Clockwise from left: Damian Lewis in Homeland, Steve Buscemi in Boardwalk Empire, Andrew Lincoln in The Walking Dead, Jon Hamm in Mad Men, and Bryan Cranston on Breaking Bad. (Ed Johnson)

On Sunday night, as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were making history as the first two women to successfully elbow out a male host for the Golden Globes, audiences took in an unprecedented display of girl power. With Lena Dunham winning for Best Actress in a Comedy, Girls taking Best Comedy, and Julianne Moore winning for Game Change, we trumpeted a new era ... one in which women could not only captivate an audience but do so with an unlikable protagonist. (Hannah Horvath is no Tony Soprano, but she can be plenty unappealing at times.)

Many of the night’s other nominees, including the stars of Veep and Nashville, fit into the same category, as did the un-nominated (but still there in spirit) Edie Falco in Nurse Jackie, Laura Linney in The Big C and Laura Dern in the criminally under-watched Enlightened, which premiered its second season this week. This last is perhaps the best example of these hard-to-watch heroines, with Ms. Dern playing the most delusional, self-righteous and self-martyring female antihero ever to traipse through premium cable.

It was a great night for rude, crude, progressive women. Unfortunately, it was an even better night for Bad Men.

In 2007, when Mad Men won the Globes for both Best Drama and Best Actor, AMC’s new prime-time show featuring gin-swilling 1960s philanderer Don Draper as its protagonist was still considered edgy for a non-premium cable show. Today, networks feature increasingly despicable, morally complex and utterly doomed characters, and the awards tend to follow. In the last several years, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has seen fit to nominate a serial killer (Dexter), a U.S. Marine-turned-Islamic terrorist (Sgt. Nicholas Brody in Homeland), several corrupt politicians (Enoch “Nucky” Thompson from Boardwalk Empire and Boss’s Tom Kane) and the world’s most dangerous high school science teacher (Breaking Bad’s Walter White) in its Best Drama and Best Actor categories.

This year, four of these ne’er-do-wells crowded the Best Actor box, with accolades for Homeland’s Damian Lewis, Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston, Mad Men’s Jon Hamm and Boardwalk’s Steve Buscemi. The only exception to the rule: the disgruntled-but-ultimately righteous Will McAvoy from The Newsroom. God save us when an Aaron Sorkin antihero is the closest we get to a good guy.

The rest are endemic of a new trend in millennial TV protagonists—men who are, if not quite villains, then at least Bad Men. At best, our guy is an immoral misanthrope and a latent misogynist. At worst, he’s a sociopath, one who may or may not be running an international drug cartel. Or a terrorist ring. If you’re lucky, he’s merely a serial killer who kills other killers. And the scary thing is: we relate to them. We empathize. And if they don’t already hate their wives and children, not to worry—we do. How can we not, what with the missus harping about domestic nonsense when there is a meth empire to run or a presidential front-runner to assassinate?

It’s not just awards-season accolades that reflect the shift away from shows about good guys: Homeland, Breaking Bad and Dexter beat their top ratings last season. The Walking Dead surprised even its biggest fans by shattering basic cable numbers with its season-three premiere, which saw an audience of 10.9 million total viewers, the “biggest telecast for any drama series in basic cable history,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

It’s not hard to see what attracts today’s audience to these characters. For the first time in our history, the majority of men will not be able to surpass their fathers in wealth or status. With the recession, record job losses and lack of affordable health care, the Great Emasculation is well underway. Thus our need for men who at least take a stand, for good or ill, men whose nihilism often stems from psychic trauma. Men who, if not kind or ethical, survive and even flourish under dismal conditions. They might not be heroes, but we respect them.

Unlike, say, their horrible wives.

Take, for instance, Jessica Brody, the wife on Homeland played by Morena Baccarin. Not only did she cheat on Sgt. Brody during his eight years in captivity and after he returned, she pestered him for “the truth” throughout season one, only to freak out about his embrace of Islam and finally kick him to the curb. Meanwhile, Brody tried—he really did—to be a good husband and father even as he plotted his terror attack. If only Jessica hadn’t been so nosy, if only his daughter Dana had shown him a little bit more respect, maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to run off with a bipolar C.I.A. agent.

Which isn’t to say that the protagonists of these shows ever voice any misogynistic tendencies. They don’t have to. It’s the programs themselves that turn the viewers against long-suffering wives, female colleagues and blameless children. A recent Huffington Post article on the 21 Worst Characters on television included the love interests on The Walking Dead, Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire. These shows, along with Breaking Bad and Homeland, all portray nosy, ineffectual matriarchs who are simultaneously ice-cold bitches, helpless victims and puritanical enforcers. We resent these women for the usual reasons women are often resented: because they are nosy, because they aren’t affectionate enough, because can’t keep their husbands from straying, because they are not always perfect mothers. Of course, they are driven to the brink by their husbands’ actions. But in a world that glorifies amorality, women are the spoilsports. They might be “good” (at least in relation to their husbands), but that makes them worse than bad. It makes them sneaky, shrewish and thoroughly unsympathetic victims.

Walter White is a Bad Men:

But Skylar is kind of worse:

Even worse, they are whores.

For instance, even though both Jessica Brody and Lori Grimes had the moral loophole of thinking their husbands were dead, we can’t help but resent them for carrying on with their husbands’ best friends. Betty Draper and Skyler White are also guilty of the cardinal female sin of infidelity, which is much harder to swallow, somehow, then when their fellows stray. (Poor Walter White has been at least sexually faithful to his wife, only to have her retaliate for his drug dealing by having an affair with her boss.)

Despite the flagrant violence of these shows, the Bad Men still tend to put “family first,” long after they give up every other social convention. And if they lash out occasionally (Draper’s constant bordering-on-abusive-relationships with his paramours, including both his current and former wives) or engage in stalker-level harassment (Walter White breaking into the house of his separated wife and refusing to leave), we sympathize.

In December, a 26-year-old Long Island man named Jared Gurman got into a fight with his girlfriend of three and a half years. They were arguing about The Walking Dead. Mr. Gurman—who described himself on Facebook as “an underappreciated person,” who felt that he should be “making more money at work”—took out a .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle and shot his girlfriend in the back. She ended up with fractured ribs and a punctured lung and diaphragm, all for calling Mr. Gurman’s theory about the zombie apocalypse “ridiculous.” Fans of the show might recognize a certain irony: despite a plethora of semi-automatics and reasons to put one to his wife’s head, Rick Grimes never took a shot at his wife.

What a mensch!

Affleck in Argo.

It’s rare as a pink giraffe, but every once in a blue moon a movie comes along in which each piece fits seamlessly and every detail works. Argo is one of them. I have come to regard Ben Affleck as better, stronger and more self-assured behind a camera than he is in front of one, but in this exemplary, meticulously detailed thriller about a fake movie that saved real lives, he wears both hats magnificently. The result is a movie that defines perfection.

Gifted, intelligent and full of cogent ideas, Mr. Affleck can almost always be depended on to come up with something fascinating, coherent and thoroughly cinematic. Argo, his third feature film as a director after Gone Baby Gone (2007) and The Town (2010), is no exception. It grabbed me by the lapels and held my attention for two solid hours without a sideward glance, and I can’t wait to see it again. You have to see it twice if you want to absorb the myriad pieces of a jigsaw too fantastic to accept as fact, although we know going in that the recently declassified records of an amazing history lesson prove otherwise. This movie is not only true, but unbelievably true. 

The story that has come to light at last is the suspenseful account of a top-secret collaboration between the CIA and the Canadian government to rescue six escaped Americans during the November 1979 hostage crisis in Iran. After trying vainly to westernize Islam, the ailing Shah fled to America and the Ayatollah took control of the government, storming the U.S. embassy in Tehran and taking 52 panic-stricken employees as prisoners in a siege that lasted 69 days. Six members of the staff escaped and took secret refuge in the Canadian embassy, fearing for their lives while mobs raged outside and the military police searched the rooms of all foreigners in Tehran, who were sudden candidates for the Ayatollah’s popular punishment of public beheadings in the square. Argo is about the desperate attempts to save their lives after 444 days in hiding and about the audacious bravery of one CIA “exfiltration” expert named Tony Mendez, who came up with an impossible plan that finally worked, against all the odds known to man. The scheme: Mendez must find a rotten script gathering dust on a studio reject pile, get into the country posing as a producer and then sneak the six American hostages back across the border masquerading as a Canadian film crew scouting locations for a science-fiction movie called Argo, to be shot in primitive Iranian locations that look like the surface of the moon.

Mr. Affleck is unrecognizable as Mendez— ethnic, bearded, yet handsomer than ever—and he plays him with a graceful assurance that equals his firm grip as a serious director. Helping him put his hair-raising plan into action is a vast team of grim-jawed secret agents in Virginia and assorted movie-industry egomaniacs who play their new roles as recruits for a world cause with wit and relish—including a wisecracking veteran producer (Alan Arkin) and an Oscar-winning makeup artist (John Goodman). The first-rate supporting cast is headed by Chris Messina, Barry Livingston and Bryan
Cranston of TV’s Breaking Bad,among others. Chris Terrio’s stupendous screenplay chronicles an admirable mastery of vast details unfolding in CIA headquarters, in the private residence of the protective Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber), who emerged a hero for his courage under fire surrounded by hostile forces, and in the danger zones of Iran itself. As the preposterous plan actually becomes a reality, grinding suspense blends with satiric glances at humor in the least expected places.

Above all, Mr. Affleck’s virtuosity overwhelms, without self-conscious computer gimmicks. The violence contained in the action sequences never overrides the director’s sense of dramatic understatement. Argo is a triumph. It has tension, sincerity, mystery, artistic responsibility, entertainment value, technical expertise, a narrative arc and a thrilling respect for the tradition of how to tell a story with minimum frills and maximum impact. It’s a great footnote to history, one of the best films of 2012 and a sure-fire contender on Oscar night.

rreed@observer.com

ARGO

Running Time 120 minutes

Written by Chris Terrio and Joshuah Bearman (article)

Directed by Ben Affleck

Starring Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston and John Goodman

4/4

'American Beauty' live read in Toronto (Getty Images)

Last night, Jason Reitman took it upon himself to prove Natasha Vargas-Cooper wrong about the timeliness of Alan Ball's 1999 script, American Beauty. Apparently it doesn't have to feel like a rehashed bowl of nostalgic bullshit--as the Up in the Air director proved at the Toronto Film Festival when he got a new and improved cast to breathe life into stale material during a live read.

This was the rundown, according to comedian Paul Scheer:

Last night I got to to perform in Jason Reitman’s Live read of American Beauty at the Toronto Film Fest with

Bryan Cranston as Lester Burnham

Christina Hendricks as Carolyn Burnham

Mae Whitman as Jane Burnham

Adam Driver as Ricky Fitts

Sarah Gadon as Angela Hayes

Nick Kroll as Col. Frank Fitts

Me as Buddy, The Real Estate King

George Stromboulous as Brad

It was awesome.

Oh jeez. You had us at "Adam Driver as Ricky Fitts." Actually wait. You had us at "Walter White as Lester Burnham, married to Joan from Mad Men."

We actually can't tell if casting Nick Kroll as Chris Cooper's repressed, tyrannical Col. Frank Fitts was the one misfire in the show, or just a way for Mr. Reitman to shrug at the audience for the heavy-handed nature of a character he couldn't control.

In case you wanted to know what all this ended up sounding like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvm-CHdN6tY

We bet James Franco--who was definitely in Toronto yesterday--is so mad at Jason Reitman for not letting him play all the characters and direct and rewrite American Beauty. He was going to turn that videotape of a bag blowing in the wind into a two-hour loop of video and call it a day. It's just not fair!

• 30 Rock
• The Big Bang Theory
• Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Louie
• New Girl
• Modern Family

Sorry, guys: Girls skews a little young for this crowd. All of the shows on this list are essentially perma-nominees at this point, but for Louie, which is so well-regarded among the establishment that its nomination seems likely, and New Girl, which is youngish but is sort-of, kind-of an actual hit on broadcast TV (unlike possible nominees like Parks and Recreation).

Best Drama

• Breaking Bad
• Downton Abbey
• Game of Thrones
• The Good Wife
• Homeland
• Mad Men

The Good Wife sneaks in just so broadcast TV is represented somehow; the rest are the five TV shows (yes, Downton is a series now, not a miniseries) that combined critical acclaim with your co-workers asking if you were caught up yet. (Poor, not-quite-loved Boardwalk Empire.)

Best Actress, Comedy

• Laura Dern, Enlightened
• Zooey Deschanel, New Girl
• Lena Dunham, Girls
• Tina Fey, 30 Rock
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep
• Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation

We stand by our prediction!

Best Actor, Comedy

• Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock
• Louis C.K., Louie
• Jon Cryer, Two and a Half Men
• Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Johnny Galecki, The Big Bang Theory
• Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory

Now that perpetual bridesmaid Steve Carell is no longer on TV, there's a spot open, and perhaps it'll go to the guy who helped keep Two and a Half Men on the air, if in attenuated form. Mr. Cryer's already won an Emmy as a supporting actor, anyhow.

Best Actress, Drama

• Claire Danes, Homeland
• Mariska Hargitay, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
• Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife
• Elizabeth McGovern, Downton Abbey
• Elisabeth Moss, Mad Men
• Jessica Paré, Mad Men

Lots of turnover in this category! But presumably Ms. Hargitay will remain, constant, impassive, immovable.
Best Actor, Drama

• Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire
• Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad
• Kelsey Grammer, Boss
• Hugh Laurie, House
• Damian Lewis, Homeland
• Jon Hamm, Mad Men

With the exception of Hugh Laurie (whose show just ended), this is a party of all the ill-behaved men of cable TV.

Peter Gallagher, a natural replacement for Jimmy Stewart (RKO, Getty)

Considering the other male lead in this stage adaptation is Bryan Cranston, you have to wonder why Peter "Remember How I was Creepier than James Spader In Sex Lies and Videotape?" Gallagher snagged the lead over the Breaking Bad star. We know that Mr. Cranston can do the Bailey's conflicting emotions of simultaneously confused, suicidal, and goofy: just look at him as the dad as Malcolm in the Middle.

Annette Bening will also costar as Mrs. Mary Bailey, proving that in an alternate universe, Carolyn Burnham finally got her King of Real Estate.

It's a Wonderful Life, adapted by Tony Palermo and directed by Bart DeLorenzo, set for Dec. 10 at the Gil Cates Theater.

Modern Family will win Best Comedy Series

Glee got all the Emmy love with a series show high 19 nominations -- The Pacific led all nominees with 24 -- but Modern Family was no slouch either. The ABC show seems almost manufactured in a lab with the way it combines the modern conceits of current series with the familiar tropes of classic sitcoms. That warm feeling of nostalgia is why voters will choose Family over fellow flashy newcomer Glee. Besides: Would anyone even call Glee a "comedy series?"

Jon Hamm will win Best Actor in a Drama

All Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston does is win Emmys. But this year, it just feels like there might be a sea change for no other reason than its time for someone else to win. His biggest competiton is likely Jon Hamm and don't be surprised when the dapper Don Draper takes home the trophy. Hamm has the Emmy "heat" -- he also got another nomination as Comedy Guest Star for his hilarious turn on 30 Rock -- and he's clearly worthy because of his performance. Lost fans hoping for a Matthew Fox win because the series wrapped up in the spring, however, shouldn't hold their breath. Don't forget: James Gandolfini didn't win for the final season of The Sopranos. Like Fox-y will?

Amy Poehler will win Best Actress in a Comedy

The beloved Parks and Recreation could only muster two nominations -- one for star Amy Poehler and one for best theme song. And while it does have a great theme song, expect Poehler to take home the one Parks trophy that will matter. There is history here: America Ferrara, Tina Fey and last year's winner, Toni Collette, were first time nominees on rookie-ish shows who won (Parks and Rec had a six-episode season one), and in all cases their victories seemed like a "shock." If Poehler were to win, people would certainly be surprised, but her work on Parks and Recreation -- turning her character from a one-note Michael Scott clone into a layered, well-meaning and original human being -- deserves as many accolades as possible.

Chris Colfer will win Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy

One of the biggest surprises during Thursday's nominations was Chris Colfer being selected for Glee. The young star -- who has no previous television credits -- is a scene stealer on the show as the newly out-of-the-closet Kurt Hummel. That's all well and good, but that Colfer can also flash Emmy voters his scenes from the Glee episode "Theatricality" -- which centered on Kurt and his dad coming to terms with their relationship -- is the cherry on top of what feels like an obvious win. Apologies Neil Patrick Harris: You're great. You just aren't Kurt.

The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien will win Best Variety, Music or Comedy Series

If you were an Emmy voter and had the chance to put Conan O'Brien on NBC one last time -- the Emmys are on NBC this year -- wouldn't you do everything in your power to make it happen, even if Conan wasn't the most deserving nominee? Thought so.

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"I like darker beer," said the actor, just before ordering an Ithaca Nut Brown Ale and a bowl of nuts to go with it. He sat beneath an elaborate wall fixture consisting of nine black rotary telephones, dressed in a blue, pinstriped button-down tucked into tailored gray pants. His hair was close-cropped, his sideburns neat and his face delicately creased with age.

"I took a tour of the Guinness factory in Dublin," Mr. Cranston continued. "They give you a little eyedrop of Guinness encased in, uh, like a plastic -- almost like a paperweight. And you can keep it as a souvenir on your desk. It's really fun."

Mr. Cranston, who recently turned 54, was in town on an epic press junket to promote Breaking Bad, AMC's twisted black comedy, which has earned him two Emmy Awards for his leading role as Walter White, a terminally ill, midlife-crisising high-school chemistry teacher-turned-meth manufacturer living in Albuquerque. The show was created by Vince Gilligan, formerly a producer on The X-Files.

Breaking Bad, the third season of which premiered on March 21, is disturbing, hilarious, touching, taboo, nauseating, edifying, awkward, anxiety-filled and, above all, masterfully written and directed, as is evidenced by the various awards and critical acclaim it has received. It is not, however, nearly as massive a hit as many of its peers (at least not yet) -- zeitgeisty, water-cooler-chatter shows like The Sopranos, Lost, True Blood and, of course, Mad Men, Breaking Bad's extraordinarily popular network-mate (widely perceived as the reason AMC has become relevant). Walter White is no Don Draper, and Mr. Cranston himself is perhaps still more well known as the fumbling father from Malcolm in the Middle, the Fox sitcom in which he appeared in 151 episodes between 2000 and 2006.

"Breaking Bad is not a sexy show," said Mr. Cranston. "It's a gritty show. It's not going to be on the cover of Vogue. Mad Men, you have the dashing Jon Hamm and all these beautiful women. The Sopranos, we're enthralled with mobsters. You know, the goombah, the goodfellas, the godfather. That's totally magazine-cover-sexy. A guy in his underwear [cooking meth] out in the middle of the desert in an RV? Not sexy."

In the season-three opener, which begins after Walter has just confessed his secret profession to his wife, Skyler, who subsequently leaves him, we first see Mr. Cranston slouched on some patio furniture in his backyard, wearing a brown robe over tighty-whities, slowly flicking lit matches into his swimming pool. With one match left in the book, he gets up, strikes it and tosses it onto a charcoal grille with the intention of burning the $500,000 in cash he'd just made off a recent meth sale -- money he needed only so that Skyler, his newborn baby and his handicapped teenage son wouldn't be left penniless when he eventually succumbed to lung cancer. As Walter gazes at the burning bills, he suddenly thrusts himself onto the flames, catches on fire, and jumps into the pool, with the grill, to salvage his fortune. You just don’t know whether to feel bad or call him an asshole.

For Mr. Cranston, the most intense moment of the entire series thus far occurred in season two, when Walter lets his young business partner’s girlfriend die in her sleep, watching idly as she chokes on her own vomit during a heroin overdose. Good times!

“What we’re doing on the show has never been done in the history of television, and that’s not hyperbole,” said Mr. Cranston. “[Vince] told me, he wants to do a series where, at the beginning, the guy is Mr. Chips. Good guy. Smart guy. Provides for his family. Never got a ticket in his life. And by the end of the series, he’s Scarface. He’s a killer. And that’s never been done before. I mean, gone are the days of Magnum P.I. He was great-looking, great car, never drank too much, never cheated on his girlfriend. It’s like, ‘What a guy!’ We don’t have that. Those days are over. So we’re in uncharted waters here, and that’s what so exciting about this era of television. It’s going places that really haven’t been discovered. I think it’s, dare I say, another golden age of television.”

Whether Breaking Bad ever gets to Mad Men proportions, Mr. Cranston is not concerned. “That’s not what I do this for anyway,” he said. But: “I think we could easily do two more years, to do a total of five seasons. We might be able to do six. I hope we’re on for as long as it takes to thoroughly examine this journey, and no longer.”

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jpompeo@observer.com

“I’m doing several things with gun play and chemicals and explosions. So I really enjoy that, being a badass,” he said, speaking by phone yesterday afternoon from his dressing room at The Rachael Ray Show, where he was scheduled to appear. “It’s like being a boy again.”

It seems ironic considering that Mr. Cranston, 51, is most well known for playing a father. He was the goofy, fumbling dad on Fox’s Emmy-winning sitcom Malcolm In the Middle (now you can picture him!), and as the high school chemistry teacher turned drug dealer, Walter White, he’s taken on another paternal role, albeit a dark and twisted one, in Breaking Bad, which premiered last Sunday, Jan. 20. Forget about the Corvette – this show, a black comedy of sorts created by The X Files’ Vince Gilligan, takes the mid-life crisis to a new level; one that, for Mr. Cranston’s character, involves terminal lung cancer, his family’s impending financial ruin, and resorting to the sale of crystal meth to try and make it all better.

Indeed, it’s a far cry from playing Hal (Malcom’s dad), whose biggest problems usually involved clumsiness and embarrassing his four sons. But for Mr. Cranston, whose acting credits include an array of diverse roles – from a laughable dentist on Seinfeld, to a hardened one-armed Army colonel in Saving Private Ryan, to the little seen, though omnipresent “Stan Grossman” in 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine – it’s all about finding the “emotional core” of whatever character he is playing. He said he’s still not certain just what that is for Walter White, but being a father himself (Mr. Cranston has a 14-year-old daughter named Taylor) his own emotional core sometimes manifests itself during the filming.

“There’s a scene where [Walter White’s] son looks at me and calls me a pussy, and every time I did that scene I cried because it affected me so much,” Mr. Cranston said. “There’s something about a son having such a lack of respect for his father that just destroyed me as a man.”

But for the most part, he said doing the show has been a lot of fun. And a lot of work: Following his Rachael Ray taping, Mr. Cranston, who until now most viewers recognized as a supporting actor, had some more interviews lined up, and though he said all the press appearances (a notoriously monotonous routine) have been “keeping me busy,” he doesn’t seem to mind.

“I really believe in the show so I’m very eager to spread the word,” he said.