Illustration by Alex Bedder.

These questions regard last night’s episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Please answer the prompts with specific examples from LAST NIGHT’S EPISODE, though supplementary material will be accepted as a secondary source. Please write legibly. No. 2 pencils only. You have an hour to finish this test. See below for questions and sample responses.

1. Sometimes Ygritte acts tough and independent, and others she is erratic and even immature, as when she steals John Snow's sword like a schoolgirl with a crush. Based on her behavior in this episode, where would you say she falls on Barney Stinson's Hot/Crazy Scale--above or below the Vicky Mendoza diagonal?

Oh, Ygritte doesn't even qualify on the Hot/Crazy scale, which can be seen here, in a How I Met Your Mother clip. (Come on, we can do better. I know we can.)

HIMYM Special - The Hot/Crazy Scale [3.05] from pride on Vimeo.

After all, Ygritte always has a method to her manic pixie dream girl madness: She wants Jon Snow not just because he's the cutest crow to ever take her hostage, slay her friends and not kill her, but because sleeping with her will prove that he's not still secretly working for the Nights Watch, which took that monk's oath, you know. It's like her hoo-haa is a sexual polygraph test that gives you quicker results than fighting with Gareth from The Office outside all day.

2. Lady Olenna continues to be smarter and cooler than everyone else in Westeros. We finally get a conversation between her and the arguably equally clever Tyrion in this episode, but he makes an uncharacteristically poor showing, while the Lady of Thorns twists the knife, giving him what he wants but first forcing him to acknowledge just how tacky his request to go dutch on the wedding is. He's clearly out of his element here. But is that element marriage, or is it money? And considering the final scene of the episode, how important is the distinction between the two?

Not to personalize it, but this weekend I was at a wedding where this guy made a toast about the new couple and tried to work in some analogy to Game of Thrones. Even though that's like ... a really bad idea. First of all, because he totally *spoiler alerted* Joffrey's wedding to an upsetting degree, but because Game of Thrones is not a series where romantic love factors that much into the equation.

Seriously.

Any marriages that last have been pre-arranged to result in the highest amount of money or power for the respective houses, usually ending in the lowest amount of marital happiness. (Someone should do a study on the correlation between the two in Westeros ... obviously Essos is different, because what started off as an arranged marriage for Dany became true love.)

When love does occur, it seems like an unhappy accident; the Lannister twins, for instance, or Tyrion's love of Shae, which he must keep hidden. Even Robb, the Honorable King, is about to put himself in the firing line of the people who were most betrayed  by his marriage to whatsherface ... the Freys. Don't think that the slight will have been forgotten so easily, not when that cranky guy with the bridge in season one was so hell-bent on marrying off his daughters to the King in the North.

True love/lust is only a distraction that can be used as leverage against you: just look what happened to poor Ser Loras the moment some blondie squire made eyes at him. So many the distinction isn't between money and marriage, but money and power, or power and marriage. What we know for sure that when it comes to love and marriage, there can be only suffering that brings about a Daenerys-style "No Children" curse.

3. It turns out that Stannis and his wife have quite a little freakshow of their own, complete with stillborn fetuses in jars and a surprisingly enthusiastic sanctioning of cult-based infidelity. Picture Stannis, Selyse, Melisandre and Davos appearing on The Jerry Springer Show. In what order will the producers bring them out in order to assure maximum fireworks? Whom will the audience side with? Will anybody resort to hair pulling or chair throwing?

Jerry Springer is all about letting things build up: you can't start out with the craziest scenario/person, because you'd have nowhere to build. So it would have to be a show that started with the love triangle of Davos, Stannis and Melisandre. Something like "This Ho Won't Let My Friend Go!" Where we first see the Onion Knight explaining the situation until Jerry says, "Well, we actually have Melisandre and Stannis backstage, is there anything you want to say to them?"

After Stannis comes storming out and Davos has to be physically restrained from trying to throttle the light out of the red witch, the group would settle down, during which Springer would switch gears.

Springer: "Now, Stannis, Davos might be an untrustworthy, illiterate knight, but you have some secrets of your own. You impregnanted Melisandre with a smoke baby to kill Renly Baratheon, did you not?"

Audience boos.

Springer: Now wait, wait. What do you think your wife and young, deformed daughter would have to say about that?

Audience gasps, starts rioting.

Stannis: SILENCE! I AM YOUR KING!

Springer: The answers might surprise you ... right after this commercial break.

During which we finally pan to the chyron on the screen: "I'm having an affair ... for the Red God!"

Backstage, you'll get a quick glimpse of Stannis's wife--does she have a name yet--holding a jar of feti in one hand and her daughter's Greyscaled little palm in the other. Maybe we then cut ahead to a weird lesbian triangle that causes Davos to quickly shuttle Stannis's daughter offstage.

4. In a show marked by regular nude scenes, Jaime and Brienne's scene in the baths stands out. The fact that they literally expose themselves to one another is echoed by their figurative baring of their souls, with Jaime telling the true story of his murder of the Mad King and Brienne reacting with real sympathy. Have any other characters on the show ever been this naked? And in light of this, what do you make of the director's choice to show their nudity to us only from behind?

I did think the decision not to show any dick was weak--how better to exemplify Jaime's situation than with a flaccid cock? But I'm glad that if Jaime was only going to be shown from the behind (and what a beautiful behind that was), Brienne was going to be shot exactly the same, making them equals not just in the eyes of each other, but in the eyes of the viewer as well. We've always loved Jaime as a rakish villain, but Brienne has been like Robb or Jon Snow: too noble and single-minded to truly be interesting.

With her eyes getting all glassy wide during Jaime's speech as he told her the unsolveable scenario the Mad King put him in, she suddenly morphed into someone much more vulnerable ...s omeone old Jaime would have easily taken advantage of, what with her woman's weakness. But new Jaime just wants to subvert the gender expectations and swoon into Brienne's arms. (Was anyone else reminded of that Girls episode where Hannah faints in that doctor's shower/sauna, because this was like the same scene but opposite.) The whole "My name is Jaime" line while he lay in Brienne's arms, her calling for help for The Kingslayer, was perfect. While she sympathizes with--maybe even trusts--him now more than she did (and there's plenty to make us think she doesn't entirely buy his story), she's still not ready to play make-believe and pretend that there's any real friendship or romance between the two of them. She's still grappling with the idea that he's a man--possibly a man who meant well, at one point--and not the monster that she viewed him as.

Of course, as much as we'd like to say that Jaime himself is a changed man, his dig at Renly in the beginning which causes Brienne to stand up nude as if ready to fight is the moment where he begins to see her as human--more than human, but a woman!--as well, instead of some weird freak female eunuch. Or ... what would they call a chick who didn't fit into the traditional lord/lady hierarchy back in those days? Besides the Flower Knight?

So while the bath scene seemed like a breakthrough in their relationship, let's not forget that Brienne is still calling Jaime "Kingslayer" and Jaime is still thinking with his dick ... at least enough to mumble an apology after letting his eyes assess the giant, nude woman in front of him.

5. Nearly every storyline in this episode hinged on questions of betrayal: when it is justified, how it is punished, and who is harmed by it. John Snow finally fully betrays the Night's Watch (and is rewarded for it), Lord Carstark betrays Robb (and is beheaded for it) or arguably vice versa, Arya feels betrayed by the Brotherhood and by Gendry, Stannis finds out that his wife doesn't consider his infidelity a betrayal, Sansa continues to be betrayed/betray herself, etc. If you were to rank the characters by who was the most wronged in this episode, who comes out on top--who is the most betrayed individual? Alternately, who feels that he/she has been deeply wronged but least deserves to think so?

The MOST betrayed individual? Easily Davos: he is trying to save his king, and he gets thrown in the dungeons for it. God help him if Stannis's daughter is caught reading to him ... I imagine there is actually a worse punishment out there than being locked in "Friend Jail." His motives are some of the most pure on the show, as evidenced by the fact that even he considers himself guilty of treason, despite the fact that he lost his (two?) son(s) in the battle for King's Landing, came back to warn the king with no regard for his own neck, and accepted his punishment as just. Who needs an army of eunuchs calling themselves Grey Worm when you have The Onion Knight on your side?

The problem with ranking the rest of the characters in terms of betrayal/betrayed is that its all a matter of perception. Tyrion would seem to have the most legitimate case about being fucked by his family once again when his dad forces him to marry Sansa Stark, but really, he's looking at it all wrong: he gets to be Lord of Winterfell! Who cares if he's married to Sansa in some sham ceremony ... he can always keep Shae at his side and act honorably toward her ... something that probably Ser Loras would not have even done, depending on the true plans of the Tyrells.

Meanwhile Cersei, the big whiner, does have a legitimate grievance--more so than her brother, perhaps, though she's so unlikeable that it's hard to see. The Tyrells clearly have the make on her, and having her marry into the family as a woman means that she'll be giving up any last claim to power she had as queen regent, and probably the last of her sway over Joffrey, as she'd be quickly removed to Highgarden. (Incidentally, nothing would make the Tyrells happier than a chance to get their own claws into Joffrey without his mother's meddling.)

There's one line that Cersei moans in that last scene--"Not again!"--that alludes to her pretty sympathetic fate: she was married off to a man who was obsessed with Ned Stark's dead sister while she was still Sansa's age in order to secure a Lannister place on the throne, and though all we saw was the end of Robert and Cersei's relationship, you can imagine he wasn't the most kind or faithful of husbands. This kind of cements Cersei's role--which has been alluded to all season--she's not the scheming evil queen she once pretended to be, but merely a pawn in her father's endless chess battle against any perceived threat to the family name.

Now that Cersei has done her duty as queen, her only use to the family is being sold like chattel to the very family she mosts distrusts, to a husband that she just had confirmed was a homosexual, and whose boyfriend took up arms against the crown.

With a father like that, no wonder the Lannisters are all kinds of fucked up.

Lena Dunham and Lesley Arfin.

HBO's critically acclaimed show Girls is mixing it up for Season 3 ... and leaving a few names behind. Don't start crying yet: it's not any of the cast members. In an article last month by Joe Pompeo, a source spilled the beans that three of the show's L.A. writers will not be returning to the already-small writers' room. But why?

Well, relocation, to start. The eternal struggle between L.A. lifers and chronic New Yorkers: the oldest story in the book. But also, more things!

The trio of deposed scribes--senior writer and ex-Vicer Lesley Arfin, former Observer reporter Deborah Schoeneman and Steve Rubinshteyn--were allegedly told before the start of Season 2 that the Dunham brain trust would be moving from L.A. to New York, where the show is filmed. Which actually makes sense, in terms of condensing the operation ... the show already shoots here, why fly out to L.A. to write it? But the downsizing seemingly had less to do with cross-country moving costs and more with giving Ms. Dunham more control over her show.

In an email to The Observer, Ms. Arfin, who had previously gotten in some hot water over a controversial tweet she made during the first season, wrote:

Really the bottom line is that she wanted a smaller writers room and she wanted it to be in nyc and me, deb, and ruby weren't able to do that.

That line seems to suggest the "she" in question in Ms. Dunham herself, who along with being one of the writers, directors and stars of the show, also holds the title of executive producer.

(Ms. Dunham declined to comment on the story.)

Although there has been no official announcement about replacing the three writers, one could read between the lines of HBO's statement to Capitol in its list of writers who did make the cut: Judd Apatow, Jenni Konner, Lena Dunham, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Murray Miller, Paul Simms, Sarah Heyward "and, occasionally, Lena’s parents."

Laurie Simmons and Carol Dunham have never written an episode of Girls, to the best of our knowledge, and neither has Mr. Simms. But if Dunham was really behind taking a nine person-writing staff and cutting it down to six (not counting the occasional parent-written episode, which holy God, actually sounds crazy-amazing), one could reasonably conclude that the 26-year-old wunderkind was taking a firmer hand on the reins for her singular vision of what Girls should be.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing: Adam Reed does the same thing with Archer, and we love Archer.

And hey, there can't be ten voices of our generation, can there?

Shane Smith, in the thick of it for VICE (Vice/HBO)

When Shane Smith, one of the founders of Vice Media, pitched a television show to MTV in 2010, it seemed unimaginable that the company that came out of Vice magazine could establish itself as a respected informational source about, well, anything (other than how to decorate your heroin stash). And yet the network bit, and The Vice Guide to Everything ran for eight episodes, balancing ridiculous segments against heavier fare.

With its latest television program, VICE, which premieres next Friday, the media company is once again trying its hand at American television. Not just television. HBO. And this time, it’s not trading on its nihilistic reputation. Instead, it’s asking audiences to trust in its international-relations acumen. It wants to be taken seriously. Or at least as seriously as it takes itself.

“This is the grown-up, smarter, more erudite version of Vice,” Eddy Moretti, Vice Media’s executive creative director (and one of the producers of VICE), told Off the Record. In addition to being more earnest than its predecessor, Mr. Moretti said, this show is intensely researched.

Like Vanguard but shorter and with more cursing, VICE features three correspondents whose job it is to “expose the absurdities of the modern condition”: Mr. Smith, Dos & Don’ts book editor Thomas Morton and a former intern named Ryan Duffy.

For the show’s first season, the trio treks deep into dangerous international terrain, with a special focus on the Middle East, India and the North Korea/Thailand/China region. (We hear that if HBO gives them a second season, they’ll cover domestic terrors as well.)

“News from the Edge” is the slogan that HBO has given VICE, which makes one wonder what counts as “news” these days. VICE goes to dangerous locales and puts its correspondents in inhospitable situations, but it is less current-affairs journalism than novelty of access.

Indeed, immersion and danger are the points of the show, facts that the hosts allude to throughout the segments. “The world is changing,” Mr. Smith intones in the credit sequence. “No one knows where it’s going. But we’ll be there.” It’s the ultimate humblebrag.

Bill Maher, the only non-Vice executive producer of the show—the other two are Mr. Smith and another Vice Media co-founder, Suroosh Alvi—is a natural fit to back the program, as his own off-color TV show is to politics what the Vice brand is to traditional reporting. Fareed Zakaria, who is a consultant on VICE, is a much stranger bedfellow. The fact that a CNN host would be involved in Shane Smith’s project suggests the media company is making a prime-time play for legitimacy with VICE.

Mr. Moretti stopped just short of calling VICE a “news” program—but that may be semantic. “I think it’s a documentary show,” said Mr. Moretti. “News, to me, is everything that happened in a day, from the weather to the president visiting Israel to, you know, a cat in a tree.”

It’s a potato/potahto situation: it’s not news in the timely sense, and yet meeting Taliban leaders is newsworthy. And in recent months, the media company has gotten used to finding itself in the news cycle.

With stunts like sending Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters to North Korea (where “The Worm” became the first American to meet Kim Jong-un) and the accidental leaking of John McAfee’s whereabouts in Guatemala through a photographer’s metadata, Vice Media has become a newsmaker—if not a newsbreaker.

Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong-un in North Korea (Vice/HBO)

Still, VICE is having some trouble finding where it fits on the spectrum. It seems as though the show wants to stay true to its roots, in some ways, but also wants to be taken seriously; a hard line to toe, especially when your program is composed of two rushed 15-minute segments about “showing some of the scariest, weirdest and most absurd customs and practices known to humanity,” as Mr. Smith has referred to it.

That tongue-in-cheek tone is difficult to maintain when dealing with VICE's surprisingly serious subject matter: child bombers of the Taliban; India and Pakistan’s fights with Kashmir; political unrest in the Philippines. Half of each episode is the correspondents telling the audience how “fucked” the people in a particular region are, with interstitial shots of shockingly explicit footage from bombings, shootings and massacres. It’s not exactly “fun TV.”

In fact, several sources questioned whether HBO has gotten what it bargained for with VICE. They suggested that HBO was hesitant to work with the company—president of HBO Entertainment Sue Naegle in particular—but agreed on the condition that the program would deliver a scoop about Mitt Romney’s polygamist family in Mexico during the election cycle. (That particular piece ended up online, but the show proceeded anyway.) Mr. Moretti denied the existence of such a condition.

Others said HBO was expecting more of the old Vice.

“[HBO] actually wanted a hate-Brooklyn, pissing on themselves [show],” said one source close to the situation, who agreed to talk on condition of anonymity. “And then they got all this serious shit.”

“HBO was shocked by that,” our tipster continued. “But Vice likes to do really serious stuff now.” Still, the source floated the possibility that the network was actually impressed: “Maybe HBO was shocked in a good way.”

As Mr. Moretti tells it, there was no resistance from the premium channel.

“It was just kind of a meeting of the minds. It was a wonderful process,” he said. “A lot of people can experience a traumatic pitch process, but with HBO, we just felt like these people knew us, understood us. They have a passion for news and documentary.”

To be fair to Vice, it’s not your older brother’s Canadian grime-core magazine anymore. (Hell, it’s barely a magazine anymore.) Vice Media has become a huge digital content creator, especially with Vice.com, which hosts 60-plus video channels. According to a spokesperson, 80 to 90 percent of what Vice Media produces today is online video.

In 2011 alone, Vice Media made $110 million on these video series, from pre-roll ads to YouTube partnerships. The programs range from the silly to the somber.

The stern of Vice’s skateboards-and-boobs ship began to turn in 2007. That was when Mr. Moretti and Mr. Alvi premiered their documentary, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, about an Iraqi heavy-metal band, Acrassicauda. The video struck all the right notes: it had the hardcore, DIY underground music scene that already fit with Vice’s original conception as a punk magazine, but it was also covering a reality about the war-torn country from a unique perspective. When the accolades began pouring in for the documentary, Vice transitioned—overnight, it seemed—from a hipster outfit to an international “news” presence. The HBO show appears to be the natural culmination of this Vice 2.0.

“The secret of Vice was to stick to the core template I created. Stupid in a smart way, smart in a stupid way. Never be serious,” said Gavin McInnes, a founder and former employee of Vice Media, who left the company in 2008 following a very public dispute after Viacom was brought in. (Viacom maintained a partnership with Vice’s online video content from 2007 to 2009, when it was VBS.TV.) “I think they are trying to do serious journalism now.”

In a 2007 interview with Wired, on the occasion of the launch of VBS.TV, Mr. Alvi said, “Traditional journalism always aspires to objectivity, and since Day One with the magazine, we never believed in that.”

In fact, when VBS.TV first launched that year, its motto was: “Rescuing you from television’s deathlike grip.”

Oh, the irony.

“I think it’s a maturation of our natural form of documentary storytelling,” Mr. Moretti said of the show. “A maturation of the Vice brand, in a way. It’s consistently more serious, and the stories are told with a lot of diligence.”

When asked if this evolution represented Vice’s bildungsroman, Mr. Moretti answered with a laugh: “Totally. Actually, it’s my personal bildungsroman.”

Like a lot of things about Vice, though, we couldn’t tell if the executive was being totally serious. Which might be a problem when it comes time to teach Americans about the Pakistani and Indian factions currently tearing apart the region of Kashmir.

In the meantime, we’ll take Vice’s new conscientious-citizens-of-the-world shtick with a grain of salt. Or, if they can spare it, a bump of blow.

Additional reporting by Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke

Illustration by Alex Bedder

These questions regard last night’s episode of HBO’s Girls. Please answer the prompts with specific examples from LAST NIGHT’S EPISODE, though supplementary material will be accepted as a secondary source. Please write legibly. No. 2 pencils only. You have an hour to finish this test. See below for questions and sample responses.

1. When Googling "Normal Tongue," what is your favorite hit? Please quote from the source text, and if there are images, definitely include them, because this is something I am actually wondering about now.

First off, can we talk about the other things that Hannah Googles? Why on earth would anyone who grew up using Google type questions that are complete sentences into the search box? Not a very efficient way of searching; this isn't Ask Jeeves. Sure, Hannah has some weird technological weirdnesses, but this seemed way off. It was the first of many scenes in this episode that rang completely false in that "this is something that is happening because it looks good on television but is actually stupid" kind of way, which is particularly dispiriting for a show that is often touted for how it reflects real life. Despite its impressionistic quality, then, "Normal Tongue" actually makes much more sense than her other queries.

From the first page of hits (results may vary): "Training in Beckman Oral Motor Protocol." Almost every other hit was about what a normal tongue color/size/coating is, which is likely what Hannah was searching for, but what self-respecting hypochondriac could resist the lure of "abnormal tongue patterns" like "Exaggerated tongue protrusion: The tongue shows extension (forward movement) beyond the border of the lips which is non-forceful. The movement is a rhythmical extension-retraction pattern. It is similar to a suckle pattern, but is mildly abnormal."

2. There are a lot of symptoms that are co-morbid with OCD, though being self-centered isn't one of them. This show did a great job tackling the frustration of people who find themselves in the uncomfortable situation of being manipulated by someone who might actually be ill, or might be playing up their illness to garner sympathy. If looked at on a spectrum (you tell me what kind), where do Laird, Hannah's father, Marnie and Adam lie in their sympathy to Hannah's obsessive-compulsive tendencies?

There seems to be an inverse relation between how much each character knows about what Hannah is going through and how much sympathy they have for her. It is not clear that Marnie has any idea how bad it is getting, but she appears in her doorway seemingly eager not to boast about her own newfound happiness but simply to pay it forward. Hannah's dad, on the other hand, has heard her cry poor wolf too many times; now that she is actually suffering a mental breakdown that money could alleviate, he is having none of it. Hannah may not actually be manipulating him now, but being that she is a manipulative person, it almost doesn't matter.

Yet again the massive gulf between Hannah's self-image and her actual self makes itself known: she manipulates Laird without even thinking, and even when he calls her on it, she continues (successfully) to do so. And perhaps the rousing music cue in the final scene wants us to believe that Adam is being heroic, but isn't Hannah just playing damsel in distress to a man who has clearly and repeatedly made his desire to be a hero known? "Accidentally" FaceTiming Adam and then openly displaying your tics is like waving catnip in front of a sabertooth tiger.

In the end, of course, this actually is about OCD, but in a very insidious way. OCD is all about control, and Hannah has lost hers. Her self-centeredness may not be an aspect of her illness, but her manipulation certainly is. She can't accept Marnie's help--she literally hides from it--because is was freely given, and thus not under her control: she didn't expect Marnie to show up, because she hadn't manipulated her into coming. But she can assume a position of surrender with both Laird and Adam, because they are acting out the roles she lays out for them. In the end, Adam is just an enabler to a very very sick person.

3. Second Louisa May Alcott reference this season. It's finally time to ask: Are we watching Little Women or Little Men, and why?

I have to go with Little Men. Both novels are about how individuals find their identity, through work and through others, which is what I think this season is getting at with these references. But Little Women concentrates on family, while Little Men is about the families we build for ourselves. The best moment of this episode is Hannah's phone message for Jessa, which really brings home just how important the social unit she has built for herself is to Hannah, even if she can't find a way to admit it and does her best to drive everyone else away.

Louisa's father Bronson was an advocate of teaching students to write from their own experience, and to learn about themselves through such literary self-analysis. And of course her close relationships with her friends from college is what Hannah's book is about, we see in the one line she has written. The suggestion is that she is beginning to understand her writer's block has everything to do with the disappearance of one best friend and near-estrangement from the other, which is certainly more compelling than procrastination and sloth, at least.

4. Let's get back to last week: Marnie's singing of Kanye West's "Stronger." It's been called "literally the worst thing that's ever happened on TV ever," and the idea of that she was spiraling down this year was confirmed by Marnie herself in this week's episode. But getting back together with Charlie (especially with that gross-cute little smile after he said that he had a lot of money) seems like backsliding. I liked where Marnie was going with that more free, less in control version of herself. If we return to Marnie Prime, is that really an improvement over putting herself out there and singing "You should be honored by my lateness/That I would even show up to this fake shit?"


The scene itself (until the gross and completely narratively unnecessary money comment) was touching, but it was all just so unearned. I mostly came away thinking, "Well, guess the writers decided that they had to stop brutalizing Marnie." If her spiral this season was some kind of punishment for her thoughtless behavior last season, or even if it was just a way to have her learn something about herself, this resolution was more than just backsliding, it was a complete about-face. I didn't like singing Marnie, I found her embarrassing and off-putting, but she was worlds better than smug Marnie.

On the other hand, as mentioned previously, Marnie doesn't seem to be calling on Hannah to be annoyingly happy all up in Hannah's face, which is certainly what she would have done last season. She seems legitimately concerned, and maybe even realizes that her own depression/desperation/self-exploration has left her friend somewhat high and dry. And if that is the case, maybe this won't be so bad.

Either way, though, it seemed like another example of the writers wanting to have things fall out a certain way, without much regard to character development, pacing, or a great deal of what went before. Why would Charlie take her back, especially now that she is making yet another public scene of idiocy? "Because he loves her" simply isn't a compelling reason at this late stage of the game. Also, dude is going to owe like hundreds of thousands of dollars via Avoid. Though I guess that just goes right back in his pocket, so whatever.

5. Several people in my apartment decided that this episode was disappointing, because it was "tied up too neatly, unnecessarily so." The one saving grace, said one participant, is that you know that their happiness can't last: they're too fickle and self-centered to actually have a happy ending. "They don't know who they are and what they don't want, and even if what they wanted was happening to them, they wouldn't even notice until it was too late."

So my question is: Should Girls ever be viewed through the beer goggles of St. Paddy's Day? Does this message ring true, and we just don't want to see these characters happy (except for Ray and Shoshanna, who end the season by breaking up)? Do we feel that they don't deserve happiness, and thus Marnie and Charlie and Adam and Hannah are only temporarily fixed? Have the scales fallen from our eyes regarding Girls, or is the show just subverting our expectations with a faux-happy ending?

Being a crotchety Jewish misanthrope who would rather perform oral surgery on himself than drink in public on St. Paddy's day, I am stone-cold sober at the moment. And I agree that the ending was disappointing and too neat. For me, in terms of character development, this had everything to do with these resolutions (as I noted about Marnie above) being unearned. This show has always centered on its characters' search for themselves, their creation of an identity for themselves, and these resolutions offer them too-easy ways out. Adam is running headfirst from a relationship that could almost be functional back into the arms of a completely screwed up one. Hannah is grasping at whatever straw she can find and pulling out all the stops to get him to take care of her. Why is this rousing music playing while he runs down the street in a fairly unnecessary fashion? There is nothing inspiring going on here, is there? And even Shosh and Ray's breakup seems unearned: she clearly has no idea why she doesn't want to date him anymore, so she makes up a cute speech instead.

It's not that I don't want these characters to be happy. Even though I don't particularly like them as people, I still want them to be happy. But as television characters, I want their arcs to be satisfying. I want them to earn their happiness, not have it imposed on them ham-handedly by writers trying to negotiate the fact that it is the end of a season and things need to come to some kind of a conclusion. I didn't appreciate the end of last season when it aired, but right now I'd be stoked if someone was just eating cake on a beach, instead of declaring their love over brunch or running sweatily through Greenpoint to kick down a door.

Lena Dunham at the Purim Ball.

Turns out there are at least two people in New York who don’t know who Lena Dunham is.

“Who was that girl with the two house tattoos on her back?” a couple of security guards asked the Transom as we walked into the Jewish Museum’s Purim Ball at the Park Avenue Armory last week. “The one everyone was making a big deal over?”

That, we informed our basic-cable-watching friends, was Ms. Dunham, the evening’s official Purimspieler and something of a main attraction. “Who?” they said again.

But she wasn’t the only gal with ink in the house. As we meandered alongside another tatted-up Jewess during the evening’s cocktail hour—which, like most of the event, had a distinct bar mitzvah-party feel—we overheard an old bearded dude getting a little judge-y: “Since when do Jews have tattoos?” he said.

But really, weren’t we all here to get along? From men in floral-print suits to at least one middle-aged vixen in an approximated Miss America costume, it was all kosher. Others in attendance had glitter tattoos, but we suspected those weren’t permanent.

When cocktail hour finally gave way to a seated dinner, the Transom found ourselves at a table of artists, most of whom were pals of Claudia Gould, the Jewish Museum’s director, although only some of them understood the holiday properly. So we explained, as rabbis have done for generations: Purim is that time of year when Brooklyn assemblymen learn the true meaning of racism.

To our left, Martha Rosler was very much in the Purim spirit. “Look at me,” she said, shaking her shoulders in some sort of seated dance, outfitted in a black-and-gold paisley blazer and Mardi Gras beads. “I’m wearing ridiculous things.”

On to dinner, and Ms. Dunham, as the Girls star/creator took center stage in front of the nearly 1,000 attendees, welcoming everyone to her bat mitzvah (we told you-—such was the vibe). As official Purimspieler, Ms. Dunham regaled us with the tale of Queen Esther and the Persians, all the while maintaining the speech patterns of Eloise, that children’s lit protagonist who lives on the “tippy-top” of the Plaza Hotel. “He picked Esther,” Ms. Dunham spieled, referring to the Persian king. “She was an orphan, which is pretty much the coolest thing you can be, like Pippi Longstocking or Drew Barrymore.”

With the story thus told, schmoozing took hold, and conversations naturally turned to Ms. Dunham’s breakout HBO show. Filmmaker Joe Lovett informed us he had just seen the first episode and that it was “very well done,” while some bleached blonde in a black dress had a harder time forming her opinion.

“I saw the first season and it was, like, really quite funny,” she said, “but, like, the second season? Like, I don’t know. I saw it.”

She then either stopped talking or our head exploded. It was now mercifully time to hit the dance floor. And it was just like they say in that old hip-hop ditty, which goes a little something like this:

“After Purim is the after party. After the party is (two hours of awkward middle school-grade grinding and groping just a hundred feet or so from) the Park Avenue Armory lobby.”

We just hope that, by the end of the night, someone became a man.

Alex Karpovsky at Red Flag screening. (Getty Images)

And his fans aren’t always those you might expect.

Just last week, the Transom was walking through Union Square with Mr. Karpovsky, en route to lunch, when an older man stopped the actor on the street. He just really wanted to say how much he liked the show. Mr. Karpovsky estimates that this happens "a couple times" a day.

And in case we didn’t believe him, cut to Lincoln Center last Friday night, where Mr. Karpovsky was playing host to a double screening of his two most recent directorial efforts and old Russian men made up a sizable chunk of the Karpovosky fan club.

Then again, it was all the way up at Lincoln Center, and the movies--which were picked up by Tribeca Films for distribution--had an earlier screening on Wednesday downtown. That one ended up making it into Page Six, if only to note that his two much more private male co-stars, Adam Driver and Christopher Abbott, were in attendance.

At Lincoln Center, Mr. Karpovsky held court over approximately 50 people, talking about the films, Red Flag and Rubberneck, both of which were made three years ago. In the former, Mr. Karpovsky plays himself as a kind of fatalistic Larry David/Woody Allen sad-sack shmuck on a cross-country roadtrip to promote his (real) faux-documentary, Woodpecker. (With us so far?) In the latter, a psychosexual thriller, he plays a creepy scientist who indulges an unhealthy obsession with a coworker after a one-night stand.

Surprised by Mr. Karpovsky’s output? Don’t be. In the time of B.G. ("Before Girls”), Mr. Karpovsky was a reasonably prolific filmmaker, with other movies like Trust Us, This Is All Made Up, The Whole Story and the aforementioned Woodpecker. He's acted in dozens more.

And if this is Mr. Karpovsky's big moment--his arrival on the scene, as it were--he's not going to let it fly by with false modesty. Though he doesn't read the oceans of commentary, nor the commentary on the commentary, about Girls that's practically inescapable if you read newspapers, magazines or the Internet, he does manage to find out what's being written about himself.

"I just have a Google alert for my name," he said. "Though it's quite porous."

With an inescapable cloud of Girls-fame hanging over him, Mr. Karpovsky did confess that fans often confuse him for Ray, as have recent interviewers. But the truth is that there’s less of Mr. Karpovsky in his most famous character than one may think. Ray is a Greek Orthodox orphan while Mr. Karpovsky comes from a Jewish family in Boston, where his father is a scientist. Ray is sour and prone to screaming matches over stuff like (literal) garbage while Mr. Karpovsky is harder to ruffle.

"They'll just use Ray and Alex interchangeably," he said, referring to journalists and Internet fans alike. "Sometimes I let it go. Other people will say 'That's the most Jewishy-Jewy motherfucker. How is he not Jewish?'" -Drew Grant

Lena Dunham.

Last spring, actor Billy Morrissette was guest starring on Girls and invited me to Steiner Studios in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to watch an episode of the show being filmed. The bad news didn’t come until the day of: due to “tension on set,” Mr. Morrissette had decided it was a bad idea to bring a guest.

And so, rather than meeting Lena Dunham myself, I had to make do with a second-degree connection, along with seemingly everyone else in New York. You see, touting one’s almost-connection to Girls, no matter how tenuous (or even imagined) is de rigueur these days for anyone under 30. Two months ago at a birthday party in Bushwick, for instance, one might have met over the course of the evening—as I did—a blogger whose cousin had been roommates with Ms. Dunham’s sister, a financial analyst from around the corner who remembered seeing Christopher Abbott, the actor who plays Charlie, working at Rockaway Taco and a jewelry designer whose best friend’s boyfriend (aka Mr. Morrissette) is played the boyfriend of Hannah’s ex-boyfriend-cum-gay roommate.

Not only are these almost-connections rampant, but New Yorkers also have a seemingly endless desire to talk about them. The only prompting a stranger usually needs to launch into a detailed description of his or her association with the cast, crew or catering of HBO’s hit show is: “Hi.”

Fame by association is so Hollywood, so what is it about Girls that causes normally celebrity-indifferent New Yorkers to desperately name-drop?

You might say it’s because the show is shot in New York, but so are a lot of shows nobody talks about. When was the last time someone asked you if you saw the latest Damages? Or mused over the dead bodies on Law & Order? Does anyone have a roommate whose sister guest starred on Gossip Girl? Probably. But I’ve never heard anyone talk about it. Louie shoots in New York and is often compared to Girls, since they are both shows whose star is also the producer, writer and director. And yet one rarely hears more about Louie than the requisite “I love it!”

One reason people may feel so comfortable talking about Girls is that many of us think it’s only by a cruel twist of fate—and a whole lot of nepotism—that Lena Dunham created the show and we did not. Knowing someone close to the show is further proof of how close we were/are/could be to having our names in the credits. “What I don’t get is why people act like being bitter toward her isn’t understandable. Why wouldn’t you be bitter toward someone who has everything you want when your life sucks?” said one man who wanted only to be identified as a New York comedian.

This confidence that we could have, should have and eventually would have done what Ms. Dunham did is a delusion, certainly, but it is also a result of the show’s incredibly personal nature. While Girls may be based on Ms. Dunham’s life, the stories are often so familiar that watching them feels like someone else is getting rich off our diary.

Upon seeing the episode where two characters make an ill-fated journey to Staten Island, for instance, Max Barbakow, a 23-year-old filmmaker, exclaimed, “Yeah, I already did that last week,” as though the show owed him money for the story line. Law & Order may be ripped from the headlines, but Girls is ripped from our heads.  

And yet, as much as we may feel that we are part of the story, we aren’t. We may identify with Ms. Dunham’s characters, we may even have a friend who has her email address, but most of us don’t know her and probably never will. It’s like looking at the Manhattan skyline from an apartment in Bushwick. You’re basically there, but out-of-towners still think you live in Jersey.

This not-quite-inclusion is why I can’t watch an episode without pointing out to anyone who will listen that that brownstone couldn’t possibly be in Greenpoint. It’s not that I really care whether Girls takes liberties with the geography of Brooklyn, I just need you to know that I know they’re doing it. We use our Girls connections and insider knowledge to assert ownership over a show that we secretly think we should have been paid for anyway.

Girls Also feels personal because there’s so much it gets right. When so many shows about city-dwelling post-collegiate adults miss the mark (see: CBS’s 2 Broke Girls and FOX’s New Girl), Ms. Dunham’s vehicle is at least a realistic representation of what it’s like to be young in New York in 2013, and that’s because the material is culled from real life.

Or so I’ve been told. (An acquaintance assured me that she had it on good authority that Ms. Dunham doesn’t like to drink, and this is why no one on the show is ever drunk and crying.)

But just as the urbanites of the ’90s didn’t know they hated low-talkers until Seinfeld told them so, we had no way to express how fun and simultaneously idiotic warehouse parties could be until Ms. Dunham nailed it in season one. Which perhaps explains why so many people feel let down by the show’s almost total lack of racial diversity. To see a show get your life so right but not see yourself represented would be maddening. As Ali Davis, a Fort Greene-dwelling fashion editor, told The Observer, “I know the show should have black people, because I’m black and I’m in that world.”

(Ms. Davis also confided that one of her classmates from journalism school used to live with series regular Audrey Gelman.)

Another reason people bring Girls into conversation is that it’s easy. Talking about the show has very few barriers to entry. You don’t have to like it, since disliking Girls is actually a respected contrarian position, whereas disliking Louie is not allowed and would never be admitted to.

One reporter I know, who lives on the Upper East Side, gave up on the show after the first season but still sends around a Facebook pictures of himself and Allison Williams from when they were in college together at Yale. He’d do fine in a Girls conversation, because the show’s plot points are only an entrée into discussion, and talking about Girls quickly turns into talking about racism, nepotism, body image, bad sex, good sex, degrading sex, sexy sex and sexism.

The bonus is that the show’s unflinching depiction of normal-looking people having sex means that a casual conversation about TV can quickly turn into a casual conversation about other people’s sex lives, which is the (usually unrealized) goal of all conversation.

The only time it’s really not a good idea to talk about Girls is when you’re with people who don’t live in New York, since there’s nothing like someone with no Girls almost-connections to make your Girls almost-connections look stupid. The problem is that they act like your experiences of watching the show are equal, as though you’re just a fan instead of someone whose roommate grew up with Audrey Gelman (true story!). Being just “a fan” would mean acknowledging that the relationship between ourselves and Girls is necessarily hierarchical. And while we may watch every episode and spend an inordinate amount of time defending it to strangers, we’re not fans of Girls. We’re more like friends, or at least friends of a friend.

Illustration by Kyle T. Webster.

A few weeks before the premiere of The Carrie Diaries on The CW, The Observer drove to Connecticut to meet the “real Carrie Bradshaw,” who now lives by herself on a small farm with two large poodles.

Candace Bushnell is not an easy woman to find. After several wrong turns on a chilly, overcast Tuesday, we found ourselves driving up a small dirt road in the middle of nowhere (technically, Roxbury, Conn.). A sharp right, and we were in the gravel driveway of what appeared to be a steeply pitched farmhouse. In a puffy blue parka, bomber hat yanked over her ears, the slight blond figure bounded down the steps of the barn, calling away her dogs and exhorting us to park somewhere else so she could get her car out. She seemed so unnerved by our arrival that we weren’t even sure she was the woman behind the cultural juggernaut Sex and the City.

“I’m one of those people who don’t get lonely,” Ms. Bushnell, 54, told The Observer later in the afternoon. “I like being alone. I write and I read. I’m not interrupted. Friends live nearby.” She’s taken up dressage riding at a nearby stable, which houses her German Warmblood, Mr. Winters.

There was a time when Ms. Bushnell more closely resembled her famed alter-ego. Raised in Connecticut, an hour away from her current home, she arrived in New York, arms open, after selling a children’s book to Simon & Schuster at age 19.

“I would literally go up to people and say, ‘I’m a writer. Can I write something for you?’” She remembered. “I wrote for this paper called Night Magazine, which was mainly just a bunch of pictures of people at Studio 54. I would do little interviews and profiles.”

Ms. Bushnell’s darkly satirical 'Sex and the City' columns, written for this newspaper when she was in her 30s and already established, read more like the savage humor of her friends Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis than those fictional musings of Ms. Bradshaw. Still, it was easy to confuse Carrie and Candace. They both had Mr. Bigs. They had friends named Miranda and Samantha. They were smart, savvy and knew everybody. If the ’90s in New York had to take on a single voice, Bushnell-as-Bradshaw was as good an option as any.

But at some point—around the time her show became a hit, it seems—the personalities split. Ms. Bushnell retreated. Asked if it was strange to see her creation become such a cultural touchstone, the writer shrugged. “I was traveling a lot when that happened,” she said vaguely.

Carrie Bradshaw, however, never left New York (except for that one time she went to the Middle East). Her legacy lives on in anyone who has ever smoked a cigarette in a Patricia Field knockoff and blogged about guys. Her apparition hovers over every “girlfriend brunch.” Her spirit possesses every college girl who still clutches onto her identity by declaring that she is “totally a Carrie!” (Or a Samantha, depending on the time of night.) She does not age, lose her New York celebrity status or suffer the effects of a recession and a media winter.

And thanks to Candace Bushnell and HBO, we can still fantasize about being Carrie Bradshaw, even when the real Carrie Bradshaw no longer does.

Despite leaving us with the taste of its terrible big-screen sequel film in our mouths, the SATC franchise fantasy is as strong as ever. Not only in The Carrie Diaries, a high school prequel which premieres next Monday on The CW, but in HBO’s show about four women—headed by a self-obsessed writer—trying to make it New York.

Before the first season of Girls had even premiered, creator/writer/producer/actress Lena Dunham was forced to answer for the show’s Sex and the City-ness. Despite the unending, indistinguishable line of quirky detectives who live on USA, and despite HBO/AMC/Showtime’s boundless well of misanthropic and misogynistic anti-heroes (Walter White, Rick Grimes, Tony Soprano, Dexter, Don Draper, etc., etc.), it was implausible—nay, impossible!—that there could be a second popular show about women, sex and urban life.

Rather than bristle, Ms. Dunham embraced the comparisons. As she told Laura Sullivan on All Things Considered, Girls owed a lot to the series, “not only because [Sex and the City] carved the space for women,” but because “the girls this show is about probably moved to New York three-quarters because they watched a Sex and the City marathon and thought, like, ‘I want me a piece of that.’”

Since similarities were inevitably drawn even before the cameras rolled, Girls set about in its premiere episode to prove that it existed in a post-Bradshaw world. In the pilot, flaky NYU student Shoshanna Shapiro was exactly the kind of young woman Ms. Dunham had described; a SATC obsessive whose dorm room was plastered with posters for the film Sex and the City ... arguably the furthest, most consumer-warped product to come from the original Bushnell series.

With that wincingly painful lack of self-awareness that would go on to define the show’s unique tone, Shoshanna described her cousin as “a Carrie, but with some Samantha aspects and Charlotte hair. That’s like, a really good combination.” She continued, oblivious to her cousin’s (and the audience’s) dismay, “I think I’m definitely a Carrie at heart, but sometimes? Sometimes my Samantha side comes out. And then when I’m at school, I definitely try to put on my Miranda hat.”

Girls wasn’t about to mock Sex and the City—the way 30 Rock once did, with Liz Lemon telling four lookalikes, “SHUT UP! That’s horrible!”—but it wasn’t above savaging the very-real stereotype of women who still walk around trying to find their identities in four characters who haven’t been on television for almost a decade.

So why are the women of Sex and the City so ingrained in the city’s cultural subconscious and stamped indelibly on its soul?

Maybe it’s an age thing. Sex and the City certainly did provide role models for young women who grew up believing that becoming a glamorous, famous writer was as easy as moving to New York and finding three friends with different hair colors. Just as plucky Mary Tyler Moore did generations before, Sex and the City proved that we all were “gonna make it after all.”

The Daily Beast’s Rebecca Dana began her career by following in Ms. Bushnell’s footsteps, becoming a society writer for The Observer directly out of college. More than once, she wrote about her mixed feelings toward the franchise.

I started watching the series as a wide-eyed Pittsburgh teenager and was quickly seduced by the whole fantasy. Carrie Bradshaw became a totem in my life, a lure to the city so powerful that I’m now embarrassed to think about it.

After growing up on a diet of SATC, is it any wonder that young women like Ms. Dana and Ms. Dunham are still reflecting and refracting a cultural zeitgeist that no longer exists?

Because there are no two ways about it: the New York of Carrie Bradshaw and the gang is gone. It was pre-recession programming, and the signs of excess wealth—the shoes, the clothes, the endless parties, cabs and brunches—were everywhere. Even if out of our immediate grasp, that lifestyle seemed within reach. Somehow, we were convinced that a woman working off of Carrie Bradshaw’s salary as a columnist (as she started out) would be able to stock a closet with Manolos in her Manhattan apartment.

But today? Forget about it. It’s impossible to give voice to your secret Carrie aspirations—or, even worse, socialite Charlotte—without immediately feeling like kind of an asshole.

With the second season of Girls premiering one day before The Carrie Diaries, it’s doubtful anyone is still comparing the dark, unredemptive, messy tone of Ms. Dunham’s creation to the chirpy, pun-obsessed world of Sex and the City. As Peter Stevenson, who edited “Sex and the City” at The Observer, told us, “Girls makes SATC look like Downton Abbey.” It was as much an iconic snapshot of New York in the ’90s as Bonfire of the Vanities and Wall Street were of the ’80s.

And that’s how we arrive at The Carrie Diaries. Stuck in its era and unable to move forward without drastically changing its protagonist’s lifestyle, the SATC franchise had to rewind. The show, based on Bushnell’s 2010 book, takes place before Bradshaw ever moved to the city and scavenges the picked-over bones of ’80s nostalgia to bring us the story of Carrie’s formative years.

The “origin story” idea doesn’t really work. The show so clumsily belabors its ’80s milieu that episodes have more pop-culture references than a VH1 flashback. (Space Invaders! Madonna! Interview magazine!) And woof, the early-Bradshaw metaphors: “It’s then that I had the realization that I had just lost my innocence, my virginity. And not to the guy I had hoped, but a different man. Manhattan.”

It’s not a bad show—its premiere showed promising chemistry, and AnnaSophia Robb does a serviceable pre-Sex-Bradshaw. But maybe actress Freema Agyeman, who spoke on the red carpet during the New York Television Festival, said it best: “The best part is the fun costumes!”

“I know some people think it’s a cynical move,” showrunner Amy B. Harris told The Observer by phone. “‘Oh it’s a franchise, you’re just trying to wring some more money out if it.’ But this is a time of my life I feel so strongly about, it was my life. My hope is that women will want to go back to their experience.”
Ms. Harris recognized the irony of The Carrie Diaries now competing with a show like Girls for an audience. “Lena told me Girls wouldn’t exist without SATC,” she said. “I’m totally prepared for the comparison, but I would be lying to say it wasn’t a concern. I hope people will stay with [The Carrie Diaries] because they feel like its their own.”

Ms. Bushnell herself might not be among them. “I really relate to Girls,” she told us. “I feel like it’s what my 20s were like.”

A common theme in The Carrie Diaries and Summer and the City (Ms. Bushnell’s sequel-to-the-prequel novel) as well as the author’s own self-narrative is the conviction that one could come to New York and make it as a famous writer. Not out of sheer willpower or hard work, but because of destiny.

“I do think there’s something in people’s DNA,” Ms. Bushnell pondered while we made some coffee and settled in. “The decision to leave your small town and leave your city, that’s a certain type of person.”

By way of explanation, Ms. Bushnell asked us to consider the lowly ant: most of them, she said, lived and worked in the colony. “But the colony would die if there weren’t ants that ventured outside their little box,” she said. “The human population would either die or be living in a dark age if some people—the right ones—didn’t move to big metropolitan areas and bring us all culture.”

This is not the story, of course, provided in the TV show The Carrie Diaries. If anything, that “certain type of person” that Ms. Bushnell described was Lena Dunham’s stubborn Hannah Horvath, who moves to Brooklyn from Michigan and founders in underemployment. Much like Ms. Bushnell, Hannah has minimally tried her hands in other types of work, but is convinced that her path is that of a writer. Specifically, one who only writes about her own life. She’s “a voice! Of a generation!”

Too bad Carrie Bradshaw has already claimed the title as the voice of every generation. About as far away from a banquette at Moomba as one can get, Ms. Bushnell acknowledged the grip her creation still holds on American culture. “Of course they’re saying Girls is like Sex and the City,” she said dryly. “It’s a TV show involving women.”

Together at last. (Getty Images)

Hoping to ride the cash cow of Game Change, the mini-series adaptation of the Mark Halperin and John Heilemann book that proved an Emmy-sweeper, HBO decided to pay Martin Scorsese a bunch of cash to make a documentary about the world's most charismatic politician, Bill Clinton.

According to the press release from today:

 HBO and Martin Scorsese will partner for a documentary spotlighting William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd President of the United States, it was announced today by Richard Plepler, recently named CEO, HBO and Michael Lombardo, president, HBO Programming. Made with Clinton’s full cooperation, the film will explore his perspectives on history, politics, culture and the world, with Scorsese producing and directing, and Steve Bing producing.

“President Clinton is one of the most compelling figures of our time, whose world view and perspective, combined with his uncommon intelligence, make him a singular voice on the world stage,” said Plepler and Lombardo. “This documentary, under Marty’s gifted direction, creates a unique opportunity for the President to reflect on myriad issues that have consumed his attention and passion throughout both his Presidency and post-Presidency.”

“A towering figure who remains a major voice in world issues, President Clinton continues to shape the political dialogue both here and around the world,” observed Scorsese. “Through intimate conversations, I hope to provide greater insight into this transcendent figure.”

“I am pleased that legendary director Martin Scorsese and HBO have agreed to do this film,” said President Clinton. “I look forward to sharing my perspective on my years as President, and my work in the years since, with HBO's audience.”

The Clinton documentary marks Martin Scorsese’s fourth collaboration with HBO, following the documentaries “Public Speaking” (2010) and the Emmy^®-winning “George Harrison: Living in the Material World” (2011), and the hit series “Boardwalk Empire,” for which he serves as an executive producer, as well as winning an Emmy^® for directing last year.

This looks hopeful, though great directors and great politicians don't always make for a fascinating--or even successfully propagandist--piece of art. After all, raise your hand if you've ever seen that mini-doc Spike Jonze did about Al Gore during his 2000 presidential run. Okay, now keep your hands raised if you made it through all 13 minutes of it.

Case closed, your honor. Though on the other hand, this would be a great opportunity for Scorsese to pick out some Rolling Stones tracks that feature Bobby Keys. May we suggest "Happy"?

http://youtu.be/53ZWIIn67ek

Golden Globe nom-toppers. (Various)

Not too many surprises this year in the nominations, announced today, for the 2013 Golden Globe Awards. This year, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler will be making history as the first female duo to host the ceremony, held on Jan. 13., but other than that, it's all Lincoln (seven nominations), Argo (five) and Django Unchained (ditto).

In television, we're looking at dramas like Game Change (five), Homeland (four, including one for "The Bear" Patinkin), Downton Abbey and, yikes ... how did The Newsroom (two) manage to get on there? That's more nominations than Mad Men (one) received! Comedies remained from last year: Girls, 30 Rock and Modern Family topped the chart. HBO shot to the top of the chart with 17 nominations total, and in a distant second place came Showtime, with seven.

Read the full list below:

Best Motion Picture, Drama

Argo
Django Unchained
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Zero Dark Thirty

Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Les Misérables
Moonrise Kingdom
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Silver Linings Playbook

Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama

Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
Richard Gere, Arbitrage
John Hawkes, The Sessions
Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
Denzel Washington, Flight

Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy

Jack Black, Bernie
Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook
Hugh Jackman, Les Misérables
Ewan McGregor, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Bill Murray, Hyde Park on the Hudson

Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama

Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
Marion Cotillard, Rust and Bone
Helen Mirren, Hitchcock
Naomi Watts, The Impossible
Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea

Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy

Emily Blunt, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Judi Dench, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Maggie Smith, Quartet
Meryl Streep, Hope Springs

Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture

Alan Arkin, Argo
Leonardo DiCaprio, Django Unchained
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained

Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture

Amy Adams, The Master
Sally Field, Lincoln
Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables
Helen Hunt, The Sessions
Nicole Kidman, The Paperboy

Best Director

Ben Affleck, Argo
Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty
Ang Lee, Life of Pi
Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained

Best Screenplay, Motion Picture

Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty
Tony Kushner, Lincoln
David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
Quentin Taratino, Django Unchained
Chris Terrio, Argo

Find out which star's daughter is Miss Golden Globe

Best Foreign Language Film

Amour (Austria)
A Royal Affair (Denmark)
The Intouchables (France
Kon-Tiki (Norway)
Rust and Bone  (France)

Best Animated Feature Film

Brave
Frankenweenie
Hotel Transylvania
Rise of the Guardians
Wreck-It Ralph

Best Original Song, Motion Picture

"For You," Act of Valor, Monty Powell & Keith Urban
"Not Running Anymore," Stand Up Guys, Jon Bon Jovi
"Safe and Sound," The Hunger Games, Taylor Swift. John Paul White, Joy Williams & T Bone Burnett
"Skyfall," Skyfall, Adele & Paul Epworth
"Suddenly," Les Misérables, Claude-Michel Schonberg & Alain Boublil

Best Original Score, Motion Picture

Mychael Danna, Life of Pi
Alexandre Desplat, Argo
Dario Marianelli, Anna Karenina
Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, Reinhold Heil, Cloud Atlas
John Williams, Lincoln

Best TV Movie or Miniseries

Game Change
The Girl
Hatfields & McCoys
The Hour
Political Animals

Best TV Series, Drama

Boardwalk Empire
Breaking Bad
Downton Abbey
Homeland
The Newsroom

Best TV Series, Comedy

The Big Bang Theory
Episodes
Girls
Modern Family
Smash

Best Actor in a TV Series, Drama

Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire
Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad
Jeff Daniels, The Newsroom
Jon Hamm, Mad Men
Damian Lewis, Homeland

Best Actor, TV Series Comedy

Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock
Don Cheadle, House of Lies
Louis CK, Louie
Matt LeBlanc, Episodes
Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory

Best Actress in a TV Series, Drama

Connie Britton, Nashville
Glenn Close, Damages
Claire Danes, Homeland
Michelle Dockery, Downton Abbey
Julianna Marguiles, The Good Wife

Best Actress in a TV Series, Comedy

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

Best Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie

Kevin Costner, Hatfields & McCoys
Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock
Woody Harrelson, Game Change
Toby Jones, The Girl
Clive Owen, Hemingway & Gellhorn

Best Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie

Julianne Moore, Game Change
Nicole Kidman, Hemingway & Gellhorn
Jessica Lange, American Horror Story: Asylum
Sienna Miller, The Girl
Sigourney Weaver, Political Animals

Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Mini-Series or TV Movie

Max Greenfield, New Girl
Ed Harris, Game Change
Danny Huston, Magic City
Mandy Patinkin, Homeland
Eric Stonestreet, Modern Family

Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Miniseries, or TV Movie

Hayden Panettiere, Nashville
Archie Panjabi, The Good Wife
Sarah Paulson, Game Change
Maggie Smith, Downton Abbey
Sofia Vergara, Modern Family

Cecile B. DeMille Award

Jodie Foster