Watch Justified, FX’s great, slightly weird new quasi-Western based on an Elmore Leonard character.  I watched the first three episodes for this review for The Atlantic, and it’s seriously pretty great:

Justified, FX’s sly, potentially delightful Western drama based on an Elmore Leonard character—which premieres tonight at 10pm—is a show about a great many things: Nazi prison gangs, the brotherhood of coal miners, misplaced loot, terrible jokes about Baptists, business plans for sex shops, drug cartels, coyotes who sneak people back into Mexico and misapplied dentistry. Perhaps most importantly, though, it’s a story about a man and his hat. 

That hat, an ostentatious white Stetson, is the means by which Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshal played with sexy nerve by Timothy Olyphant, enters the show’s first episode, on his way to kill a man. The initial shot of the back of his overdressed head pulls back to reveal palm trees and then a perfect Miami pool, the environs from which Givens will quickly exile himself by dispatching three bullets in the chest of a gun-runner who once killed one of Givens’ comrades. Because the other man pulled his gun first, Givens will insist that the shooting was “justified,” a word he softens towards the end when he uses it, and he uses it frequently. Of course, Givens ends up shooting an old friend shortly after his transfer, leading his new boss to caution, “If you was in the first grade and you bit someone every week, they’d start to think of you as a biter.”

I’d definitely urge folks to stick with the show, even if you don’t love the first episode about redneck Nazis.  The show is a lot less predictable than it initially seems, but it takes an episode-by-episode comparison to make that clear.

I recognize this idea may strike people as really strange.  I’m not even sure of it myself.  But wouldn’t it be interesting to see Guillermo del Toro do a Wonder Woman origin story?  io9 got me thinking about this with their post on why there hasn’t be a Smallville-equivalent show for Diana Prince.  I think that’s independently a great idea, and I’m sort of platform-agnostic as to whether I’d like to see that origin story on the big or small screen.

I recognize that del Toro tends to operate in a somewhat grimy register as he did in the Hellboy movies, and I do tend to think of Wonder Woman as clean, sleek, streamlined.  But I actually think Hellboy holds the keys as to why del Toro might be wonderful for Wonder Woman.  First, I think it’s important to remember that Wonder Woman is an Amazon, technically humanoid but separate from humanity.  She’s kind of a low-scale deity.  And del Toro understands beautifully that distinction, the struggles of people who are more, and in some cases much more, than human, but still want to live in the world of human interactions and emotions.  Hellboy gives up his horns, Wonder Woman her immortality.  They make particular sacrifices for the chance to connect, and to act in the world, I like that.  Second, del Toro’s really quite good with women characters.  I love his (and Selma Blair’s) Liz Sherman.  I’d like him to have a chance to play with a female character who is a little less conflicted about her powers, simply to see what he’d do with it.  I also think the ambivalence about a particular man in Hellboy might translate into a more generalized ambivalence about men, which would be pretty critical to Wonder Woman’s introduction to the wider world.

Anyway, it’s really just wishful thinking.  But I do like del Toro’s very particular vision.

So when I wrote a couple of years ago that Sex and the City was a superhero show (and movie) for women, I didn’t expect that to become literal.  But I have no idea how else to interpret these publicity shots for the movie (captions are by the ladies at Jezebel, from whence these are snagged).  The girls seem to be in actual high-fashion superhero drag.  I do recognize the ridiculousness of this.  It is insane, it is consumptive, it is obnoxious.  But I kind of love the transcendent absurdity at work here.  These ladies are out of orbit.  They are, as Kathy Bates declared in Primary Colors ”outside the mainstream.”  And that’s how you get to superheroes.  You start with cartoonish people beating someone up, or being chivalrous, or whatever.  And then magic happens, and you make the leap.

I guess it’s pretty cool that the Obamas get to do things like have Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg over for an advance screening of The Pacific, which began airing this weekend.  And I definitely enjoy getting to request critics’ copies of things.  But, and this may be a weird quirk of mine, I’ve never particularly cared about whether I beat other people to cultural phenomena.  Maybe I should have more bloodhound instinct, more desire to find something before everyone else does, and be the person who introduces it to the world, who can say that I was listening to whoever back when they were playing bars in Austin or releasing mix tapes in New York.  But I’d be really profoundly sorry to have my pleasure and enjoyment of any given thing diminished by the timing of my introduction to it.  And I care a lot more about trying to understand things and what they mean than the speed with which I find it.  Given how long it took me to really start a deep engagement in pop culture, there are huge swaths of things I’d be disqualified from getting into if I felt like I’d missed them, and it was too late and everything was ruined forever.  And I see no reason to deny myself that.