Sunday TV in my house was a ritual in the early 2000’s, when my parents deemed I was old enough to watch The Sopranos: my dad would get home from work at a reasonable time, my sister and I would excuse ourselves from the friends we were hanging out with, my mother would cook a big dinner of sausage and peppers and polenta. We’d all make a feeble grasp at connecting with our Italian heritage—one of my father’s cherished past-times—and gather around the television to spend an hour together, once a week.

The only Sunday shows I follow now are Mad Men and Game of Thrones. When those air, usually my dad isn’t home yet. My sister spends those hours and most others in her room, and my mom falls asleep on the couch and catches up on DV-R around 6am. Sometimes we hash through what happened and who we hate most (Joffrey and Don) while I sift through the fridge for something I can call breakfast or lunch, but more often than not none of us are home at the same time to talk anymore.

Even though the Sopranos, in whatever piece of emotional alchemy it managed to formulate, had the power to make my family care about the same thing for 1/168^th of a week, last night’s Mad Men made me realize the power of a show has nothing to do with inspiring a sense of community, but in forcing individual interpretation through silence, lingering, the absence of traditional dramatic stimuli.

Nothing could be more antithetical to Game of Thrones’ strategy of jumping between plot points to maintain a constant, over-compressed torrent of sex, yelling, and death. I came away from last night’s episode feeling entertained the way I would by a very good webgame: superficially invested, but mostly relishing the opportunity to be immediately gratified for minimal effort.

Whereas the deafeningly loud turn of this week’s Game of Thrones was Jaime’s reformation, evidenced by his saving Brienne from an actual bear in some sort of ridiculous gladiatorial arena, Mad Men’s was Don and his current extramarital fling Sylvia silently standing in an elevator. That’s all. She had just broken off their affair after Don went a step too far in exploiting her crumbling marriage, turning a hotel room into their bizarre sex dungeon. She takes a stand and we see Don beg—for sex, for her continued submission to him, or because he’s been forced to admit he’s emotionally invested—which, for a person as invested in appearing ‘strong’ as he is, is almost sickening to watch.

“It’s easy to give up something when you’re satisfied,” Don bargains. Sylvia retorts, “It’s easy to give up something when you’re ashamed.” And that should rightfully be the end of their interaction, but after a brief Joan scene in the boardroom of the newly merged company, we cut back to Don and Sylvia riding the elevator down. It’s something so simple but so vital: two people sharing space, each feeling a different kind of sadness. These are the circumstances under which strangers in movies become lovers, but here it’s the long, slow, terribly quiet descent into the estranged. They only people who would be able to understand their turmoil are themselves, the same people who would gain nothing by saying any more about it.

“What did you think of Don last night,” my mom will ask. “What an asshole,” I’ll say microwaving some leftovers. I’ll eat in my room.

TV is no longer a communal activity, in my house and in most houses, because we’ve focused our attention on being able to customize our entertainment consumption to our own schedules and tastes. Other people watch what you watch, but the reasons for talking about it with them seem less tangible. It’s not my intention to moralize and weigh the pros and cons of watching shows on your laptop in bed. What I can say is that Mad Men—perhaps unintentionally—is taking advantage of the way most people consume media now, by giving us scenes that feel too personal to be shared. 

Season 2 of Bob’s Burgers is FINALLY available on Netflix Instant.

Bob’s Burgers became TV’s most enjoyable show by channeling early Simpsons

Bob’s Burgers is good at so many different kinds of jokes that it sometimes seems to take on the rhythms of a night out with funny friends. It has at least one surrealistic musical sequence in nearly every episode, whether it involves Thomas Edison and an elephant singing a duet or old-person swingers sexing it up in a swimming pool. It features grand visual gags. It features elaborate movie and pop-culture references (as in the wild, weird E.T. riff “O.T.: The Outside Toilet”). It plays around with tropes of both the genre it’s in and the genres of stories it’s seen before. It even has a ridiculous number of puns, more than any television show should be able to get away with in this day and age. It takes all of this, blends it with a genius ensemble cast that rattles off the show’s weird-ass punchlines with aplomb, then builds it on a foundation of real drama and stakes. It feels so impeccably constructed that to take it apart seems as if it should ruin the magic trick of every episode, yet it all seems so easy that it almost doesn’t matter. Bob’s Burgers has always been a good show, but its third season has placed it in the rarified air of TV’s best, a near constant assault of humor, heart, and old-fashioned showmanship. (via)

ABC has scheduled the eight remaining unaired episodes of sophomore comedy Don’t Trust the B—— in Apt. 23 for a May 17 bow on ABC.com, iTunes and Hulu, according to star Krysten Ritter. (via)

A continued exploration of Game of Thrones references in comedies.

Imagine Downton Abbey’s Dowager Countess completely stripped of even the pretense of being polite to anyone for any reason and you’ve got this delightful old cutthroat, played with deadpan panache by leather-catsuit legend Diana Rigg. In short order she insults Renly, her son, her dead husband, her female friends and relatives and handmaidens, the Lannisters, the waiter – pretty much everyone but the three women sitting at the table, talking treason about the King. Sansa’s white-knuckle terror over the very idea of saying something negative about Joffrey for others to hear is so obvious you want to reach through the screen and wrap her in a blanket or something (man, Sophie Turner rules), which only proves how fearless and confident Lady Olenna is in her own security and power. She’s rich, powerful, well-connected, intelligent, and just plain out of fucks to give. They say the graveyards of the world are full of indispensable men, but she’s not a man, is she? What a thrill to watch three females decide their own fates for a change. (via)

Lady Olenna Tyrell is scarier than the White Walkers.

AMC Eyes ‘Breaking Bad’ Spinoff Toplined By Bob Odenkirk

A list of Breaking Bad spinoffs we’d rather see:

• Skinny Pete and Badger trying to get their band off the ground.
• The hijinks of Wendy the prostitute.
• End of list.