Banking on the success of TV shows like Lost,  NBC is debuting The Event on September 20. The premise is a little fuzzy: network execs haven’t revealed much about the show since debuting it at Comic-Con earlier this summer. Here’s what we do know: during an investigation of his fiancee’s disappearance, a man discovers what could be a massive cover-up. Not a lot to go on, but that short description leaves a lot of room to explore different plot devices.

Still, I can’t help but thinking The Event looks like another big budget conspiracy series that will start strong and fizzle halfway through the season. Where shows like Lost succeeded in offering answers along with more and larger questions, shows like Flashfoward and Heroes got off on its on mysteries without satisfying the audience. The cast (including Blair Underwood and Jason Ritter) promises potential–but “Flashforward” and “Heroes” had great casts, too. And NBC doesn’t have a very strong lineup this fall–so if “The Event” crashes, their season could end up looking mighty shaky.

But I’ll watch–if only to find out if the first episode lives up to the hype. Sometimes a simple premise can be developed into an intricate puzzle…and sometimes, it flops. I’m hoping for the former.

Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy, starting with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in the form of the books as well as the Swedish movie versions and the not-yet-made-but-much-discussed American movie versions, has been everywhere recently. (Alyssa wrote about it here and here.) If you’re done with the Larsson books, or were deterred by their length or the amount of violence, I’d recommend taking a look at Larsson’s countryman Henning Mankell.

Mankell’s Inspector Wallander crime novels have the same bleak but appealing Swedish flavor as Larsson’s books, but Mankell is a better writer, and his books are even more compulsively readable. Wallander is an admirable but flawed hero, and a nice antidote to the too-perfect and too-desired Mikael Blomkvist. He’s an exceptional police detective, but he has problems with his ex-wife and teen daughter and aging father, so he drinks and listens to opera and contemplates the fate of Swedish society. There’s a lot of anxiety about society in these books, and the characters are trying to sort out how issues like immigration actually affect their daily lives. Despite this underlying tension, though, the mysteries themselves are superbly plotted and thoroughly satisfying. So brew yourself a cup of coffee and curl up with Faceless Killers, the first in the series. (The coffee is important. People drink coffee ALL THE TIME in these books. If you like coffee at all, you’re going to end up craving it as you read.) An added bonus: All the snow provides a nice escape from the current heat wave.

(If you’d rather watch your mysteries – or you want to both read and watch – never fear! The BBC has made six of the novels, so far, into adaptations starring Kenneth Branagh. They play on PBS’s Masterpiece: Mystery!, or you can get them from Netflix.)

Michael Ross makes a good point on The Root today about Mad Men. Now that the fourth season of the series is well into the 1960s, writers can no longer use the excuse of historical accuracy not to include black people in its cast of characters. Ross highlights at least one prominent black man who worked in advertising:

Jason Chambers’ 2008 book, Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry, recounts [...] the career of Georg Olden, an African-American trailblazer in advertising. After the United States entered World War II, Olden, the Alabama-born son of a Baptist preacher, left college and got a job as an artist for the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. He later went to work at CBS and left there in 1960, at the age of 40, to pursue a new career in advertising. He signed on as the television art group director with BBDO.

In 1963, much in demand, Olden accepted an offer to move to the influential agency McCann Erickson to become vice president and senior art director. That same year, he became the first African-American designer of a postage stamp, a stylized depiction of a broken chain that marked the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Olden went on to win seven Clios (the advertising industry’s equivalent of the Oscars) for his work throughout the 1960s. (Icing on the cake: Olden himself designed the actual Clio statuette, inspired by a Brancusi sculpture.)

Throughout that decade, federal and state governments did what they could to make Olden less of an advertising anomaly.

“The New York City Commission on Human Rights and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission both focused significant attention on the advertising industry during the 1960s, and their efforts reinforced and extended those introduced by civil rights activists,” Chambers writes. “The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination in employment, broke down many of the visible and invisible barriers to blacks in the advertising industry. As a result, many agencies began to lure black professionals from other industries and to recruit at black colleges.”

It’s true that Mad Men, as much as I love the show, often skirts the actual racial, gender, andd socioeconomic conflict of the 1960s in the interest of focusing more on the individual characters. Its dealings with racial issues — Pete Campbell’s idea of moving into the “Negro” market and Paul Kinsey’s black girlfriend and brief exploration into Civil Rights issues — often seem stunted and forced. It’s almost as if the writers realized they had to work Civil Rights and changing demographics into the show somehow and thought these brief mentions and storylines would do.

I’d argue that the same point could be made about dealing with the women’s liberation movement. Though Peggy is an admirable character as she works to be thought of as equal to her male copywriter peers and Betty Draper’s frustration with housewifedom is interesting, the show’s writers often touch too briefly on such issues. They’d rather have a character tote a topical book than feature a conversation between female characters about sexism in the office — something I’m sure wasn’t as much as an anomaly as the writers would make you think. They prefer to be subtle.

I’m ultimately still a Mad Men fan and will keep tuning in (even though I’m beginning to agree with Tracie Egan Morrissey that this season is getting a tad dull), but I do wish they’d introduce a substantive African American character or attempt to deal with controversial 1960s issues in a more central way.

My personal theory of Weezer is that some time around 2004, some hipster who spent high school moping to Pinkerton killed Rivers Cuomo’s dog, and Make Believe, the Red Album, Raditude, and now Hurley are all part of an Ahab-esque quest for vengeance. Alternately, we can embrace the Matt Sharp theory.

The correlation is pretty compelling. Weezer releases two of the best rock albums of the ’90s. Then it breaks up. It gets back together without Sharp as bassist, and soon enough “We Are All on Drugs” happens. But what this ignores is that the Green Album and Maladroit, while certainly not up to par with the first two records, are still very fun. I’m not going to say that “Photograph” is as good as “Why Bother?” or something similarly ridiculous, but it, “Hash Pipe”, and “Island in the Sun” are legitimately good singles. “Dope Nose” holds up well, and “Keep Fishin’”, if a little saccharine, is as catchy as anything the band ever wrote:

I’m willing to accept a limited Matt Sharp theory, which posits that the band’s decline from all-time great status to being merely quite good was due to his departure. But the band only became a true horror show after two albums without him, which suggests some other causal mechanism is needed to explain the full scale of its downward spiral.

Yesterday the Hollywood Reporter noted that of the prominent ladymags — Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Elle – will all feature actresses over 40 on their September covers: Halle Berry, Jennifer Aniston, and Julia Roberts, respectively. It’s wonderful to see that Hollywood isn’t disposing of actresses as they get older — if anything, older actresses are becoming more valuable, since Sandra Bullock has become the top-paid actress in Hollywood last year when she pulled in $56 million. (Such a rise in older actresses doesn’t appear to be the case in the porn industry, though, because 28-year-old Aurora Snow was relegated to playing MILF roles once she turned 24.)

But let’s face it, the women who will grace the covers of the highest selling month of fashion magazines of the year certainly won’t look 40 by the time Photoshop is done with them. Jezebel’s Photoshop of Horrors series does a great job of revealing exactly how terrifying Photoshop gone wrong can be. Even before Photoshop, it’s not much of a stretch to say that the women in Hollywood tend to still fit a certain mold of beauty. And for all of the praise over the fact that Berry (soon to be 44), Aniston (41), and Roberts (42) will be gracing magazine covers, these women are still in their early 40s. It’s harder to say if these women will still be valuable and grace magazine covers 10 or 20 years from now.

Furthermore, although it’s great to see a woman of color like Halle Berry, the first women to portray an African American role that was nominated for an Oscar, women of color in fashion magazines are still few and far between. An analysis done by Sociological Images recently did an analysis of Bride.com, revealing that of the 600+ images of brides on the site, just 43 were African American. The site portrayed few women who could be identified as Hispanic and zero women that could be classified as Asian. By far, white women are still portrayed as the standard of beauty.

As I’ve mentioned before, I understand that achieving diversity is a challenge. It’s not something that can be slapped together, and I recognize many of the institutional problems that must be tackled first. People should also be praised for doing something well. I’m glad that Hollywood and the fashion industry are still including the over-40 demographic. I do hope, though that the industries of fashion and movie-making don’t just pat themselves on the back and go on to business as usual. It would be nice if they kept working on expanding the definition of beauty and talent.