BuzzFeed: "12 Objects That Defined The Year In Television"

From Breaking Bad’s stevia packet to Girls’ Q-tip, here are some of the pivotal objects that sum up scripted television in 2013. SPOILER ALERT for a ton of shows if you’re not caught up. You’ve been warned.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "12 Objects That Defined The Year In Television," in which I look at the 12 objects that roughly define 2013 in scripted television, from a Q-tip on Girls and a Sharpie on Homeland to an automobile on Downton Abbey and that Cytron card on Scandal.

1. This Q-tip.

Where It Appeared: Girls
What It Was: A seemingly innocuous Q-Tip, used repeatedly by Hannah (Lena Dunham), whose OCD was quickly spiraling out of control, to clean out her ears. But she inserted it too deeply into her inner ear canal.
What It Did: It punctured her eardrum (“I heard hissing,” she later said), leading Hannah to seek medical attention at the hospital.
What It Meant: That Hannah had truly hit rock bottom with her psychological condition and that she had seemingly lost control of her life and mental state. It was an excruciating scene to watch, not just because of the physical discomfort it manifested, but for the emotional fallout it wrought: At the end of the episode, she inserted a Q-Tip into her other ear and started counting once more.

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BuzzFeed: "Where Can Homeland Go From Here?"

Showtime’s espionage thriller wrapped up its third season and much of its overall narrative. So where can the show possibly go in Season 4? WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "Where Can Homeland Go From Here?" in which I look at the third season finale of Showtime's Homeland and where the show could possibly go from here. (Answer: wherever it does, I likely won't be watching as I'm fatigued with this show at this point.)

With Sunday’s season finale of Homeland (“The Star”), Showtime’s espionage thriller seemed to fold inwards upon itself, offering up a 20-minute epilogue that felt very much like a conclusion for the series, an alternately intelligent and deeply frustrating drama, depending where in its overall narrative you were at any given time. (It was, however, renewed for a fourth season earlier this year.)

In its often maddening and meandering third season, Homeland found Carrie (Claire Danes) pretending to be on the outs with the CIA while actually on a covert operation under the watchful eye of an even-more-gruff-than-usual Saul (Mandy Patinkin). Saul, meanwhile, hatched a truly mind-boggling plot to insert a high-level asset in the Iranian government… and get Brody (Damian Lewis) — himself the subject of an international manhunt for a bombing at the CIA that killed 100-plus people — to assassinate a high-ranking Iranian official in order to put the rogue nation under U.S. control.

“The Star” managed to tie up many of the narrative’s loose ends and capped off the Carrie/Brody dynamic, offering up a season finale that may have worked more effectively as a series finale. (Seriously, stop reading right now if you haven’t yet watched “The Star.” SPOILERS!) Brody’s death — ordered by Javadi (Shaun Toub) in an effort to secure his role in this power play — is meant to be a pyrrhic victory; it’s meant to be a gut-wrenching ordeal both for Carrie — who is carrying his baby — and for the audience at large. And there is a brief moment, when Brody is raised on a crane by his neck at a public execution and he stares outwards with terror in his eyes, where his death has some actual emotional weight and consequence. And then Carrie climbs the fence and shouts his name and I remember I’m watching Homeland, which ultimately stumbles into some melodramatic excess every five minutes or so.

Brody: “So what happens next?”
Carrie: “What do you mean?”
Brody: “When we get home, what happens next?”
Carrie: “I don’t know. What do you want to happen?”
Brody: “Honestly, I never expected to get this far, so I try not to think about it.”

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The Daily Beast: "Is This The Real Carrie Mathison?"

Who is the real Carrie Mathison? I explore the thematic overlaps between two female spies now stealing our collective attention: Claire Danes’s character on Homeland and Jessica Chastain’s Maya in Zero Dark Thirty. WARNING: the following contains plot details from the latest episode of Homeland. If you are not up to date, read at your own peril.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Is This The Real Carrie Mathison?," in which I compare the similarities and thematic overlaps between Homeland's Carrie (Claire Danes) and Jessica Chastain's pseudonymous CIA agent "Maya" in Kathryn Bigelow's upcoming Osama bin Laden manhunt film Zero Dark Thirty, out December 19th in New York and Los Angeles.

“We fight with what we have.”

On the most recent episode of Showtime’s byzantine terrorism thriller Homeland, Carrie Mathison, the damaged, disgraced, bipolar CIA analyst played by Emmy-winner Claire Danes, finally came face-to-face with the terrorist that she had been doggedly pursuing for years, a hunt that put both her career and her sanity in jeopardy.

While the fanatical Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban)—responsible for the death of countless innocents and for brainwashing Marine Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) and transforming him into an instrument of vengeance—had the upper hand in this standoff, the tête-à-tête that followed was remarkable for the fact that Carrie was staring into the face of her adversary, and the words that he spat out at her, hogtied though she was, reflected Carrie’s own indomitable will.

“Do you have the perseverance, the tenacity, the faith?” a seething Nazir asked Carrie, referring to his own will to “exterminate” the American people, even if it takes “three centuries” to do so. His extremism is a distant relative to Carrie’s own, her flawed moral compass guided by the belief that Abu Nazir was planning a major attack on the United States and that Nicholas Brody had been turned.
But what their conversation revealed was that Carrie does have all of those characteristics, embraced on the long road to tracking down Nazir, qualities shared by Carrie Mathison’s sister in arms, Jessica Chastain’s Maya, in Kathryn Bigelow’s sensational Osama bin Laden film, Zero Dark Thirty, which opens Dec. 19 in New York and Los Angeles.

It’s impossible to watch the remarkable Zero Dark Thirty without thinking of Homeland or of Carrie Mathison. Like Abu Nazir, they too fight with what they have: drawing on a wellspring of tenacity and perseverance, and an unerring faith that what they are doing is not only right, but just.


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The Daily Beast: "Review: Season 2 of Homeland and Season 4 of The Good Wife"

Set your DVRs! I review Season Two of Showtime’s Homeland and Season Four of CBS’s The Good Wife, finding common ground in their deft and subtle explorations of identity.

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "TV's Kick-Ass Women Return," in which I review Season Two of Homeland and Season Four of The Good Wife, tracing the way that both shows explore their characters' shifting identities.

In the season opener of Homeland, which airs on Sunday, Claire Danes’s Carrie Mathison smiles.

If you’ve been watching Showtime’s Homeland, the newly crowned winner of the Emmy Award for Best Drama, this seems entirely contrary to her character, a bipolar and deeply disgraced CIA officer who underwent electroconvulsive therapy in the first season finale. Carrie isn’t prone to happiness: she has been misunderstood, mocked, and kicked out of the intelligence community. For all of that, Carrie was also right that Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Emmy Award winner Damian Lewis), a former prisoner of war, is not what he appears to be.

Danes—who also won an Emmy on Sunday—inhabits Carrie with a crippling onus placed on her, one that has only widened the cracks in her sanity. Her prescience and her instincts go unheeded, and the damage that she causes threatens to consume her altogether.

CBS’s The Good Wife, also returning on Sunday evening, will deal with its own identity crises this season. On the surface, these two shows don’t seem to share many similarities. One is a tense terrorism thriller on premium cable, the other a contemplative legal drama that explores technology, politics, marriage, and the law with a subtlety that make it a paragon among television dramas. Both, however, tackle issues of self-identification with insight and perspicacity, and this is felt even more keenly in Homeland’s second season and The Good Wife’s fourth.

Within The Good Wife, Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) has played the dutiful wife and the aggrieved spouse with equal vigor, a friction that cuts to the core of The Good Wife. What does it mean to be good? And how does that reflect our own needs and desires outside that of familial responsibility? Having lost everything after the betrayal of her philandering husband, Peter (Chris Noth), Alicia had to, out of necessity, redefine herself through her work, returning to a profession that she had left. Her discovery that she excelled in the field is the first in a series of transformations for the character.

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The Daily Beast: "Homeland Sweeps the Emmys: Why Showtime’s Thriller Exploded"

Mad Men is triumphant no more. I examine Showtime’s superlative terrorist thriller Homeland, which took home the Emmy for best drama Sunday.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Homeland Sweeps the Emmys: Why Showtime’s Thriller Exploded," in which I take a look at Homeland's victory at the Primetime Emmy Awards last night and look at why the premium cable drama toppled Mad Men.

Not only did Mad Men not win the Emmy Award for best drama, the AMC period drama went home empty-handed Sunday, leaving the 64th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards with not a single statuette in its possession.

In the weeks leading up to the awards telecast, Mad Men seemed very much like a sure thing: it had won four of the four times it was eligible for Best Drama, and the odds seemed very much in its favor once more. In fact, Showtime’s Homeland—the taut psychological drama that also nabbed best-actor and -actress awards for Damian Lewis and Claire Danes—had cooled in recent weeks, with Breaking Bad or Downton Abbey poised as far more likely usurpers to Mad Men’s throne.

Yet Homeland did triumph, putting Showtime on the awards map in a very real way and ending the streak maintained by AMC and HBO. It’s not only a victory for showrunners Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, but also for the new regime at Showtime overseen by David Nevins, whose support for the fledgling Homeland has paid off in dividends.

However, those scratching their heads over what happened to the once-Teflon Mad Men are missing the point. Homeland’s victory isn’t much of an upset, if we’re being honest. While the least expected choice of the viable ones, the Emmy is still very much deserved. While I’m a staunch supporter of Mad Men (and will continue to be), Homeland is new and shiny, and Emmy voters, like magpies, are often drawn to the glitter of a fresh show. But Homeland is also a highly provocative drama, fueled by paranoia, patriotism, zealotry, and madness.

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The Daily Beast: "Best Drama Race: Will Mad Men Make History?"

The race for the Emmy Awards’ top drama prize is fierce (hello, Downton!).

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Best Drama Race: Will Mad Men Make History?" in which I assess the field to see whether Mad Men will make history with a fifth win.

Can Mad Men could do the impossible on Sunday and win a fifth Emmy Award for Best Drama? After walking away with the statuette four years in a row, all eyes are on AMC’s Emmy darling, which could make history with a five-time win.

Currently, Mad Men shares the record for most Best Drama wins with such notable programs as Hill Street Blues, The West Wing, and L.A. Law, all of which were crowned victors four times. But a win at Sunday’s 64th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards would make Mad Men the undisputed drama record-holder, no small feat for a show that is about to go into its sixth season—reportedly the show’s penultimate—and whose loyal viewers are considerably dwarfed by HBO’s and Showtime’s entries.

Mad Men’s fifth season found Don Draper (Jon Hamm) rediscovering himself as a newlywed after his surprising proposal to his secretary, Megan (Jessica Paré); Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) facing his mortality; Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) selling herself to become a partner; Peggy Olsen (Elisabeth Moss) leaving the firm; and poor Lane Pryce (Jared Harris) taking his own life in the office. Often polarizing, Season 5 of Mad Men was a challenging and gut-wrenching season of transformation for its characters, and a lyrical and haunting experience for many viewers.

It’s Mad Men’s toughest road to the Emmys podium. This year’s competition is fierce; so fierce, it seems, that there isn’t a single broadcast network drama competing for the top prize. (Stalwart CBS drama The Good Wife is the most obvious omission.) Instead, Mad Men’s competitors come almost entirely from cable, with AMC sibling Breaking Bad, HBO’s Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire, and Showtime’s Homeland all represented.

And then there’s Downton Abbey, the British costume drama that transformed itself into a phenomenon this year. The Julian Fellowes–created show—which depicts the lives of the wealthy Crawley family and their servants in the post-Edwardian era—airs on PBS’s venerable Masterpiece, the 41-year-old anthology series that has suddenly become a mainstream success story thanks to its wise and prescient investment in Downton.

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The Daily Beast: "TV Tackles Bipolar Disorder"

With Showtime’s recent dramas Homeland and Shameless, characters with bipolar disorder on television are no longer on the fringes.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "TV Tackles Bipolar Disorder," in which I explore the portrayals of Carrie Mathison and Monica Gallagher, played by Claire Danes and Chloe Webb, as individuals with bipolar disorder and how those realistic and nuanced portrayals both shape their respective series but also help to remove the stigma associated with mental illness. I talk to Homeland co-creator Alex Gansa about Carrie's illness and how her decision to turn to ECT will affect Season Two (beginning in September) and with Shameless writer/producer Etan Frankel about the handling of Monica and how her condition has molded the Gallagher family.

On Homeland, Claire Danes’ Carrie Mathison is a brilliant and ambitious CIA analyst, gifted with a beautiful mind that sees connections and hidden patterns that others around her can’t. She’s driven to an obsessive fixation on Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a recently returned POW whom she believes to be a terrorist sleeper agent. Carrie, to her horror and ours, is right.

However, Carrie suffers from bipolar disorder, a crippling psychological condition that is sometimes known as manic-depression, which affects roughly 5.7 million Americans, or 2.6 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to data from the National Institute of Mental Health. The illness includes “dramatic shifts in mood, energy, and activity levels that affect a person’s ability to carry out day-to-day tasks” that “are more severe than the normal ups and downs that are experienced by everyone.” (Other symptoms can include but are not limited to erratic behavior, hypersexuality, rapid cycling between mood states, and even delusions and hallucinations.)

What makes Carrie such a superb intelligence agent is also her Achilles’ heel, and her journey over the course of the first season of Homeland was one of frustration, error, and ultimately being right. Her words go unheeded when her condition is discovered by her employers, making her a modern-day Cassandra, a woman too smart for the room, too close to the truth, whose viewpoint is discarded by men who believe they know better. Danes’s stunning performance is one of several new groundbreakingly realistic depictions of mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder, on television.

“A lot of women in particular have responded to this idea that Carrie was right and that nobody knows she was right,” Homeland’s cocreator/executive producer Alex Gansa told The Daily Beast. “There’s a real sense of tragedy in that.”

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The Daily Beast: "Homeland, Justified, Downton Abbey and More: The Best and Worst TV Shows of 2011"

At The Daily Beast, it's finally time for my Best and Worst TV Shows of 2011 list: with 10 shows up for recognition as the best (including Justified, Homeland, Downton Abbey, Community, Parks and Recreation, Game of Thrones, The Good Wife, and more) and five for worst of 2011. (Plus, you can also compare my Best/Worst picks to my colleague Maria Elena Fernandez's.)

Head over to The Daily Beast to read my latest feature, "Homeland, Justified, Downton Abbey and More: The Best and Worst TV Shows of 2011," which--as the title indicates--rounds up the best and worst television that 2011 had to offer. Warning: the story may contain spoilers if you are not entirely caught up on the shows discussed here.

What is your take on our lists? Did your favorite/least favorite shows make the cut? Head to the comments section to discuss and debate.

Our Own Worst Enemy is Ourselves: Quick Thoughts on the Homeland Season Finale

I'm puzzled by how polarizing the season finale ("Marine One") of Showtime's Homeland ended up being, with viewers on one side or the other about just how effective--and believable--the climax of the espionage drama was last night.

Personally, I thought it was powerful, heartbreaking, and superlative, filled with emotional resonance and an aura of tragedy hovering uneasily over everyone, particularly the now-tragic figure of Cassandra-like Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), whose portents of doom fell onto deaf ears. It's Carrie who saves the lives of the Vice President and his cabinet as well as that of Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), but her instability is used as a weapon against her. In essence, she saves the world, but is denied the knowledge that she's done so.

Her breakdown in the final third of the episode isn't just a mental one, but that of communication as well as self-worth. Carrie's entire persona is based on a laser-like precision of the facts, collating information, and projecting possible scenarios. Her guilt over missing some valuable clue that led to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 have shaped the person she is today, one who is determined to dig at the truth regardless of the personal cost to herself. Which is why Carrie's decision at the end of the episode is all the more tragic.

In voluntarily opting to undergo electroshock therapy, Carrie is choosing to forget, to wipe clean the slate of her memory, and start fresh. Her tabula rasa is the result of weeks of being correct but not knowing so, of falling under the thrall of Brody and falling in love with him, of not being trusted by those in charge, and by being exposed in the eleventh hour by someone she trusted. Carrie began the season a disgraced CIA officer; she ends it a disgraced woman, full stop.

What makes her decision all the more tragic--and the implications all the more severe--is that in that moment of clarity before she slips under the anesthesia, Carrie finally slips together the final missing puzzle piece in her color spectrum of clues, remembering that Brody spoke of Issa in his sleep and that Abu Nazir's son was named Issa. The missing part of the spectrum is finally in full view, the rainbow complete, the puzzle solved, the meaning of Nazir's silence finally clear.

But Carrie has doomed herself to forget, to wipe away the events of the last few weeks, her painful time with Brody, her ouster from the CIA, her injuries in the blast and the subsequent psychological freefall that followed. Carrie won't remember that she made the connection, that she unmasked Brody's involvement, that she Solved It All. Instead, her words are once more misheard, misunderstood, disregarded. Her Cassandra cries are ignored, and cast off as meaningless gibberish, the white noise that arrives before the long sleep.

Brody, meanwhile, has his own life saved in the wake of Carrie's crusading. He--and his family--owe her a debt of gratitude, but it's one that he'll never repay. In reaching out to Dana (smartly, the only member of the Brody family who saw anything about their pater familias' behavior as irrational, bizarre, or troubling), Carrie follows through on Saul's advice vis-a-vis Aileen: she seeks out not what made Brody an extremist (Issa) but what makes him human (his family), hoping that Dana's voice on the line can, in essence, "talk him down" from detonating himself, the Veep, and a slew of government officials in that underground Cheney-esque bunker. It's a masterful payoff to a plant from several episodes ago. In trying to get to Dana, Carrie tries to stab at Brody's Achilles heel: his family.

And it's not until Brody hears Dana's voice on the phone that he begins to rethink this turn of events and weighs what the true collateral damage would be: his own loved ones. It's in that moment that Brody himself decides where his true allegiance lies. Can he rip open a psychic wound in his family through his sins? Can he fail to fulfill a promise to his daughter? On the roof later, it's as though Brody is seeing things clearly for the first time, acknowledging that they do in fact have "views," which he never noticed. Carrie may be forgetting, but for Brody, it's an acknowledgement that he chooses to remember, something that connects to the opening sequence as he videotapes his final confession.

It's a masterful turn of events, once more setting up Carrie and Brody as ideological opposites, defined by their choices and the way in which they process their damage. Which isn't to say that there weren't some missteps along the way here. I agree with the dissenting opinion that Brody's decision to not detonate the VP but instead assume a position of power within the government and do more damage there--while it made sense within the context of Brody's mind--should not have come as a surprising development to Nazir.

After all, surely a turned politico with a grudge against the administration and a fervent Islamist is more of an asset that killing the VP. Brody is right when he says that if he cuts off one head, like a Hydra, another will rise up to take its place. This is all very true, but the way it's handled within the context of the show makes it seem as though this brainstorm of Brody's is news to Nazir, that the leader wouldn't have anticipated this potential turn of events in advance and that it takes Brody failing to follow orders to get him to see a different path for his so-called "Marine One."

But that's a minor quibble in a season finale that brought tension, emotional depth, and gripping suspense to the mix, as well as some unexpected humor (Walker mussing the old woman's hair as he walked out of her apartment, the VP's disgusting use of Elizabeth's death to declare his presidential intentions, Brody's gut-punch of words to Carrie in the police station parking lot, and Carrie's insistence that she go to the hospital). While I suspected that Carrie would figure it out in the end--just in time to forget it all--that moment carried more than its fair share of intellectual and emotional weight (particularly the beautiful scenes between Danes and Mandy Patinkin), rendering Carrie a far more tragic figure than we previously believed her to be.

I'm curious just how far into the future Season Two of Homeland will be set, and just how Carrie will be drawn back into the mix when her security clearance has been revoked permanently. (The sadness with which Saul tells her that there's no way her termination will be reversed was palpable.) Having forgotten what she knew about Brody, Carrie will be forced to start back at square one again, but, considering her dogged determination thus far, I think it's safe to say that Carrie will once again be in pursuit of Brody--and the Truth--before too long.

As for me, I'm anxious to see what that means and how it unfolds. The America of Homeland--and the larger one of the real world--need Carrie Mathison and it needs shows like Homeland that ask uncomfortable questions about the greater good, morality, and governmental malfeasance. I just hope that Season Two lives up to the very large expectations created in the wake of this fantastic and thoughtful finale.

What did you think of the season finale? Are you dying to see Season Two of Homeland as soon as possible? Head to the comments section to discuss and debate.

Season Two of Homeland will air in 2012 on Showtime.

The Daily Beast: "Fall TV Report Card: The Winners and Losers"

With the 2011-12 television season in full swing and the cancellation orders stacking up, Jace Lacob rounds up the season’s winners (Revenge! Homeland!), losers (Man Up! Whitney!), and draws.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest story, "Fall TV Report Card: The Winners and Losers," in which I offer up not a critic's list, or a Best of 2011 TV list, but a business story selecting the winners and losers (as well as draws) for the first half of the 2011-12 television season. (Those selections are in the gallery.)

With the 2011-12 television season well underway, it’s become increasingly clear that this isn’t the best fall the broadcasters have ever had. Back in May, when the networks touted their new offerings to advertisers, it appeared they were trying to take some risks with their programming.

But the opposite is true: most of those shows featured what the networks hoped were built-in audiences for retro brand settings (Pan Am! The Playboy Club!) or remakes of vintage television (Charlie’s Angels, it’s back to pop-culture heaven for you), but viewers largely stayed away from these and many of the new fall shows.

Those claiming that viewers’ attention is elsewhere, such as on the Internet, likely don’t have a response for the oversize audience for things like AMC’s The Walking Dead, now the highest-rated cable show on the air, or the first post–Charlie Sheen episode of CBS’s Two and a Half Men. (The latter could be due to sampling, but the show has remained consistently in the range of 14 million to 16 million viewers since then.) It seems as though people are watching television, but they’re increasingly just not that excited about what’s airing on the broadcasters. (Just look at the declining fortunes of once-invulnerable reality franchise The Biggest Loser.) Which is downright worrisome, as the networks have to replace aging series and churn out new and zeitgeist-grabbing programming on a yearly basis. And sorry, Fox, but that wasn’t The X Factor, despite the nonstop hype.

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The Daily Beast: "Showtime's Homeland: The Best New Show of the Season

There is no room for argument: Showtime’s provocative and gut-wrenching psychological thriller Homeland is the best new show of the season.

Revolving around two very unreliable narrators engaged in a series of riveting mind games, Homeland explores an America 10 years after 9/11, surveying the damage done to both the national psyche and the central protagonists. Claire Danes plays Carrie Mathison, a CIA operative with both a mental illness and a troubling sense of personal guilt that she missed crucial intelligence prior to the Sept. 11 attacks; Damian Lewis (Life) plays soldier Nicholas Brody, a prisoner of war who returns home to a family that long thought him dead, and who may or may not have been turned into an enemy of the state during his eight-year captivity in Iraq.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, entitled "Showtime's Homeland: The Best New Show of the Season," in which I talk to the show's co-creators Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon about terrorism, intelligence analysis, and paranoia in the post-9/11 and post-24 era.

Homeland airs Sunday evenings at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Showtime.

The Daily Beast: "TV to Watch (and Skip) This Fall"

The fall television season is now upon us, and the offerings seem pretty underwhelming for the most part.

From must-watch entries like A Gifted Man, Revenge, Homeland, and Pan Am to the better-forgotten Terra Nova, I Hate My Teenage Daughter, Man Up!, and Grimm, I break down which new shows you should be watching this fall and which will have you running from the room, in my latest feature at The Daily Beast, "TV to Watch (and Skip) This Fall."

What will you be watching this fall? And what are you skipping altogether? Head to the comments section to discuss.

The Daily Beast: "Showtime's New Mastermind, David Nevins"

Former producer David Nevins stunned many Hollywood insiders when he announced that he was stepping down from his role at Imagine Television and taking the top job at Showtime, recently vacated by Robert Greenblatt.

Now five months into his term at Showtime, I sit down with Nevins over lunch in a new feature at The Daily Beast, entitled "Showtime's New Mastermind, David Nevins," in which he tells me about his “girly taste in television,” and why it’s “fun to be naughty” as a programmer.

We also discuss what's coming up for the network, what's in development (Damian Lewis/Claire Danes psychological drama Homeland, House of Lies, starring Don Cheadle), the challenges and opportunities facing Showtime, which is on a growth trend, and, um, selling Time Life books over the phone.