Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 50

Hulu’s Bid to Replace Cable

Until recently, the news of cable television’s death has been mostly exaggerated: Though “cord-cutting” is on the rise and subscription numbers have declined, the change has been gradual enough to not cut too deeply into profit margins. That may change in 2017, however, with the news that Hulu will offer more than 35 live TV networks to subscribers in the New Year for an as-yet undetermined price. With this kind of “bundling,” where various popular channels are sold as a package, streaming TV is starting to more closely resemble the very thing it was meant to replace.

Hulu isn’t the only online streaming service that will offer live TV to subscribers next year. There’s already Sling TV, which offers bundles raging from $20 to $40 a month for up to 50 channels. AT&T’s DirecTV Now, due to launch this month, will debut at $35 a month for more than 100 channels. Hulu’s new TV deal figures to be somewhere around that price point, but like both Sling TV and DirecTV, it won’t offer all of the four major broadcast networks, but rather a hodgepodge that subscribers will have to spend more money on to try and supplement with other services. For cord-cutters who are already living without broadcast television, the question is whether it will be enticing enough.

Hulu’s new deal, struck with Disney and Fox, will allow the company to offer ABC, Fox, the various ESPN channels, FX, and the Fox Sports bundle for “dozens” of national markets. Hulu also has Turner on board, which includes TNT, TBS, Cartoon Network, and Turner Classic Movies. As with Sling TV and other online subscription services, the channels on offer will vary from place to place because of complex affiliate deals. This is, of course, the advantage cable companies offer—though their vast channel lists come at a much heftier price.

The appeal of these services is supposedly that they’ll allow customers to pick and choose what they want to watch, rather than submit to the thousands of networks cable companies throw at them (and pay the rental fees for DVRs and cable boxes). The reality is beginning to look somewhat different—to bring costs down, companies like Hulu have to resort to packaging a bunch of channels together, some valuable, some less so. If there’s a show on CBS that you want to watch, you’re out of luck—the network has held out on bigger deals and will instead try to draw viewers to its “CBS All Access” app ($6 a month) with upcoming shows like Star Trek Discovery and a spinoff of The Good Wife.

Amid all this, other streaming networks like Netflix will continue to throw original content at audiences—it’s planning on 1,000 new hours of original TV in 2017—requiring viewers to pay its $10 a month subscription fee in order to find out what happens in Stranger Things season two. Suddenly, the cost of all these services (don’t forget HBO Now at $15 a month) bundled together feels less economical. As a result, cable companies are hoping the growing financial burden and customer annoyance as the channels on offer splinter between various streaming networks will be enough to keep them from cord-cutting.

Perhaps cord-cutters will come back to cable, but loyalty to companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast seems unlikely, as their subscriber numbers keep dwindling. A new model for many broadcast shows, from network sitcoms like New Girl to acclaimed cable hits like Halt and Catch Fire, is that an entire season will hit Netflix the day before the next season premieres, and for many viewers, that’s just fine. As “Peak TV” reaches new heights, staying totally up to date with shows feels less important—everyone might be at a different point in their binge-watching, and thus water-cooler conversations about what happened on TV last night feel less relevant.

The future, as Todd VanDerWerff wrote at Vox last month, may be total inertia. Whether “cable TV” survives in its current form is almost moot—a subscriber-based model, with bundled channels, is likely going to be the most profitable and easiest to deliver, no matter who’s delivering it. It might be Comcast or it might be Hulu, and the next few years will offer answers to some of those questions. But the way we watch TV has already fundamentally changed—cable companies are just now starting to catch up with it.

The Stickiest Hit of 2016 Is Appropriately Depressed

In a recent post at Psychology Today, the author William Poundstone mentioned the Chainsmokers song “Closer” when illustrating research indicating that people stop listening to new music around age 33. Poundstone’s point was that a big swath of the American population may be completely unfamiliar with the song that’s No. 1 in the country—and, as of its now-11th week at the top of the charts, the longest-running No. 1 song of 2016 (placing it among the longest-running No. 1 songs of all time).

Of all the songs that might be used to illustrate an age gap, “Closer” is a particularly good one. That’s partly because it’s about aging—or rather, not aging, with the chorus insisting “we ain’t ever getting older” as the singers describe melancholically shacking up with a down-and-out ex of four years prior. Another reason is that “Closer” is a smartly crafted artifact of its time, totally suited to 2016 pop—which, in turn, has lately quite suited the drained and pissy national mood.

The Chainsmokers are the DJs Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall, who broke through with the 2014 novelty single “#SELFIE,” a jackhammering EDM ode to smartphone narcissism. They’ve since transitioned to more “serious” material with successful singles including “Roses” and “Don’t Let Me Down,” both of which like “Closer” are wistful mid-tempo dance tracks anchored by an up-and-coming female vocalist. In the process, Taggert and Pall have transcended the facelessness that sometimes afflicts EDM producers by giving colorful/reprehensible interviews such as one with Billboard, which features the quote, “We’re just frat bro dudes, you know what I mean? Loving ladies and stuff.”

“Closer,” released in July, is a vocal duet between Taggart and the singer Halsey, whose song “New Americana” felt lab-designed to conquer Instagram captions by swiping Lana Del Rey’s sound while rhyming “Nirvana” with “legal marijuana.” Taggart and the other writers of “Closer” have taken cues from that song with regards to the power of multisyllabic couplets about rock bands that remind millennials of middle school, pairing “Blink-182 song” with “Tucson” for the most memorable line of “Closer.” They’ve also picked piano chords reminiscent of Justin Bieber’s “Where Are Ü Now” and lifted a hook from The Fray’s 2005 smash “Over My Head (Cable Car),” resulting in a sound on-trend with the blasé, last-call-at-the-club vibe of the year in pop from Drake to Zayn to Rihanna. Most distinctive about “Closer” might be its structure, which pivots from misty emotional reveries to passages of clear, specific storytelling from opposite points of view.

The year has been defined by songs about trying to hold on to vitality in the face of draggy capitalist realities.

The song’s quick scramble to the No. 1 spot in late summer triggered smart analysis from the likes of Slate, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. The uninitiated might want to start with the Switched on Pop podcast, where the songwriter Charlie Harding and the musicologist Nate Sloan dissect how “Closer” uses a nursery-rhyme-like melody and production that mimics the time-telescoping narrative of the lyrics. They also address perhaps the most important gimmick in recent hitmaking: the so-called “pop drop,” where in addition to a singalong chorus there’s a recurring section of rhythmic excitement and distorted vocals delivering a wordless earworm.

It’s easy to be cynical about a song as precisely on-trend as this one, especially when its creators go around talking about how they’re obsessed with their own “metrics.” But there’s no denying that the song’s meaning—a momentary pleasure can be bittersweet in its reminder of mortality—is authentically connecting with listeners. Which says something, given how subtly spiteful the lyrics are: The only real distinguishing feature of the girl Taggart’s singing about, supposedly inspired by actual exes of the band members’, is that she can afford neither car nor tattoo nor mattress. They’re hooking up for the temporary escape, and he seems a bit embarrassed by it.

Even in this focus, the song fits its time. The year has been defined in large part by songs that share the Chainsmokers’ message of trying to hold on to vitality in the face of draggy capitalist realities, whether those realities are the unpaid-for items of this song or the 9-to-5 grind looming behind Sia’s “Cheap Thrills” or Twenty One Pilots’ “Stressed Out” or the two big “Work” hits of 2016. Weariness is the hottest commodity in new pop—maybe the over-33 crowd should tune in after all.

The Stickiest Hit of 2016 Is Appropriately Weary

In a recent post at Psychology Today, the author William Poundstone mentioned the Chainsmokers song “Closer” when illustrating research indicating that people stop listening to new music around age 33. Poundstone’s point was that a big swath of the American population may be completely unfamiliar with the song that’s No. 1 in the country—and, as of its now-11th week at the top of the charts, the longest-running No. 1 song of 2016 (placing it among the longest-running No. 1 songs of all time).

Of all the songs that might be used to illustrate an age gap, “Closer” is a particularly good one. That’s partly because it’s about aging—or rather, not aging, with the chorus insisting “we ain’t ever getting older” as the singers describe melancholically shacking up with a down-and-out ex of four years prior. Another reason is that “Closer” is a smartly crafted artifact of its time, totally suited to 2016 pop—which, in turn, has lately quite suited the drained and pissy national mood.

The Chainsmokers are the DJs Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall, who broke through with the 2014 novelty single “#SELFIE,” a jackhammering EDM ode to smartphone narcissism. They’ve since transitioned to more “serious” material with successful singles including “Roses” and “Don’t Let Me Down,” both of which like “Closer” are wistful mid-tempo dance tracks anchored by an up-and-coming female vocalist. In the process, Taggert and Pall have transcended the facelessness that sometimes afflicts EDM producers by giving colorful/reprehensible interviews such as one with Billboard, which features the quote, “We’re just frat bro dudes, you know what I mean? Loving ladies and stuff.”

“Closer,” released in July, is a vocal duet between Taggart and the singer Halsey, whose song “New Americana” felt lab-designed to conquer Instagram captions by swiping Lana Del Rey’s sound while rhyming “Nirvana” with “legal marijuana.” Taggart and the other writers of “Closer” have taken cues from that song with regards to the power of multisyllabic couplets about rock bands that remind millennials of middle school, pairing “Blink-182 song” with “Tucson” for the most memorable line of “Closer.” They’ve also picked piano chords reminiscent of Justin Bieber’s “Where Are Ü Now” and lifted a hook from The Fray’s 2005 smash “Over My Head (Cable Car),” resulting in a sound on-trend with the blasé, last-call-at-the-club vibe of the year in pop from Drake to Zayn to Rihanna. Most distinctive about “Closer” might be its structure, which pivots from misty emotional reveries to passages of clear, specific storytelling from opposite points of view.

The year has been defined by songs about trying to hold on to vitality in the face of draggy capitalist realities.

The song’s quick scramble to the No. 1 spot in late summer triggered smart analysis from the likes of Slate, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. The uninitiated might want to start with the Switched on Pop podcast, where the songwriter Charlie Harding and the musicologist Nate Sloan dissect how “Closer” uses a nursery-rhyme-like melody and production that mimics the time-telescoping narrative of the lyrics. They also address perhaps the most important gimmick in recent hitmaking: the so-called “pop drop,” where in addition to a singalong chorus there’s a recurring section of rhythmic excitement and distorted vocals delivering a wordless earworm.

It’s easy to be cynical about a song as precisely on-trend as this one, especially when its creators go around talking about how they’re obsessed with their own “metrics.” But there’s no denying that the song’s meaning—a momentary pleasure can be bittersweet in its reminder of mortality—is authentically connecting with listeners. Which says something, given how subtly spiteful the lyrics are: The only real distinguishing feature of the girl Taggart’s singing about, supposedly inspired by actual exes of the band members’, is that she can afford neither car nor tattoo nor mattress. They’re hooking up for the temporary escape, and he seems a bit embarrassed by it.

Even in this focus, the song fits its time. The year has been defined in large part by songs that share the Chainsmokers’ message of trying to hold on to vitality in the face of draggy capitalist realities, whether those realities are the unpaid-for items of this song or the 9-to-5 grind looming behind Sia’s “Cheap Thrills” or Twenty One Pilots’ “Stressed Out” or the two big “Work” hits of 2016. Weariness is the hottest commodity in new pop—maybe the over-33 crowd should tune in after all.

Politics, on Your Starbucks Cup

The first thing you should know is that it’s not red. Not at all—there’s not a crimson bow or background in sight.

The next thing you should know, though, is that the new Starbucks cup—the thing unveiled this time each year, traditionally as a be-cardboarded invocation of The Holiday Season—has nothing explicitly festive about it. This cup, contra previous years’ worth of Starbucks seasonal cuppery, features no ornaments. It depicts neither reindeer nor snowflakes nor snowmen nor softly aggressive exhortations to “pass the cheer.” There’s simply a lacily intricate line drawing of people, set against a backdrop of green—and against a backdrop of white, where the Starbucks logo would traditionally be.

Starbucks just put, essentially, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on its coffee cups.

The most striking thing about the cup isn’t its Where’s Waldo-y intricacy, nor even its explicit lack of corporate branding. Instead, it’s Starbucks’s explanation for the design of the cup—one that is explicitly, and self-assuredly, and actually just a little bit shockingly, political.

As the company explains it in its press release:

A single line connects the figures. A coffee farmer, a family, a barista, friends embracing. A mosaic of more than a hundred people drawn in one continuous stroke is featured on a new Starbucks green cup.

The new green cup is available exclusively in U.S. Starbucks stores starting today (November 1), for a limited time while supplies last…

Starbucks commissioned artist Shogo Ota to create the artwork. His threaded design represents shared humanity and connection, serving as a symbol for stitching people together as a united community.

And here’s how Starbucks’s chairman and CEO, Howard Schultz, explains it: “The green cup and the design represent the connections Starbucks has as a community with its partners (employees) and customers,” he said. “During a divisive time in our country, Starbucks wanted to create a symbol of unity as a reminder of our shared values, and the need to be good to each other.”

Related Story

The Inanity of the Starbucks Christmas Cup ‘Controversy’

During a divisive time. Gone are November 1’s traditional cheery deer, and the jaunty snowflakes, and the apolitical (if still, yes, occasionally divisive) ornaments of years and seasons past. Here, now, is a Starbucks seasonal cup decorated with … civics. The worldwide conglomerate—the company that sells “third spaces” as well as cups of coffee, and culture as well as caffeine—just put, essentially, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on its cups. It brought politics into the holiday season—in the guise, of course, of transcending politics during this holiday season.

In some sense, certainly, that’s unsurprising. Starbucks has had a long—and, it should be said, awkward—history with political engagement. Schultz himself has been extremely vocal about political contests (he has called the campaign “a circus” and, also, publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton). He has angered gun-rights advocates when he asked guests not to bring firearms into Starbucks stores. And remember last year’s “Race Together” initiative, in which the company encouraged its baristas to discuss race relations with customers?

So here, in our hot little hands, is the logical outcome of all that: Even the holiday season, the thing that prides itself on eschewing differences in the name of “good cheer,” has been made explicitly political. (At least for a little while: There’s a rumor, based on a reddit leak, that more traditional red cups, complete with etched holly, will be issued right after the election.) For now, though, Starbucks has taken the logic of Chipotle’s cups and bags—the notion that cardboard can be a canvas for cultural conversation—and extended it to politics. The company, in the name of transcendence, printed the “divisive time in our country” right onto the vessels that millions of Americans, every day, carry on their person. It brought politics into its third space. Togetherness is a hard idea to argue with; still, it’s hard to think of a move, in the end, more opposed to “passing the cheer.”

What Happens If Republicans Refuse to Replace Justice Scalia?

What’s the opposite of Court-packing? It’s one of those linguistic holes that no one knew existed until the last week. Now it’s time for the wordsmiths to get to work.

The Supreme Court is already short-staffed, ever since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February. A month later, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland, the chief judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, to succeed him. And that’s about where things have sat ever since. Republicans in the Senate have declined to even hold hearings on Garland’s nomination, much less a vote, arguing that voters deserve a chance to weigh in. (Democrats like to point out that voters elected Obama in 2012 for a term that is still ongoing.)

For months, the debate centered on what would happen if presidential favorite Hillary Clinton won. Would Senate Republicans decide to move on the Garland nomination during the post-election lame-duck session? If not, would Clinton honor Obama’s selection, or would she ask Garland to withdraw and nominate her own (presumably younger, possibly more clearly liberal) choice?

Now the debate has shifted, as several Republican senators have suggested simply not allowing any Democratic selections to the Supreme Court at all. Late on Monday, CNN reported on private remarks made by Senator Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican up for reelection. He said that there will be no lame-duck confirmation, and then added, “And if Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court.”

That aligns him with Senator Ted Cruz, who last week told Dave Weigel, “There is certainly long historical precedent for a Supreme Court with fewer justices. I would note, just recently, that Justice Breyer observed that the vacancy is not impacting the ability of the court to do its job. That’s a debate that we are going to have.”

A week before that, Senator John McCain, who is also running for reelection, said, “I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up.” Later, however, a spokeswoman partially walked back his comments, saying the Arizonan will “thoroughly examine the record of any Supreme Court nominee put before the Senate and vote for or against that individual based on their qualifications as he has done throughout his career.”

There’s some support for the argument among conservative intellectuals too. Ilya Shapiro argues in The Federalist that the Senate should block any Clinton nominees, saying the Constitution allows it. Michael Stokes Paulsen writes in National Review that the Court should be reduced from nine to six justices. While he supports a legal change in the future, Paulsen says attrition by refusing to confirm would be a good way to get down to six.

Shapiro is correct legally—there’s no explicit, affirmative obligation to confirm. But refusing to confirm is deeply anti-conservative, in the small-c sense of following norms and customs. Meanwhile, the effects of a smaller court are already on display. Because the court now has an even number of members, it can lock in a tie, in which case the lower court ruling is affirmed. This has already happened in a case involving President Obama’s attempt to protect some undocumented immigrants from deportation.

One nightmare scenario circulating among politicos with dark sense of humors imagines that the presidential election could end in a 269-269 electoral-vote tie. A deadlocked Supreme Court, split along ideological lines, would also tie 4-4, leaving the election in dispute, with no clear resolution.

Even without that, ties would rework the shape of the justice system. “As at present, ties would yield no precedent but merely affirm lower courts’ rulings, with more limited effect,” Paulsen writes. “Fewer justices thus means less judicial activism, at least at the Supreme Court level.” Yet that would do nothing to limit judicial activism at the lower-court level. Because the Supreme Court couldn’t set precedent, different circuits could end up with radically different precedents, further balkanizing an already geographically polarized country.

The unstated implication of Cruz and Burr’s argument is that Democratic presidents—whether Obama or a hypothetical Clinton—are less legitimate than Republican presidents, who should be allowed to make appointments on the Supreme Court. The essential motivation is still just the same—ideological disagreement—but there is no longer any pretense of respecting the other party’s mandate. It’s the logical end of the increasing politicization of the court-nomination process.

For a time, confirmation was largely pro-forma, before gradually becoming more political, with Democrats maneuvering to torpedo Robert Bork’s nomination to the court in 1987. Then came filibusters—including the unsuccessful one of now-Justice Samuel Alito that Obama joined. Both sides now hold that voting against nominees on partisan grounds of nominees’ views is legitimate. Simply refusing to even consider nominees, regardless of qualifications, is both a clear step beyond that but also an obvious evolution of it.

In addition to the potential for ties, one other major problem with this drift in Court politics is the precedent it sets. No Democratic president would be able to appoint any nominee as long as she or he did not have a Democratic Senate. (Democrats are already discussing eliminating the filibuster if they win the Senate, and Republicans have talked about doing the same.)

Once such a precedent was in place, a Democratic Senate would surely refuse to confirm any Republican presidents’ nominees if at all possible. Consequently, American government would only function when a single party had complete control—control of the Senate and the White House, and then by virtue of those, control of the Supreme Court, since a president of either party would almost certainly choose to appoint a full compliment of justices if possible. The United States could end up ungovernable except under one-party rule.

Max Richter’s Soundtrack to Dystopia

Music, Alfred Hitchcock once said, “makes it possible to express the unspoken” in film—to hint at underlying turmoil or approaching darkness. No contemporary composer expresses the same complexity of emotion onscreen as Max Richter, whose work pervades modern culture, from film to television to dance to theater. On The Leftovers, the HBO show about the sudden and incomprehensible disappearance of 2 percent of the world’s population, it’s Richter’s theme that expresses the world’s subsequent state of nihilism and despair. “On the Nature of Daylight,” a composition from his 2004 album The Blue Notebooks, pops up in countless scenes and soundtracks, notably in a pivotal moment in Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming sci-fi film Arrival. Richter also wrote the score for the 2016 film Morgan, a sci-fi horror film about a human hybrid gone wrong.

His newest work accompanies the first episode of the new season of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker’s speculative series about a world transformed by technology. In “Nosedive,” directed by Joe Wright (Atonement) and starring Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World), a woman lives in a reality where every interaction, no matter how tiny, is rated, and people gain status in society based on their scores as human beings. Throughout the episode, the score creates a sense of gorgeous disconnect: a signal for viewers that beneath the sunny perfection of the world of “Nosedive” is something deeply troubling.

Although Richter’s work rewards focused attention, his most recent album was intended for subconscious rather than conscious listening. 2015’s Sleep is an eight-hour record created with the help of a neuroscientist to accompany a full night of rest—a comment both on the scattered nature of modern attention spans and the power of slow art. Some of his upcoming projects include the Jessica Chastain movie Miss Sloane, season three of The Leftovers, a show called Taboo for the BBC starring Tom Hardy, and a new ballet for the Netherlands Dance Theater. He spoke with me by phone; the interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Sophie Gilbert: What was the process of creating the score for “Nosedive,” and what appealed to you about the project?

Max Richter: First, Joe [Wright] and I talked about the general themes of the script. He and I had been wanting to work together for a time and this opportunity came along. Black Mirror obviously has its own universe, with a very strong fingerprint and strong themes, and I was intrigued on reading. It’s such a powerful piece of storytelling. And it’s very, well, we can say prescient, but prescient only in terms of five minutes from now. It’s almost like a documentary. But a very important piece of filmmaking in a way, because these things touch on all of our lives very directly.

SG: The score contributes so much to the mood of that specific episode. It could be so much darker, but there’s something almost hopeful about it because the music is so lovely. Was that intentional?

MR: Yes. When I saw the material, what struck me about it really was that this is a scenario of utter devastation, from a psychological point of view. And yet it has a sort of shiny, wonderful quality because of course the effect of this rating system in the episode basically causes everyone to behave in a wonderful, smiley, happy way the whole time. There’s a kind of tyranny of fake joy, and I thought it would be nice to try and score that dimension of it, so it has a warmth and a fairytale quality throughout. That’s what you’re seeing, and in a way, by turning that up, you get a sense of the darkness underneath it.

SG: What’s your thought process when you’re composing something like this? Are you thinking about setting the mood, or are you trying to accomplish something else?

MR: When I’m working with pictures, with images and storytelling, it’s really about the sentiment and the emotional trajectory of the characters. That’s really where the music lives, I think. That’s what I’m focused on, that’s what I respond to most strongly. And it is an instinctual process, writing a film score; it’s a sort of hybrid thing where you have a lot of planning, a lot of ideas, a lot of conceptualizing, and then also happy accidents, and you never quite know how these things are going to fit together. An example from “Nosedive” is that we had this idea to make the reward sounds from the phones [in the episode] part of the score, so I spent some time composing these little ringtone things that could become part of the actual score itself. That’s the kind of thing that can go terribly wrong sometimes, but actually in this case, because of the way that these sounds drive the narrative, it worked really well. These sorts of dynamics happen a lot in a storytelling structure like this. There are lots of different things that feed into the process.

SG: Between “Nosedive” and your work on The Leftovers, there seems to be a recent trend in your work of thinking about these grim alternate realities. Do you ever think explicitly about the sound of dystopia, or how you might conjure it?

MR: For me, the big thing really is the theme. And the psychological dynamics of the thing. This Black Mirror episode, like they all are, is a possible future. When I was a kid, there were really only two possible futures in the foreground, which were Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell obviously is about social control via brutality and physical oppression and deprivation and force in a very blunt way. That’s how power exerts itself and controls in Orwell's world. Huxley’s world is about seduction and pleasure; it’s about social control via reward and pleasure. When I was a kid, the consensus was that the future was going to be Orwell’s vision somehow: There’s a sort of Cold War quality about it. But now, in a world of unrestricted corporate power, it feels like Huxley was maybe the more clear-sighted of the two. You know [“Nosedive”] is very much Huxley’s world: It’s about this character getting tiny rewards continuously. She’s like a hamster in the wheel of this reward cycle. That for me was the overarching idea of the material.

People talk about “film music,” but it’s almost a different category, the music that sticks to images and makes them catch fire and glow.

SG: It’s interesting, because even Sleep in a way feels like a project for a dystopian reality. But it’s also the reality we live in, where people don’t get enough rest and are constantly distracted and fragmented.

MR: Sleep is a project I’ve been thinking about for many years. It just seems like society has been moving more and more in a direction where we needed it. Our psychological space is being increasingly populated by data. And we expend an enormous amount of energy curating data. That’s kind of a significant psychological load, and Sleep is an opportunity or a suggestion that we take a holiday from that and reflect on what’s actually going on. If you’re a busy person living in the West, it’s easy to end up in a data hamster wheel. The idea of Sleep is that it’s an antidote.

SG: What are the different challenges in creating something for a film or TV score versus creating something like Sleep?

MR: They’re completely different. I mean, concert music, ballet, and opera, and making records is most of my life. I do a lot of film and television work too but they really are very, very different things. With a record or a piece of concert music, that’s the whole game right there, that’s the entirety of the story being told, and you want to have that conversation with the audience and the listener directly and purely in sound terms. With a cinema project or other collaboration, the music is one strand in a hybrid world, and sometimes you want to hear it, but mostly you want to experience it in conjunction with the images and story. I was thinking about this the other day: It’s almost as if you need another word for it. People talk about “film music,” but it’s almost a different category, the music that sticks to images and makes those images catch fire and glow.

SG: Is there a particular kind of film and TV project you’re interested in? Many of them have emotional complexity in common, and a kind of darkness, too.

MR: I suppose I’m interested in things that have a strong social-political-psychological dimension. Going all the way back to Waltz With Bashir, or looking ahead to Miss Sloane, these are all political films, political storytelling, but with a strong personal and psychological dimension. And Black Mirror is one of them.

SG: Can you talk a little bit about how you conceive technology playing a role in your own work, and how you incorporate it into your work?

MR: For me it’s horses for courses, really. If I’m working on a piano piece or a string quartet for an orchestra or an electronic piece or a record, I’ll use the appropriate tools. My work starts in classical music, my background is as a conservatoire, university-trained classical composer. But over the years I’ve evolved a lot of different working methods. There’s no point, for example, trying to notate on a piece of paper what a modular synthesizer is going to do; there’s just no way to write it down. That’s something where you invent and try things out, and then re-listen and see if you like them. Synthesizers, computers, they all have their own natural language, their natural way to make sounds.

SG: I read an interview with you from a year or so ago where you said you don’t do “traditional” TV music. Can you explain a little bit what you meant by that?

MR: What I feel about this is also something I feel about music generally—you might call it the “Why Music?” question. There’s an awful lot of music spread very thinly throughout a lot of TV and you often feel that it isn’t really doing an awful lot, so why is it there? I feel really that if the music is there, it should be doing something. If the music is there then it should be bringing something to the situation, to the images, to the story—something that only music can do.

How Rom-Coms Undermine Women

Here is one of the good things to come out of Donald Trump’s recent hot-mic revelations: The scandal, in its assorted horrors, furthered a much-needed national conversation about the shadowed contours of sexual violence. In response to Trump surrogates’ attempts to dismiss the candidate’s misogynistic comments as “locker-room talk,” media outlets and individual Facebook-opiners alike came forward to insist that, on the contrary, what Trump was describing in Access Hollywood’s recording was in fact a form of assault. Trump’s words, in spite of themselves, ended up bringing a bit of ironic clarity to a culture that is living in the aftermath of patriarchy—during a time in which feminism and Puritanism and sex positivity and sex-shaming and progress and its absence have mingled to make everything, to borrow Facebook’s pleasant euphemism, Complicated.

There’s one more thing, though, that has contributed to all the confusion: the romantic comedy. The common knock against rom-coms—besides their being too often glibly hetero-normative and horrendously lacking in diversity and ironically ambivalent about the women who generally watch them—is that they are fantasies, in the worst way as well as the best. (“I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi,” Mindy Kaling, both a lover and a creator of the genre, has said.) The other complaint you can make about them, though, and one that seems especially apt at the current moment, is that rom-coms, on top of everything else, have a troubling tendency to blur the line between romantic exertion and sexual violence. Many assume a fundamental passivity on the part of women, and, relatedly, a fundamental assertiveness on the part of men. For any romantic coupling at all to take place, they argue implicitly—and, indeed, for the human species to have any hope of propagating itself—men must exert themselves, and women must gratefully accept them. Before Mars and Venus can fall in love, many rom-coms assume, Mars must first make Venus do the falling.

Many rom-coms treat women either as bundles of buzzing, desperate desire or, on the other hand, as empty vessels for it.

The problem is, though, that Venus isn’t always there, waiting to be wooed; sometimes, she must be actively sought. So Ted, in There’s Something About Mary, hires a PI to track down his crush, and this is presented in the film not as evidence of creepiness, but of a Sensitive Guy being Romantic. Lloyd, in Say Anything, arrives at Diane’s bedroom window—his Love-Boombox thrust stubbornly skyward, pulsing with Peter Gabriel—to woo her with song. (The movie, similarly, frames Lloyd’s “okay, then I will just come to your home” gesture as supremely romantic—so successfully, in fact, that the Romeo-at-Juliet’s-window inspired scene is commonly cited in lists of The Most Romantic Movie Moments of All Time.) Dean, the quintessential Nice Guy Boyfriend in Gilmore Girls, begins his Nice Guy arc by following Rory around Stars Hollow without talking to her or alerting her to his presence—simply because, as he later explains, “you’re nice to look at.”

It’s a theme so common that, as my colleague Julie Beck pointed out, the site TV Tropes has a page dedicated to exploring it—“Stalking Is Love,” the page is called. (The trope has also received that highest of cultural ratifications: an Onion headline. “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested,” the fake paper reports, in a “it’s funny because it’s real” way.) The trope also got treatment in How I Met Your Mother, a sitcom-length rom-com that found its romantic protagonist, Ted, similarly showing up—several different times—at the window of his beloved. Ted, ever the theorist, invoked Lloyd “You Will Listen to Peter Gabriel and You Will Love It” Dobler in what he dubbed the “Dobler-Dahmer theory” of grand, romantic gestures. Ted’s theory went like this: If the person on the receiving end of the gesture is romantically interested in the gesturer, then—à la Lloyd Dobler, Heartsick Hero—it’s charming. If not, the gesture will come off as creepy and stalkery and threatening and awful (in the manner of Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibalistic serial killer).

The Dobler-Dahmer theory is helpful not just in its acknowledgement of the high-stakes nature of the romantic gesture, but also in its recognition of the agency of the gesturee. The rom-comic plots it invokes don’t simply celebrate stalker-ish behavior on the part of men; they also, on the flip side, often celebrate passive behavior on the part of women. Many of them treat women either as bundles of buzzing, desperate desire—Love Actually, How to Be Single, He’s Just Not Into You—or, on the other hand, as empty vessels for it.

Take Hitch, the “love doctor” in Hitch, who introduces himself in the movie that treats him as a romantic hero with the following voice-over:

No woman wakes up saying, “God, I hope I don’t get swept off my feet today.” Now, she might say, “This is a really bad time for me.” Or something like, “I just need some space.” Or my personal favorite: “I’m really into my career right now.” You believe that? Neither does she. You know why? Because she’s lying to you, that’s why. You understand me? Lying. It’s not a bad time for her. She doesn’t need any space.

She’s lying to you. Lying. This, in the context of the film, is presented as cheerful and charming, a realtalk-y acknowledgment of the world’s awkward romantic realities. It would never occur to Hitch to doubt its own intentions—“because with no guile, and no game,” the Love Doctor later explains to a client, “there’s no girl.” Watching Hitch today is uncomfortable not just for all the reasons watching a rom-com might typically be uncomfortable—its assumption of the centrality of romance to feminine life, its downplaying of things like family and friends and career and other vehicles for human spiritual fulfillment, its conviction that a woman must not be simultaneously attractive and single—but also because the film studiously extracts a woman’s own desires from its romantic equation. She says she’s not interested; he assumes she’s lying. She says “no”; he replies, “I will make you say yes.”

It’s an attitude suggested even in the many rom-coms that aren’t explicitly stalkery in their premises, but whose plots—and whose sense of what romance is all about—revolve, nonetheless, around gamefied manipulations. Cameron, in 10 Things I Hate About You, fakes a deep knowledge of French so he can become Bianca’s tutor. Wedding Crashers condemns the pick-up artistry of John and Jeremy at its outset, but then rewards their manipulations, in the end, by letting them get their girls. The cue-card guy in Love Actually—his character is so roughly sketched that he is generally and correctly known simply as Cue-Card Guy—shows up at the door of his beloved, while her husband sits watching TV, to confess his love. There he is, at her home, without, the cards say, “hope or expectation,” for the purpose of … what? Confusing her? Making her feel good about herself? Convincing her that she should totally leave his best friend for her? Using her so that he may, himself, get some much-needed romantic closure?

“Rom-coms reflect one of the great cultural myths of romantic love: that no matter how big the obstacle, love will conquer all.”

It’s unclear—opacity is the defining characteristic of Cue-Card Guy—but the movie suggests that it is probably the latter of these: “Enough,” Cue-Card Guy says to himself as he’s walking away from her house, “Silent Night” still blaring on his Doblerian boombox, having successfully passed his romantic frustrations on to the woman who is their object. “Enough now.”

It would be one thing were the awkwardness of Cue-Card Guy and his love-sick ilk limited to the screen. But, of course, they are not. Rom-coms are powerful, in part, because they pervade. They, too—like celebrities, like songs, like presidential candidates—have norm-setting capabilities. A study released earlier this year from Julia Lippman, a postdoctoral fellow in communication studies at the University of Michigan, found that rom-coms can give their audiences the illusion that stalking behavior—criminal activity—is, yes, romantic. The gestures of Say Anything and There’s Something About Mary and their fellow films “are often framed as unequivocal signs of true love,” Lippman wrote. “Indeed, they may be seen as reflecting one of the great cultural myths of romantic love: that no matter how big the obstacle, love will conquer all.”

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And that myth gets reflected and refracted into a culture that is, in the age of normalized feminism and dissolving patriarchy and lines that are too often “blurred,” trying to figure out for itself the precise distinction between the creepy and the romantic. It’s telling that one of the highest compliments that can be paid to a woman about her looks—that she is “ravishing”—is derived from the same Latin root that gave us “rape.” And hovering in the exhaust of that etymology are rom-comic portrayals of romance as an antagonistic game—a hunt that rewards both aggression and stealth. WikiHow’s 15-step guide, “How to Get a Girl to Fall in Love With You,” assures its readers, “You don’t have to have a good excuse to talk to her, you just have to have some sort of excuse to break the ice.” The Modern Man’s advice on “How to Talk to a Woman Who is Wearing Headphones”? That guy, you can almost guarantee, was a keen viewer of rom-coms. The finance-focused site The Simple Dollar turned to rom-coms to formulate its list of “12 Wildly Romantic Gestures in Movies (That Don’t Cost a Thing)”; the tips it offered for “wowing your loved one this Valentine’s Day without spending a fortune” included some of the most classic “Stalking Is Love” conceits: “Turn Up Outside Her Window”; try some “Benevolent Manipulation”; and, finally, engage in “Relentless Pursuit.”

That might be fine; it might even, depending on the feelings of the “loved one” in question, be romantic! The problem is that, when you are relying on Relentless Pursuit as a way to get what you want, there is no role to be played by the human person on the other end of your desire. The rules of the hunt allow her only to (temporarily) escape or to (permanently) accede. In a world in which “no” means “yes,” the logic goes—and a world, worse, in which the “no” will transform into a “yes” with dogged, directed persistence—the only say the beloved has in the matter is not whether, but simply when, she’ll give in.

One Key to Westworld: Video Games

There’s a famously irreverent theory about video-game design that posits that players can judge a game’s quality by how quickly they come across a simple wooden crate in a level. According to this concept, the appearance of a crate, an ordinary visual marker that might contain loot or block a player’s passage, signals that developers ran out of original ideas and started recycling old tropes. The so-called “Crate Review System” is largely just a way to poke fun at the limitations of the video-game medium: Crates have long been a comfortable, formulaic hallmark that helped remind the player that they were in a fictional universe.

In HBO’s new sci-fi drama series, Westworld, game design has progressed far beyond the placement of crates, but its players are still looking for the seams. The show poses questions about the ethics of artificial intelligence as it investigates the humanity of its “hosts,” the realistic-looking androids who populate the park where rich humans come to play-act as cowboys. But its fifth episode, which aired Sunday, delved deeper into two of the “guests” driving the park’s stories: one a neophyte and the other a hardcore player, both struggling to find a way to enjoy themselves.

The newcomer, William (Jimmi Simpson), takes the “crates” around him for granted, following his storyline on rails like he’s supposed to. The unnamed veteran, referred to in the credits as the Man in Black (Ed Harris), has come to only see the invisible walls of the artificial world, and now only enjoys trying to break them down. As Westworld methodically builds out its universe, it seems more and more like a commentary on the psyche of the gamer, and the ways the intentionally limited world around them can feel comforting, desensitizing, and eventually stifling.

Until now, the show had mostly focused on the cold, callous nature of Westworld’s programmers, who drag the game’s robots down to the fluorescent subterranean hell beneath the park, clean them up, wipe their memories, and send them topside again to repeat their short, brutal lives as damsels, gunslingers, prostitutes, and black-hatted villains. Episode five, “Contrapasso,” centered around two clients the show has been following through the park, charting their journeys as gamers in a scripted world that’s beginning to malfunction.  

William has been dragged along to Westworld by his co-worker and future brother-in-law Logan (Ben Barnes), a more experienced player who sees visiting the park as some kind of manly rite of passage. Logan dresses up in black and enjoys indulging in Westworld’s most lurid features, drawing his pistol at the slightest provocation, and barking at William to be more active. At one point, Logan shoots a host and takes its gun, delighting at the “upgrade,” like a Grand Theft Auto player cheerily swapping a shotgun for a bazooka. But the show’s contempt for Logan is clear. He’s an amateur, looking only to unleash his raging id, and when he’s dragged off by robots after another contretemps in this episode, William, tired of his violent antics, doesn’t try to save him.

Meanwhile, William has been drawn in by one of the game’s core stories. He’s taking part in an adventure with a ostensible damsel named Dolores (a host played by Evan Rachel Wood) who he’s fallen for, while journeying into the park’s “border towns” with an outlaw called El Lazo. The crucial emotional narrative belongs to Dolores, whose consciousness is inexplicably branching into new territories. Dolores’s development is fascinating, but William’s attraction to her is obviously rooted in the fact that she seems “real.” Not real in the sense of her flesh-and-blood appearance, but in the ways she’s breaking the artificiality of the game around her—she immediately stands out in the way that the game’s garish window-dressing (like a ridiculous orgy scene that William and Dolores meander through) cannot.

What better game than one where nothing can be scripted at all?

How directly this relates to the arc of the Man in Black (Harris) is still a matter of opinion. For the last few weeks, fan debate has raged online over whether this mysterious, self-aware gunslinger is just an older version of William, a gamer who has been through the park so many times that at this point he seems to be just going through the sadistic motions. “Contrapasso” seemed to tacitly endorse that theory by showing the Man in Black interacting with a host called Lawrence (Clifton Collins Jr.) almost as if he were an old friend, before killing him off. Then, the show almost immediately cut to William running into El Lazo—also played by Clifton Collins Jr. That the host could have been quickly cleaned up, given a new role, and spirited across the park seems unlikely.

More probable is that William’s story is taking place decades ago, and that the Man in Black is a grizzled future version of him who’s bored by the fictional confines of Westworld. In watching William go through his first major campaign, viewers watch him become inured to its shocking violence, and start to look for the seams in the storytelling he’s moving through. By the time he’s grown old, into a far calmer villain than the trigger-happy Logan, he can spot the crates instantly, and is trying to figure a way around them. If this theory holds, it’d be a fascinating way of illustrating how the appeal of virtual worlds can get exhausted, and how mastery of a video game doesn’t just mean “beating” it, but trying to “break” it, forcing it to behave in unpredictable ways.

In video games, crates often serve as background scenery designed to block off passages in a level, to keep the player from wandering off track while also offering minor obstacles. Westworld represents the next level of game design: the “sandbox,” or a big open world that players can explore. But even in a sandbox, figurative crates remain—even in a fictional city, or country, there have to be borders that a player can’t stray outside of. The Man in Black is looking for a way around or through those borders, hunting for a legendary Easter egg in the game called “The Maze.” He’s Mario hopping over a wall to get to the Warp Zone; he’s a Silent Hill player who’s found every possible ending to the story but is still hunting for more.

The Man in Black’s confrontation with Ford (Anthony Hopkins), Westworld’s designer, at the end of “Contrapasso” was certainly a game-breaking moment. Here was the game’s god descending among its mere mortals, and in a fit of pique, the Man in Black decided to see what would happen if he brandished a knife at Ford. Immediately, the host next to him (a cowboy named Teddy, played by James Marsden) seized the blade with his bare hands, overcome by programming designed to protect his creator. The Man in Black seemed simultaneously delighted and bored; here was another crate spotted, another glitch in reality logged.

The Man in Black’s quest, it seems, is to delve to the bottom of Westworld’s very creation. Ford has acknowledged that he created the game with a man named Arnold, who died before it was launched to the public. Arnold’s philosophy was more geared toward expanding the consciousness of the AI he created, and he and Ford had some deep disagreement over this that has yet to be fully revealed. “The Maze” that the Man in Black is hunting seems key to unlocking this question of consciousness; it’s a deep, buried secret in the code of the hosts, one he’s trying to bring out in some strange quest for liberation. For someone tired of the pre-plotted world of gaming, that makes sense as an ultimate goal: What better game than one where nothing can be scripted at all? It’s a concept that’s fascinating and nightmarish, all at once, and of Westworld’s grand ideas, it’ll be one of the most interesting to see play out.

Everyone Is Angry at James Comey Now

What does it take to unite former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, liberal columnist Paul Krugman, and pitchfork-wielding former Tea Party Representative Joe Walsh?

In today’s polarized times, it should be practically impossible—but FBI Director James Comey has managed to pull it off. On Friday, Comey sent a letter to the Republican chairs of committees relevant to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, saying that the FBI had discovered new, pertinent emails.

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Comey’s short note—just three paragraphs, with little other information about the number of emails, their source, or when they might be reviewed—shook the presidential race. Coming with several polls showing a slightly tighter race, it suddenly looked like the Clinton campaign might be falling apart at the seams, and that Trump had a renewed chance.

Since then, the public has learned more about the emails in question, complicating the picture. Adding to the difficulty, much of the new information has emerged in anonymous leaks to a range of outlets, producing a sometimes contradictory image. It’s been reported that the emails in question were turned up during an investigation into former Representative Anthony Weiner for allegedly sexting a North Carolina 15-year-old. Weiner’s estranged wife is top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and apparently the emails in question were on a shared laptop. First, there’s no clear figure on how many emails there are, no idea whether there are new emails not previously reviewed, and no sense (at least publicly) of how likely it is that there’s anything that would change Comey’s pronouncement in July that he did not recommend charges against Clinton for her use of a private email server and address. (He later said it wasn’t even a close call.) In fact, the FBI didn’t even get a warrant to look at the emails until Sunday.

Within hours of the letter being made public, the Democratic Party had swung its entire messaging apparatus into attacking Comey.

“It’s pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information right before an election,” Clinton said on the trail in Florida on Saturday. “In fact, it’s not just strange; it’s unprecedented and it is deeply troubling.”

Other Democrats were much less measured. In a letter to Comey, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote, “I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act. Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law.” Reid also alleged, without offering any substantiation, that Comey was withholding information about ties between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government. The Nevadan has a reputation for making outlandish claims with an eye toward forcing others to debunk them.

Meanwhile, liberal writers like Paul Krugman unleashed broadsides, accusing Comey of attempting to aid the Republican Party. Some of the same Clinton allies who spent weeks saying Trump endangered American norms by saying the election was “rigged” were quick to declare corruption when the news cycle turned against their candidate.

As a tutorial in executing a messaging offensive, it was impressive, showing how much more easily Clinton can unite her party and lead a unified front than, say, Trump after the video in which he boasted about sexually assaulting women. But whether it’s the right message remains to be seen. For one, there’s a risk of hypocrisy. While Clinton and her allies were not delighted with the manner in which Comey announced his decision not to recommend charges, calling her “extremely careless” with classified information, many of them were quick to praise Comey’s integrity. Now some of them are even suggesting that Comey is trying to throw the election to Trump. There’s no evidence for that claim, and it’s hard to imagine it being true: As a studiously moderate longtime Washington establishment Republican, Comey doesn’t fit the profile of a Trump fan.

Going to war with the FBI is also a dangerous game. If you work the refs, you might get better calls; or you might just anger them and end up digging a deeper hole. But this is likely a short-term strategy, designed to run out the clock and protect Clinton’s lead ahead of Election Day.

There’s a second, separate type of criticism of Comey, which argues not that his motives are questionable but that his decisionmaking process has been grievously wrong. On Friday afternoon, Benjamin Wittes wrote a much-read piece at Lawfare arguing that Comey was in a bind and had no choice but to inform Congress, even at the risk of thrusting himself into the midst of the presidential race’s final week.

But there’s pushback to that notion, now. Some of it comes from politically interested observers. Former Attorney General Eric Holder, for example, has campaigned for Clinton and made his views on the race clear, but his argument, laid out in a Washington Post column, is procedural rather than political. Several outlets have reported that Comey broke with Department of Justice policies, and that DOJ officials counseled him not to send the letter, but did not attempt to actually stop him. Holder argues that Comey violated protocol. “I fear he has unintentionally and negatively affected public trust in both the Justice Department and the FBI,” Holder wrote. “And he has allowed—again without improper motive—misinformation to be spread by partisans with less pure intentions.” Holder and dozens of other former DOJ officials also signed a letter criticizing Comey.

But it's not just Democrats. Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, argued in a New York Times column and in a formal complaint on Saturday that Comey had violated the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from using their authority to interfere with elections. (Interestingly, Painter initially told my colleague Emma Green he thought Comey was on solid ground, then changed his mind.)

Other Republicans have argued that Comey made the wrong decision in July when he recommended against charges for Clinton, but that his letter on Friday was misguided as well, sometimes for the same reasons.

Gonzales, who was attorney general under George W. Bush, was critical of Comey’s July announcement, but said on MSNBC on Monday that the new move also seemed dubious. “It was probably inconsistent with protocol, so in that sense, you have to question the decision,” he said. (It’s curious to see Gonzales, who was forced to resign amid questions about his administration of the Justice Department, being cited in discussions of ethics—especially by Democrats.)

Fox New’s Bill Hemmer reported that Karl Rove, the former Bush strategist, said Comey was “wrong in July and was wrong on Friday.” An echo came from Joe Walsh, a controversial former one-term representative from Illinois who was warning just last week that he was “grabbing my musket” if Trump lost:

Look, I think Comey should have said prosecute her back in July.



But what he just did 11 days b4 the election is wrong & unfair to Hillary.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 31, 2016

William Weld, a former U.S. Attorney and Republican governor of Massachusetts now running for vice president on the Libertarian ticket, was also scathing about Comey’s decision. Weld knows a thing or two about sidestepping policies. He once led the Justice Department’s criminal division, but resigned with other top officials in 1988, to protest the conduct of Attorney General Edwin Meese III. When a special prosecutor declined to indict Meese, Weld and a colleague took their complaints to Congress, forcing Meese’s resignation.

Comey infuriated Republicans by not recommending charges against Clinton in July, and some who are enjoying Clinton’s struggles may, as a result, be less likely to leap to Comey’s defense. Arrayed against him, he finds the Democratic messaging machine plus former Justice Department officials of both parties. So now Comey finds himself a lonely man. Maybe it’s just as well that he won’t have social distractions, though: His agency has a lot of emails to read.

How to Make the Most of a Predictable NBA Season

The 71st NBA season started just last week, but most of the league’s followers already feel pretty confident about how it will end. The Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors have met in the last two Finals matchups, and judging by everything from advertising campaigns to betting odds to preseason rankings, a third installment seems a mortal lock. The Cavaliers still have LeBron James, whose teams have reached the championship round six years in a row, and the Warriors added the superstar forward Kevin Durant to a team that won a record 73 games last season. In his season preview piece, ESPN’s Zach Lowe summed up the prevalent thinking: “We’ve never seen an NBA Finals trilogy, but as things stand today, any other outcome would be shocking.”

The seven months between now and the Finals, then, take on the air of a drawn-out prologue. Twenty-eight other teams may make modest gains and mount little charges in the standings, but reasonable observers will see through the distractions. With James stringing passes to all corners of the court and tearing to the rim for dunks, Cleveland will almost certainly emerge from the Eastern Conference, and with Stephen Curry tossing in audacious three-pointers and Durant applying his own scoring prowess, Golden State will do the same from the West. Those who prefer their high-level basketball with a dash of doubt have two options: Convince themselves a hiccup from the Cavs or Warriors in November matters, or wait for the championship in June.

This top-heavy state has prompted some concern. Segments dedicated to the NBA’s competitive imbalance have become staples of sports-talk television shows, and after Durant’s signing in Golden State, the commissioner Adam Silver weighed in, saying, “I don’t think having two ‘superteams’ is good for the league,” and suggesting that future bargaining agreements may be designed to prevent such teams from forming. For the near future, though, the age of the superteam holds, presenting fans with a challenge. Why, and how, do you follow a season-long story when you know the final chapter?

For starters, you cherish the twists, even if they might ultimately prove inconsequential. Last Tuesday’s opening slate of games held to protocol at first, with the Cavs collecting their championship rings and then rolling over the New York Knicks, but a showdown between the Warriors and the San Antonio Spurs held some surprises later in the evening. In front of their rejoicing home fans, the Warriors started sluggishly and wore down as the game went on, eventually losing by 29. Durant and Curry played up to their standards, combining for 53 points, but the veteran Spurs bothered the rest of Golden State’s stars on defense and outworked them for rebounds, and the opener in Oakland ended up a dud.

It was a small stumble, by definition—one loss in an 82-game schedule—but in a modern sports-media landscape that runs on crisis, no problem is too minor to go remarked on. “I’m sure the story tomorrow will be, ‘[Durant] broke up the chemistry and we can’t win with KD,’” the Warriors forward Draymond Green predicted after the loss, and the real responses ranged from superteam schadenfreude to analytical deep dives. “So, The Warriors Got Their Asses Kicked,” read the headline of one delighted Deadspin recap, while The Ringer declared, “The Warriors Have 81 Games to Address Their Achilles’ Heel.” Both articles proposed well-considered causes for the ignominious opener, but each also seemed inspired by the fan’s fundamental thirst for drama. The conclusion of the latter—“An NBA season that was supposed to be a coronation from the very beginning just got a lot more interesting”—seemed more of a wish than anything, quietly tempered by a phrase a few sentences earlier: “It’s easy to overstate things.”

Overstating, after all, is one way fans have of getting by when the ultimate outcome seems a matter of course. No team will be perfect, and so imperfections are seized upon as evidence that things might not be as set as they seem. It’s an old and well-honed drill, applicable to everything from an early-season upset loss to reports of tension within the locker room. In this way, the year is presented as a series of vital challenges, instead of a long wait for a probable ending.

There is a sense of pro sports more closely mirroring the tamer victories of regular life.

There’s another, less practiced method of dealing with championship predictability: Don’t focus so much on the championship. The major American leagues tend to share a “title or bust” ethos—ask the four-time Super Bowl loser Buffalo Bills or all the teams that lost to Michael Jordan in the Finals how beloved they are for falling short—but other sports in the U.S. and abroad have discovered the appeal of celebrating various tiered accomplishments. Teams incapable of championship contention in college football can still challenge for conference titles, and those unable to do that can win regional rivalry games; depending on circumstances, either of those can render a season an absolute success. European soccer clubs, meanwhile, have all manner of major and minor ambitions to pursue: In domestic leagues, the international Champions League, various scattered short tournaments, and nicknamed games against certain hated opponents.

The NBA has no tradition of celebrating non-champions in any official capacity, but the league’s current climate may make doing so unofficially a matter of course. The divide between the haves (Golden State and Cleveland) and the have-nots (everyone else) is so clearly marked as to create, in essence, separate realms of competition. While the Warriors and Cavs wait for their eventual matchup, more subtly intriguing squads fill a vast lower tier. The Los Angeles Clippers—who feature a Mozart of a point guard in Chris Paul and a cannonball of a power forward in Blake Griffin but who have never advanced past the second round of the playoffs due to ill-timed injuries and occasional infighting—have a chance to secure the second-best record in the Western Conference and reach the Conference Finals for the first time, where a loss to the Warriors would still have to be considered a sort of victory. The Boston Celtics, unique among the NBA’s better teams in their relative lack of star power, could continue their bit-by-bit climb and meet the Cavs in the Eastern Conference Finals, and could feel the same sort of pride at the accomplishment. Neither team has much chance at winning the ultimate prize, but in a league with the odds this stacked, losing well is almost as good.

There’s a refreshingly everyday appeal to this, a sense of the artificial world of pro sports more closely mirroring the tamer victories of regular life. The explosive guard left behind to lead the Oklahoma City Thunder on his own after Durant’s departure, Russell Westbrook, won’t have a shot at a championship this year, but he will have four chances at some measure of payback when the Thunder and Warriors meet. Winning one or two of those games wouldn’t make the year end any differently but it would surely feel great, to Westbrook and Oklahoma City fans alike. The young Detroit Pistons, who played the Cavs close in every game of a sweep in the first round of last year’s playoffs, have no chance at closing the gap between the teams, but they might register a win or two in this year’s go-round, making the defending champions work for it a little.

Come summer, the main story of the 2016-17 season will be written during a seven-game Finals series, most likely involving Cleveland and Golden State. Between now and then, though, a more enduring legacy could emerge. While the two best teams wait out the technicality of the regular season, basketball fans have a chance to gain new appreciation for smaller accomplishments, all the more admirable for not producing trophies.