oscar’s) 22-year hot streak, and the ‘70s, when Best Picture went to someone’s idea of a classic—films like The Godfather and Annie Hall that mark early viewing in a cinephile’s cinephilia—every year except the last. Ahead of me were a couple of expected treasures, a couple of pleasant discoveries, and a whole lot of fat. Not every epic is Sergio Leone, not every social picture is Douglas Sirk, not every musical is Vincente Minnelli. And that goes double for Vincente Minnelli. Gigi winning the year Some Came Running goes unnominated is like Michelle Williams’ Marilyn triumphing over Meek’s Cutoff, which is to say a tragedy on par with not finding a good parking space.

The Style of Revenge: Not just pretty pictures of rich people any more

Last night marked the return of television's best new drama since Terriers, a smart, delicious soap that’ll have you eating up the meaningful stares in one moment and chuckling at how it explodes convention the next, say, by introducing a Lost castaway in the middle of all these fancy parties. Since Revenge is on hiatus until April, “Scandal” was just a tantalizing taste of what the show looks like now that it’s caught up to its foreboding opening sequence. Unfortunately, it was such a pungent bite that I’m dying for more. Director Kenneth Fink finds so many dark, expressive visuals that it’s bursting with killer inserts, the cumulative effect like a storm swallowing you up. "Scandal" is also the most pointedly topical Revenge has ever been. It’s always been a show about destroying the lawless rich, but tonight we get a Duke-style media circus that Fink finds equal parts invasive and ridiculous, cruel yet deserved. There's more surveillance than the whole season of Homeland. It’s almost an hour of the expected narrative feints and sublime/ridiculous voice-overs, but it’s riveting because Fink’s direction is so thoughtful. I don’t know if he’s looking for work, but “Scandal” is all the clip reel he needs. He even makes the ho-hum work of television crime scene investigation provocative.