The bridge is yours.

-Super, super excited for the debut of This Was Television, a historical TV blog.

-The first primetime schedule, from 1946. I would totally watch the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports and Serving Through Science.

-Nitsuh Abebe has a playlist to get you through to the end of the week.

-Bad dating advice from superheroines.

-All the spells from Harry Potter in one place:

As a kickoff to summer, I decided to finish up The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, HBO’s adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s series of a Botswanan female detective named Precious Ramotswe starring Jill Scott. It’s a totally charming show, and both its tone and content are incredibly different from anything else on television, which makes me particularly sorry that it never got the second season. Precious is neither an anti-hero nor your standard cop with a dark secret—she’s a profoundly nice woman with a streak of steel she acquired during an abusive marriage—and most of the people around her, from her rigid secretary to the hairdresser who refers her clients are also pleasant and kind. The bad people she encounters aren’t great villains. Instead, they’re often petty, weak, or angry, and taking it out on the people around them. And perhaps most importantly, her cases are similarly low-key.

The obsession with murder on American crime shows makes sense for a lot of reasons. Murder and rape, the other pop culture standby, are the crimes we take most seriously: they grab an audience’s attention and lend a sense of urgency to an episode. Murders provide opportunities to whip out the kind of high-tech wizardry that works so well as television transitions, whether it’s a medical examiner explaining something routine to Law & Order detectives, or the geniuses playing with awesome-looking toys on Bones. It also provides an excuse for harsh and theoretically exciting interrogations. And has become almost universally true in both prestige and network drama, there’s a consensus that we reach a truer understanding of humanity by venturing through the darkness rather than by heading towards the light. We’re more interested in divining the motivations of the most depraved people among us than exploring saints or simply good people who maintain from day to day.

This struck me because, despite their wildly differing locales, main characters, and relationships to the American cop show tradition (in one marvelous sequence in Ladies’ Detective Agency, the stylist, who is driving Precious’s secretary Grace, says how pleased he is that they’re bickering because it means they’re living up to trope), the show that most reminds me of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency is The Unusuals. A short-lived ABC cop show with a ludicrously good cast, including Jeremy Renner, Amber Tamblyn, Adam Goldberg and Harold Perrineau, The Unusuals was distinctive among its network brethren in that that the detectives weren’t always solving murders. Yes, there was an episode where Goldberg and Perrineau’s characters took over an underground murder store as a sting operation and faced a quandary when one of their clients wanted to kill her abusive cop husband. But a lot of the time, the characters were rounding up a one-man band on a nuisance charge, solving a crime spree motivated by the medical bills of an old-school hood, or tracking down a reported zombie that turned out to be a man with Alzheimer’s who had escaped from a nursing home. These were absolutely smaller stories, but they could be beautifully written, revealing of a whole range of life beyond New Yorkers with their heads bashed in or their hearts shot out.

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency worked that way by design. As detectives, Precious and Grace were guaranteed to get cases that either didn’t rise to the level of police attention or didn’t concern strict illegality. Watching Precious track down the records that prove a lawyer is committing insurance fraud to help fund an orphanage, or Grace investigate beauty contest candidates for their integrity (an assignment that tests her jealousy and sense of self) is charming and a much more wide-ranging perspective on Botswana than it would be if she was simply another tough cop. I’ve written that we might have an anti-hero glut on television. If we turn away from the old stand-bys, it might be nice to spend time with people who are pleasant rather than saints—and with scenarios that explore our more frequently unleashed petty impulses rather than our mostly-contained dark ones.

Over at Women and Hollywood, Melissa Silverstein responds to the exclusion of movies by female directors from the main competition at Cannes with a call for more transparency about the process by which films make the cut. I’m of two minds about this.

I think there are certain kinds of transparency that are valuable. When the National Magazine Awards came out this year and people were dismayed, I think the American Society of Magazine Editors did themselves a favor when they gave journalists some insights into the makeup of the pools that produced the nominations. Being transparent ended up dispelling the sense that a secret cabal of dude editors had systematically shut women out of the running and refocused the conversation on thornier questions like the differences between magazines aimed at men and women, or how to improve the pool of women who are writing magazine features on things that aren’t women’s issues. I’m all for exposing cabals if they exist, but they shouldn’t become a distraction from things that are much harder to address.

But there’s no question that some kinds of transparency can become a rabbit hole. If festivals or awards start explaining why they accept or reject every single movie or piece, they’re not likely to satisfy anyone. The Pulitzer’s one-line citations of nominees and eventual winners are a nice bit of economy, but explanations like that open the door to lengthy justifications of what got in and what didn’t, offered up to folks who want to champion a movie, or a show, or a piece that resonates with them. Ultimately, nominations and awards are always going to be products of their judging pools, rather than of popular votes, and opinions in those pools will always be subjective and brokered.

Better to know who the judges are than to try to get reasoning for their preferences out of them. It might even be interesting to see judges write statements about their preferences and the things that get them excited, and for competitions to try to put together balanced pools based on those as well. It’s not like putting Kathryn Bigelow on your jury will tilt it towards sympathy for carefully observed domestic stories about the inner lives of women. The basic facts and figures on who makes up judging pools is a good form of transparency that should be standard, along with the numbers on whose represented in initial submissions. But transparency is only the start: the decisions people make much earlier back in their careers are much murkier to fathom, and equally important.

One of the things that irritates me most is people — progressives in particular, because conservatives tend to be more vigilant on this score — who dismiss culture as if it’s unimportant, or as if people aren’t influenced by it. And my favorite counterargument of the moment comes from Paul Krugman, who went into economics because he wanted to be Hari Seldon when he grew up:

The background story is, I read Foundation back when I was in high school, when I was a teenager, and thought about the psychohistorians, who save galactic civilization through their understanding of the laws of society, and said “I want to be one of those guys.” And economics was as close as I could get. Those are pretty unique novels — they really are structured nothing like even the great bulk of science fiction, because they are about how social science can be used to save humanity…, we don’t exactly have the laws of psychohistory, but we do have some pretty good guidelines. The other thing, of course, is in Foundation, Hari Seldon is able to put together his long term plan and actually nudge history in the direction he wants it to go, and so far I’m feeling not like Hari Seldon but like Cassandra. I keep on predicting bad things, no one will believe me, and then they happen…Not everyone, obviously, but social scientists in general … I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction. It’s speculative, we’re thinking about what society could be like. Never mind the gadgets, although they create the alternative worlds, but a lot of it is thinking about society.

Fiction is about defining the outer limits of possibility: you show a kid a world where economists can shape the fate of humanity, and he’ll embrace realistic possibilities for social science he might never have been attracted to in the first place. Show girls superheroines and master archers as well as princesses and maybe some activity will catch a spark. I sometimes write that a movie or television show feels surprising because I didn’t think it was something that could exist. What really ends excites me about those pieces of art is that they’re times when popular entertainment is matching what’s truly possible in the world, and occasionally exceeding it. It’s artistically and societally depressing when media rooted in imagination turns out images and societies that are vastly more crabbed than our world actually is.

By that I don’t mean that we can’t explore oppression, or myopic people. But when books, or music, or movies fall into replicating the same old character tropes, or means of interactions between people, or possibilities for science and technology without acknowledging that society’s moved on around them, there’s something sad about that, both as a failure of art, and of excitement for the future. Or, as D.H. Lawrence put it, in a marvelous line cited by Austin Allen in an essay on the power of literature, fiction “Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake.”

Maureen Ryan pointed out this Q&A with Michelle Lovretta, the creator of Canadian fantasy show Lost Girl (currently airing on SyFy) about a succubus trying to make her way among warring faerie communities. I was particularly struck by her explanation of the efforts she’s made to keep the show sex-positive, and to avoid falling into stereotype and error:

So, I came up with a few internal rules and I moved to Canada that first year to co-showrun the show (with the fab Mr. Peter Mohan) partly just to help institute them:

1. sexual orientation is not discussed, and never an issue;

2. no slut shaming – Bo is allowed to have sex outside of relationships

3. Bo’s male and female partners are equally viable;

4. Bo is capable of monogamy, when desired;

5. both genders are to be (adoringly!) objectified — equal opportunity eye candy FTW…

Bo has lots of sex, with men, women, humans, Fae, threesomes… and she’s still our hero, still a good person worthy (and capable) of love, and that’s a rare portrayal of female sexuality. Also, a show built around a bisexual lead doesn’t have to BE about her bisexuality — orientation can just be an interesting element of a story, and not the story itself, and that’s the central spirit of our show. I consider that “I’m here, I’m queer, and it’s no big deal” approach to a main character still fairly rare and wonderful, at least in North America. It’s also rare to have a female lead who is so honestly sexual, without judgment…I think the single element I will remain proudest of is just that we’ve been able to create and put out into the world a sex positive universe where a person’s sexual orientation is unapologetically present and yet neither defines them as a character, nor the show as a whole.

I would really like to see this sort of thing tacked up in a lot of writers’ rooms. And the fact that a show that starts with the intention of doing something better needs these as reminders is an illustration of how pervasive our default assumptions about women and non-straight people and sexuality are. Getting your head right is a constant struggle.

I’ve longed to see the actual statistics on viewership for Hulu and Netflix’s original content efforts, so I was exceedingly interested to see Deadline’s first roundup of how many people are watching the YouTube channels the company stood up with programming seed money. The numbers are revealing.

Geek and Sundry, the Felicia Day-branded channel meant to build off the success of her web show The Guild, has attracted a proportionally huge amount of media coverage and buzz. But it was only the 16th-most watched channel on the site last week, netting 728,453 views (it was 13th previously). The most-watched channel, Sourcefed, which quickly wraps up viral news stories, was number one for the second week running with 5,607,921 views, a number that would have any actual network other than NBC feeling chest pains. The numbers drop off quickly after that: the channel with the number two slot has 3.8 million views, and only the top 11 channels netted over a million clicks on the play button. These are sobering numbers for folks who’d like to see network and cable television get outcompeted by the web. And they’re a cautionary tale for those who’d like to see their favorite shows, like Community, slip the yoke of a conventional production company and be supported by viewers: it’s a reminder that the core audience for any given show who would follow it off their televisions, much less support it with their dollars is not actually equivalent to its Nielsen rating.

Perhaps these numbers will improve. I continue to think that bundling web series together makes a lot of sense so people can find a number of things they might like at once, and so shows like The Guild, Husbands, or The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl with comparatively large followings can be used to launch new efforts. This is a medium is barely in its infancy, it’s really still in gestation, and the vast majority of consumers haven’t even thought about seeking out new original programming online much less figured out where to find what they like.

But I still think this illustrates a point I made in On The Media this weekend. I really think the networks would be smart to start using web television as a farm system. A season of web television usually adds up to about the length of a pilot. If a motivated web audience finds a show and proves willing to keep coming back for the bits and the pieces of a pilot over a period of time, that might be a good indicator that a core audience exists for a show that a network can build on, rewarding legacy viewers with higher production values, and putting a promising concept in front of an audience that didn’t even know it was out there to hunt for. If the networks were smart, they’d be excited about the idea of all these people shooting test pilots for them for free and developing audiences for them before they have to spend a penny of their advertising budgets, even if they don’t care about good ideas. And as much as I like the idea of the networks having more competition, it’s not time to give up on conquering from within either.

“Tears aren’t a woman’s only weapon. The best one’s between your legs. Learn how to use it.” – Cersei Lannister

“There is no number.” – Peggy Olson

“What do we say to the god of death?” – Syrio Forel
“Not today.” – Arya Stark

I’ve been saying for some time that once the books are finished and the television series has caught up, there’s an essay I can’t wait to write about the male mentors of Arya Stark. But watching this Sunday’s episodes of both Game of Thrones and Mad Men, I was struck by the parallels between those series’ traditional women, Sansa and Joan, and their trailblazers, Peggy and Arya, and the advice they receive from others about how to make their lives better.

One of the ways we understand that Don Draper is a fundamentally selfish person is his failings as a mentor, one of the major threads of this season. On a fairly fundamental level, he’s incapable of seeing Peggy’s — or anyone else’s — success as a contributor to his success rather than detracting from it. He’s not going to advocate with her with Heinz. He hangs up on her when she tries to apologize. Instead of seeing Ginsberg’s rise as another opportunity for Don to get credit for spotting and developing a talent that other people might have passed over, he undermines the younger man by leaving his design for a Sno-Cone ad in a cab so he has an excuse not to pitch it. Alan Sepinwall remarked on how “Peggy tries to resume her role as Don’s work wife — literally in the Cool Whip pitch — but the chemistry’s not the same” in “Lady Lazarus,” but in a way, that’s an illustration of the fundamental awkwardness of their relationship. Don’s lack of confidence means that he’s keeping a ledger of what Peggy owes him, rather than secure and able to spend his influence and knowledge without expecting a return with interest in a series of scheduled payments. Everything he does when Peggy gives her notice is wrong. He’s asked too much of her over the years to understand she sees their account as basically even. Even if Peggy wants the role of Don’s work wife, his ardent, courtly kiss on her hand is an attempt to seduce her rather than respect her, a fundamental reminder of her gender. The emotion is powerful, but what she wants is a kind of relationship that Don is unable to engage in.

Joan, who gets and takes the best advice (which is not saying much) offered to her all episode by Lane, who advises her to get a fair price for what she’s selling, was never really considered a potential subject for mentorship and professional growth. She buys her way to a more stable, secure, second-class existence. It’s a place she can have not just because, as Don tells Peggy, she’s been there for thirteen years, but because giving your office manager five percent of the firm is fundamentally different from admitting a woman as an equal partner. Joan, as Emily Nussbaum argues at the New Yorker, has won her right to be in the room, to hear what the men think of her. Peggy wants to change the terms of the conversation rather than simply hearing it, or participating in it. Her deep drink, her conviction to leave, is less about the firm choosing Joan over her, and more about the affirmation that Don Draper has trained her for something he doesn’t actually know how to give her: leadership.
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The bridge is yours.

-Jaguar gets that product placement doesn’t always have to be sycophantically positive.

-SEK has a typically brilliant analysis of the camera work in “Blackwater.”

-Watching Curt Schilling blame the state of Rhode Island for the failure of his video game company is a study in conservative hilarity.

-I actually think this trolling of Community fans, myself included, is pretty funny.

-Of course Danny Boyle is basing the London Olympics Opening Ceremony on The Tempest and Frankenstein.

-Jay-Z and Kanye West take to the barricades:

When the first teaser for The Host, the adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s science fiction novel starring Saorsie Ronan as an alien lifeform implanted in the body of a young human woman, came out, I decided to give Meyer the benefit of the doubt and give the book a shot. I was pleasantly surprised, and it made me wonder how Meyer’s career might have gone if The Host had been published before Twilight and Meyer had been embraced as a science fiction novelist, rather than primarily as a romantic one. But we live in the world that Twilight built, and so The Host looks like it’s going to be marketed as an intense young adult love story:

This is too bad, because to my mind, the most interesting thing about The Host as its status as a kind of peaceful Old Man’s War from the aliens’ perspective. Ronan’s character is an extremely fragile alien who goes by Wanderer. Her species is a colonizing—and as they see it—civilizing one that travels to new planets, removes the consciousness from the sentient species who live there, and insert themselves. The worlds they run are free of conflict, poverty, disease, and ecological devastation. In Wanderer’s opinion, this is a significant improvement, and lets her species, known as Souls, gather the stories, traditions, and wisdom of the species whose bodies they occupy. Where in Old Man’s War, John Scalzi’s characters drop in on species and civilizations as they fight their way through the galaxy, Wanderer gives us fleeting but powerful glimpses of life in all its possibilities.

That’s not to say there isn’t a YA-level love triangle in the novel, but rather than being defined by Who Loves Bella Swan more, the people who end up competing both for Wanderer’s love and the affection of the body she inhabits offer differing models of human independence in the face of alien invasion. The man who loved the body Wanderer occupies before it was hijacked stands for resistance to the invasion, to an inflexible vision of humanity as pure and independent, while the man who comes to love Wanderer for herself is one of the first humans she meets who is intrigued by the possibility of expanding his knowledge of the universe and his understanding of the kind of people who are worthy of sympathy and empathy. It’s a triangle with intellectual purpose beyond emotional frisson.

The book isn’t perfect, far from it. But it’s going to make me sad if The Host gets sold as another romance in the vein of Twilight and not as anything more. I’d like to think that a sense of wonder is still something that can get pricked by exposure to the potential size of the universe, not just by the sensation of being desperately wanted. Maybe The Hunger Games will convince folks that if you heighten romance with a postapocalypse, girls won’t be deterred, and boys will feel there’s something there for them, too, and we’ll all get a better movie as a result.

I think James Poniewozik is largely correct that while the networks may be upset about new technologies that let viewers skip ads, they might be better off trying to find fee structures that are responsive to new technologies:

But they want—and a good business would provide—many more ways of paying, if not with their eyeball attention to ads, then with money. (There’s the possibility, for instance, that networks could raise fees to networks like Dish that offer ad-zappers, which fees could be passed along to those who ad-zap, to replace lost ad revenue.) People want to be able to buy episodes, subscribe to shows, watch on their own schedule, and bypass ads they don’t want. In the process, the relationship of people to TV networks will change: right now, networks’ true “customers” are the advertisers, because they’re the ones who pay money.

The TV business is changing from one with a single main revenue source to one with a lot of them; the transition is bound to be painful for the networks. But quashing an option your consumers want is the wrong way to forestall that pain. You can’t pull the plug on technology forever, and if that’s your best response to change, it’s your own fault when consumers start tuning you out.

I also think this is easier in theory than in practice, and is going to take years to sort out. One important experiment will be to see how consumers respond to a Netflix or Hulu Plus pricing scheme that’s more reflective of the actual cost of supporting that content and the production of higher-quality original content. A second step will be to see how consumers behave if they’re faced with regular but reasonable hikes in the prices of those services, which are responsive to both renegotiated content contracts and rising wages and costs. I would like for it to be true that people are willing to pay for content at a cost that will support a fairly diverse array of high-quality programming, but as I’ve written before, we don’t actually have proof of a viable financial model yet, and it’s not wrong for the networks to be cautious about blowing up an existing business model in favor of optimistic projections.

We have a sense of what we’ll pay for three distinct products in this market. First, there’s what people will pay for bundled cable, both in terms of what prices will get them in the door and what prices won’t lead them to quit at the end of a first-year contract. We also have a sense of what we’ll pay for a single episode of television, because iTunes and Amazon have established that price for consumers much in the way cable companies did. And we know we’ll pay $8-$30 a month for streaming video and DVD exchange services. As consumers, I think we have little sense of the ad revenue we’d have to make up if we were to replace advertisers as networks’ customers. I’d be excited to see a good experiment in how to price out new models, but it would take serious negotiation between distributors and the networks to set one up, and it would need to include both coastal and rural consumers to account for differences in broadband penetration and avoid preference bias. If folks have ideas on how to make such an experiment work, leave them in comments. It’s time to start thinking beyond the simple idea that evolution is good and important, and start talking in greater detail about how we get there.

In response to yesterday’s post, in which I suggested it was time for journalists to start asking white actors, directors, and writers rather than people of color about how their careers have been influenced by race and why Hollywood is so overwhelmingly white, a reader directed me to this fantastic clip of Shame and Hunger director Steve McQueen making precisely that point, laying out exactly the questions that should be asked, and watching as his white male counterparts at the roundable get very, very nervous:

One of the things I think has been interesting about watching folks talk about Lena Dunham, Girls, and race is that it’s one of the only times I can think of where a white creator was asked (quite fairly, I think, though Terry Gross could have been more probing) about race and the role it played in her creation. Like her answers or not, at least Dunham seemed prepared to have a conversation about the assumptions and decisions that made her show what it was. That’s a lot more than any of these older, Oscar-nominated dudes were ready to do. Maybe next time, they’ll be prepared. And hopefully one of the lessons of Girls will be that many more of these conversations should be happening in interviews. As commenter Jenni put it on Twitter, “White people have race, and men have gender. We should always be talking about these things.” Or at least more often.

Hemingway & Gellhorn, HBO’s splashy biopic of Ernest (a mustached Clive Owen) and journalist Martha (an ass-baring Nicole Kidman) has been thoroughly filleted by my fellow critics, and I’m not going to replicate their complaints against what I found to be an oddly trite movie. But there was one thing I found rather striking about it, though more as a cautionary tale than as a thing to praise: the shifts between dramatically different styles of cinematography. Watching Hemingway & Gellhorn felt more than a little like flipping through an Instagram stream, though to less evocative effect.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with juxtaposing these different styles and signaling changes in tone for a pair of extremely mercurial people. When Hemingway battles a marlin in Key West, the frame is saturated in blues that in a final shot are soaked in red to mark his suicide by shotgun. In Cuba, and in the throes of marital bliss, they’re captured in blurry pops of color. The image takes on an HD sharpness when it lingers on the breasts and buttocks of dancers in a club who inspire Hemingway and Gellhorn to slip away from a drunken twist, the sight of these beautiful women in their act and changing costumes heightening their mutual desire.

But when it come to the couples’ work, the stylistic showiness of Hemingway & Gellhorn ends up distancing us from the emotion it wants to convey rather than strengthening it. When Hemingway and Gellhorn are working together in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, she filing dispatches for Collier’s, he shooting The Spanish Earth, the movie captures them in the sepia tones and occasionally jerky moments that replicate the kind of footage he and his crew are capturing. When Gellhorn sees a burned baby in China or encounters a young girl with a pet turtle in an opium den, they’re in black-and-white, which lends a documentary cast to her encounters, but also means we don’t have to reckon with the full, horrifying state of the baby’s skin, the damage done to the young girl. And when Gellhorn flees the sight of the horrors at Dachau, she stumbles through a Brothers’ Grimm-style forest cast in mossy grays. Maybe the show’s budget prevented a full-scale or even minor-scale recreation of a concentration camp, but the sequence ends up treating her more like a fairy-tale heroine than a correspondent bearing witness. She sees ugliness, her capacity to bear witness to it is one of the things that defines her, but the movie can’t bear to show us anything but loveliness even in the midst of Gellhorn’s trauma. Both of these sequences would have had much more power had they been presented straightforwardly, if we saw what she saw with a Hollywood approximation of how she saw it.

The thing that’s fun about Instagram is that we can use it to make our lives look more heightened and dramatic than they usually are. But Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn’s lives are supposed to already be as exciting as we’d like to make ours look. The flashiness of the cinematography in Hemingway & Gellhorn feels like an indication of lack of confidence in their story, rather than the deployment of available tactics where they’re needed. Just because you can saturate something with color or swath it in sepia doesn’t mean you have to.

In case any of you haven’t seen it yet, I wanted to call your attention to Emily Nussbaum’s New Yorker column on Community and Doctor Who, which is really a stealth argument that it’s time for those who look down their nose at genre fiction to reconsider, in part, perhaps, because genre fiction itself has changed:

The original “Who” dwelt on pure sci-fi obsessions, abstract questions of how society is organized and the line between humans and machines. But, as deeply as fans loved the show, its themes were rarely emotional. Instead, it jumped from Aztec civilization to Mars, as much an educational show for children as an adult narrative, with a British-colonialist view of the universe. (So many savages, so little time.) The series’ most striking feature was the Doctor himself: in contrast to “Star Trek” ’s Kirk—the Kennedyesque leader of a diverse society—the early Doctor Who was an alien iconoclast with two hearts and a universe-wide Eurail Pass. For a certain breed of viewer, this was an intoxicating ideal: the know-it-all whose streak of melancholy—or prickly rage, depending on who was Who—had to be honored, because he actually did know everything. Though that show had its charms, I was surprised, and delighted, to find that the modern “Doctor Who” has a very different emphasis: it’s a show about relationships, in an epic and mythological vein.

“It’s so much larger when you’re on the inside,” she writes of science fictional shows, though it’s worth remembering that emotional complexity and attentiveness to relationships aren’t the only thing that validate science fiction. There’s plenty of value in well-executed silly gadgets and drivebys to distant civilizations. The Daleks may be low-effects “Nazi-ish pepper pots,” but shabby exteriors and crude mechanically can be a vehicle for totalitarianism as well as glitz and glamor. Dropping in on a planet or a time per week can read like a survey of the Empire, but early Star Trek made those encounters melancholy, and strange, and sad (and occasionally silly) from the outset—those visits were less an affirmation of control but a reminder of how much there is out there. It’s not less worthwhile to dream about how we’ll interact with the strangenesses of the future than to ruminate on how we might have interacted with people we already know in the past. The world is changing rapidly, and even outwardly silly thought experiments may yield useful lessons and parallels. How we’d behave under siege may be a question that fluctuates only slightly if the invaders are orcs, or medieval humans, or Nazis, or cybermen. How we define humanity is a question that can be extended and expanded by science fiction in a way that realism or historical fiction may not allow us to access. Execution is one thing, but ambition itself is not inherently laughable or dismissable.

Genre fiction may become respectable when it’s seen to be answering the same sorts of questions as literature, and if it meets certain standards for prose or artistry. But judging fiction on the former rather than simply the latter says more about the gatekeepers of respectability—the New Yorker a week earlier banged the guilty pleasure drum to no particular effect or insight, saying “part of the pleasure we derive from them is the knowledge that we could be reading something better”—than about the fiction that’s up for judgement.

In a much-circulated comment in a thread about this week’s episode of Girls, the AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff, in response to a commenter declaring that Lena Dunham needs to be funnier because of how unattractive she is, laid out precisely how sad it is, and how much people deny themselves, when they default to careless, angry misogyny. It’s a powerful short essay, and I was most struck by these lines: “I don’t know what it is about this show that makes people make snide, misogynistic attacks against it. I don’t know what it is about this show that makes people unwilling to extend it even the most basic of critical charities, like accepting its central premises.” I actually think I know exactly why this is, and Todd’s exchange with this commenter is a jarring reminder for me that for a moment this spring, I forgot it.

Much has been made of Dunham’s willingness to display her body in both Tiny Furniture and Girls, her lack of fear about being subject to scrutiny that terrifies actresses whose bodies more clearly conform to Hollywood standards. But what’s radical about Dunham isn’t just her willingness to take off her clothes, but what kinds of stories she tells about herself, both clothed and nude.

This is a radical oversimplification, but Hollywood tends to sort women into two categories: those with bodies that fall within the generally accepted parameters for commercialized beauty, and those who don’t. If an actress’s body falls within those parameters, all kinds of stories are available to her: she can have a career, a child, be a warrior, a lover, a genius, a drunk. But if an actress’s body doesn’t meet those standards, most of the stories she will be allowed to literally embody will be drawn from the non-conformity of her looks. Melissa McCarthy can romance a man whose body is like hers on Mike and Molly when Hollywood decides it wants to affirm that everyone can find love, and a man who’s shorter and thinner than her in Bridesmaids when it wants to make a joke of her voraciousness. In Drop Dead Diva, about a model reincarnated as a non-thin lawyer, Brooke Elliott’s character acts as an education in inner goodness for a formerly vapid woman, as if goodness and an understanding of spiritual beauty increase in some sort of direct proportion with weight. With “sassy,” non-thin African-American women, fleshliness is supposed to be some sort of conduit to truth-telling—liberated from, or locked out of full societal acceptance, they’re granted a pop-cultural license to comment on and critique it—NBC’s Best Friends Forever even gave us a sassy elementary-schooler to judge everything from the main character’s pulled pork to her love life, cast into the role of perfecting a white lady at the age of eight.

Some of the stories in Girls are drawn from Lena Dunham’s body, of course. When she describes Marnie as a “Victoria’s Secret angel” and herself as a “fat baby angel,” or when Adam plays with Hannah’s stomach fat, her character is conforming to expectations. She is self-deprecating, aware that her body conveys different value than Marnie’s. But instead of telling a story about how Hannah learns she is worthy of love, or any of the other pre-approved storylines for women with non-Hollywood bodies, Girls isn’t really content to stay within that expected set of narratives. The geography of Hannah’s world isn’t boundaried by the countours of her body. When she and Adam have sex, it’s not her body that’s funny, it’s his pornified fantasies, and when she has sex with a nice-guy pharmacist, the joke is his extreme deference even though he knows very little about his own desires. In the storyline about Hannah’s boss the sexual harasser, it’s not supposed to be hilarious that she thinks he desires her because she’s unattractive, but that she’s mistaken his lazy familiarity for a desire for action.
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The bridge is yours.

-The evilest 1 percenters in television history.

-Even the most desperate broadcast networks don’t think they need older viewers.

-NFL players look beyond football to Hollywood.

-Alex Trebek on leaving Jeopardy.

-Who knew Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunger would be a critique of our heroic notions of the presidency?

It’s going to be very, very hard for Elementary, CBS’s Sherlock Holmes adaptation, to convince Sherlock diehards that it’s superior in any way to the miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in any way except in that there will be more of it. But every modern interpretation tends to pick one facet of the great detective’s personality and hone in, and so I think Elementary’s decision to focus on Sherlock as an addict will be a nice complement to Sherlock’s focus on Sherlock as someone with potential Asperger syndrome:

In the stories, Watson regularly discusses Holmes’ use of cocaine and morphine, but the stories tend to track away from these conversations rather quickly, as in The Sign of Four where Holmes admits he uses because “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.” Watson warns him to “Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process which involves increased tissue-change and may at least leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?”

But his warning is diverted by the arrival of a mental exercise that puts Holmes off his second hit of coke. Arthur Conan Doyle was still writing stories on the assumption that we were more interested in the cases Holmes could solve than in Holmes and Watson themselves. In so much as the mysteries illuminated anything, they illuminated London and British society, and to a much lesser extent, the flexibilities that let said society tolerate a man as singular as Sherlock Holmes, and the limitations that led him, at the end of that case, to declare that “For me, there still remains the cocaine-bottle.”

Today, psychology is the point, and we learn about society and its attitudes through a microscope not a sprawling city map. And with Dr. House finally gone from Fox’s airwaves, there may be room for another cranky, brilliant addict on our airwaves. CBS may favor broad entertainments. But when it comes to gaging the market and looking beyond the PBC and BBC sets, it knows us all too well. Whether Elementary succeeds or fails may determine on how interestingly the show manages to update the narrative of the brilliant addict who turns to drugs to entertain himself in a society that moves too slowly for him to match our contemporary understandings of the science of addiction and the acceptable narrative paths to recovery.

From a Vulture interview with the actor who, to the delights of those of us who loved him in The Wire and Luther, is starring in Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel:

Just don’t ask if he blames a shortage of roles for black actors. “Next question,” he says when I raise the subject. “I’m so bored of answering that. Are there differences between black actors’ opportunities and white actors’ opportunities? Yes, there are. It’s been said. I’d rather a young black actor read about success as opposed to how tough it was. I get these roles because I can act and that’s it. Hopefully that’s it. The less I talk about being black, the better.”

He doesn’t mind talking about growing up poor, though. From the rough neighborhood of Hackney, the son of West African immigrants, he left home at 16 to join the National Youth Music Theatre, and toured with a production of Guys and Dolls. (He played Big Jule.) “We traveled the world,” he says. “I didn’t ever see a future in musicals, but I loved it.” It also kept him out of fights in Canning Town, the ostensibly nicer neighborhood where he went to high school, then a hub for the extreme right-wing party, the National Front. “Their beliefs are ‘Keep Britain White,’ ” he says. “Walking down the street, someone would call you a black cunt. I was like, ‘Fuck that.’ ” It was around that time that he shortened his given name, Idrissa, which he says means “firstborn son,” because he got tired of beating people up when they told him it sounded too feminine. “I quickly got well known because I was tall and wasn’t taking any shit.”

Of course, a lot of what the magazine describes as talking about class here is actually talking about race as inflected by class. But I do kind of take the point—in the quest to illustrate how Hollywood is denying itself talented leading men and women, great performances, new audience, journalists can run the risk of asking actors the same questions over and over again, that they find reductive and frustrating. And it’s a tactic that ends up doing the same thing that Hollywood does: treats whiteness as a natural default. I’d be curious to hear more white actors, particularly those playing characters who were people of color in life or in source material, asked to talk about race, and in those cases in particular, how they feel about participating in the homogenization of Hollywood products. And even more so to hear those questions posed to writers and directors. Making actors of color constantly relive their frustrations, especially when they feel they may not be able to be honest about those frustrations out of fear of limiting their future opportunities, may provide ammunition for making decision-makers embarrassed. But that’s not actually the same thing as asking people who make the decisions that make Hollywood whiter why they made those choices, and why they think they’re acceptable.

This post contains spoilers through the May 27 episode of Game of Thrones.

In the world of Game of Thrones, the greatest challenge for the characters is often knowing how to behave in any given situation, whether it’s a court under siege, the front line of a battle, wildling captivity, or a sophisticated, depraved foreign court. Because the society is so rigidly constrained by class, gender, and martial roles, often characters’ survival depends on how well they’re able to conform to the roles that people expect or need them to take up. Arya’s ability to survive in Tywin Lannister’s employ involved a balance of servility and amusingness, while her sister Sansa needs to please some members of the Lannister court by her utter submission and others with flashes of spitfire temper that indicate a greater capacity than that normally exhibited by and allowed to noble ladies. But on rare occasions, transcending the role that’s been assigned to you and the accepted wisdom can change your life or save it. And as Stannis’s fleet converges on King’s Landing, sailing smoothly into Tyrion’s trap under cover of darkness, find what breaking character can win them.

First, there’s Sandor Clegane, who’s taken something of a smaller role in the show than in the novels. But as King’s Landing braces for invasion and seige, he steps forward to tell the truth about anyone unlucky enough to cross his path. “There’s women in the ground. I put some there myself. So have you. You like fucking, and drinking, and singing. But killing, killing’s the thing you love,” he sourly informs Bronn, who’s having a drink and a girl as preparation. “You’re just like me. Only smaller.” Bronn may be able to dispute the question of which one of them would win in a fight, but he’s unable to deny the essential similarity. And when he sees what Sandor fears, watches the bigger man paralyzed as a man on fire wheels towards him on the battlefield, Bronn saves his life with a well-aimed shot, an acknowledgement of fellowship, and that he knows Sandor’s weaknesses too. The obscene green light of that fire lets Sandor finally see his own limits clearly. “I lost half my men. The Blackwater’s on fire,” he tells the king he’s protected with dogged loyalty. When Joffrey orders him back into battle, Sandor liberates himself in a fashion so startling it allows him to escape. “Fuck the Kingsguard,” he declares in terms more definitive and sincere than Jamie Lannister could ever muster. “Fuck the city. Fuck the king.”
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The season of graduation is upon us, a time when those moving on to the next stage in their lives are deluged with cliche wisdom and even worse pop music. So to countervail all of that, here’s a reminder that growing up is awesome, you will stay in touch with all the right people (who mostly won’t be who you expect), and if all else fails, Beth Ditto will be there to bail you out.

First, a reminder: graduation is overhyped. People have been worrying about keeping friends and staying with their school significant others since the Paleolithic age, or at least since the Beach Boys were covering the Four Freshman a capella and having it count as pop music. You will survive, and the ties that endure will not be the ones you fret about the most:

Second piece of caution: fetishizing your youth is silly. Growing up is fantastic. You have more responsibilities, but also infinitely more freedom, and infinitely more sense of what you can do with it. Oh, who am I kidding. I just wanted to post this version of “Forever Young” that’s been turned into a Ron Paul-influenced screed about individual liberty:

But if you are worried, after hanging out with my best friend form high school in San Francisco, I can attest that Vitamin C was totally right that it is possible to stay in touch with folks, though good luck on the finding a job that won’t interfere with your tan thing. That may not be a reasonable thing to expect in your benefits package in this economy:

Blink-182 is criminally underrated. I sort of feel like “Going Away to College,” which acknowledges that you can both love someone and inevitably end up growing apart from them, should be mandatory listening for every high school senior in the country:

I would probably do almost anything that Baz Luhrmann told me to do, but Mary Schmich’s advice (often attributed to Kurt Vonnegut) is honestly dead-on, even if I recognized its value better in hindsight than I did when I heard it in middle school:

And for anyone for whom school wasn’t even close to the best year of their lives, Green Day has the perfect kiss-off:

Do people remember Semisonic? Does liking them make me an Old? Either way, as a follow-up to the whole life gets better when you grow up and go out into the world thing, “Closing Time” is a good reminder that sometimes a definitive, dignified exit is better than hanging around wishing that things wouldn’t have to change:

And Beth Ditto has just the anthem you need to move on to the next one:

Romantic comedy was once a noble genre, a place to work out not only will they or won’t they, but why or why not, and should they or shouldn’t they? The Lady Eve may be a goofy romp about a conwoman and her beer-heir mark, but Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda’s spiky courtship is all about how much we can overcome deeply ingrained prejudices about class and sexual experience. In When Harry Met Sally, the two main characters talked their way through what makes a good relationship for a decade—and worked out their attitudes towards their careers and themselves as friends—before they got together. And movies like Annie Hall defied the traditional meaning of comedy—it ends with a breakup, not a marriage—to acknowledge both the power and potential for heartbreak of modern relationships.

But in recent years, romantic comedies have gone timid. In the quest for PG-13 ratings, they can’t say much about sex. And in their desire to rake in dollars, an interchangeable array of blonde or blondish heroines with disposable jobs in PR and fashion have spent ninety minutes resisting an similarly dull assortment of disc jockeys, television producers, and businessmen. A few R-rated romantic comedies from Judd Apatow and the creators in his orbit have broken the mold, but they haven’t been enough to change the conventional wisdom of the industry.

All of this is the reason Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria, about Mortimer Granville’s (Hugh Dancy) invention of the vibrator in Victorian England, is simultaneously a delight and a relief. There is a will-they-or-won’t-they couple at its heart, of course: when Mortimer, who believes in the germ theory of medicine, takes a job with women’s physician Dr. Charles Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), he meets Dr. Dalrymple’s very different daughters, dutiful Emily (Felicity Jones) and Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a socialist feminist who runs a London settlement house. While Mortimer plans to take over Dr. Dalrymple’s practice and becomes engaged to Emily, he’s drawn to Charlotte, whose ideals appeal to him even as she rejects the diagnosis of hysteria, which gives Mortimer his living, as an attempt to disguise the true dissatisfactions women experience. And when her political work gets Charlotte put on trial and branded hysterical, Mortimer must decide if he will let her be institutionalized and subject to an involuntary hysterectomy or maintain his devotion to the diagnosis that’s made his career. I spoke with Wexler about the declining stakes of romantic comedy, the importance of careers and values in successful relationships, and how she ended up making romantic comedy for men. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the things you brought up was the decline of the romantic comedy, and this is very much a romantic comedy. I was curious if you thought that reflected the inevitable homogenization of any genre when Hollywood gets their hands on it, or whether consumers have actually backed away from romantic comedies where the issues are larger than will they or won’t they?

I think a lot of romantic comedies revolve around will they or won’t they. And yes, will they or won’t they get together is where ours is, but it’s not quite the central question. It’s more how will they? I think a lot of the better writing in romantic comedies these days has tended towards the R-rated romantic comedies, Knocked Up, Bridesmaids…I think Knocked Up, they take the characters, you put them in really hard situations, and you see how they deal. I think that’s a good thing. But the kind of witty banter, the kind of Hepburn-Cary Grant stuff is just not around as much, and it just felt right for this story, with this quirk of history.

It seems like in a lot of romantic comedies, the characters don’t really get treated like adults. Their careers raen’t particularly important to them. It’s a little infantilizing. One of the things that’s fun about Charlotte is whoever she ends up with has to share her values.

And her passion for her work. I think that’s where they connect first and foremost is they’re passionate about their work and what they believe in. They’re both true believers in their own way…I think one of the things you try to figure out is what kind of movie you’re trying to make. And I knew, on a very core level, I was making a romantic comedy. In that, I think the fundamental kind of question is about how and who you fall in love with, what draws you to people.

The movie is a lot about progressives in different ways. Mortimer, his character is a medical progressive. The rest of his life, he kind of fits tidily into the box. It doesn’t make sense for him to buck the system because it’s set up for him. But in the end, he can’t deny the truth in front of his face. His friend Edmund, played by Rupert Everett, is a progressive in science and technology, and he also doesn’t fit neatly into the box as a gay character. But he is part of the aristocracy, and he’s wealthy, and has ways around it. And Charlotte is the girl who can’t help it. She knows it would be easier not to raise her hand in the back of the classroom, so to speak, but she still has something she has to say. She knows it would be easier for her, but she doesn’t know how to be anything else. She’s a truth-teller.

In this kind of film, what their job is illuminates their character’s journey. It’s also important because it’s how it all happens. Because he’s a doctor who gets a job treating women for hysteria, that’s how he meets her. I’ve been looking at a lot of other films right now, and we’re always trying to get away from anybody’s job because it’s about the relationship. And sometimes it can be very cheesy and stupid to resolve something about the relationship through they achieve something at work. It’s kind of sideways. But in this case, I think so much of the film is about acknowledging the truth that’s right in front of you even if culture wants you to pretend it’s something else. And the only way these two are ever going to get together, the big obstacle between them is their differing opinions about what the truth is and what’s acceptable. Until they can find a way to each other as passionate people who are true believers, they’ll never be together. And they’re not even trying to be together…It’s when he wakes up that their relationship starts to work out.
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