In an odd way, Green Lantern is conceptually what I want to see more of in superhero movies, even if it doesn’t completely fulfill the promise of science fiction. It’s a story about a world opening up beyond our comprehension, that places humanity within a greater context. The dialogue looks reasonably snappy here, and it seems like the movie will have a sense of humor. But oh, does the movie look visually awful:

My first thought was that it looks cheap, though that’s probably not exactly right. The budget’s a reported $150 million, isn’t tremendously high for something that’s going to involve this many effects shots, only $10 million more than the budget for Captain America: The First Avenger. But I wonder if the sweep of the story (or at least the story’s conceptions) and the budget just don’t match up in this day and age. If we’re going to see this many different things, we expect them to look good, as James Cameron’s conditioned us.

This is one of the problems of telling good stories about alien civilizations or human advancements—the pace of scientific progress and the changes in how we live that accompany that progress are now so rapid that images of the future aren’t an impossible dream. They’re conceivable, and so it’s not enough to put something slapdash on screen and expect audiences to sign in wonder. As our imaginations have expanded, so has the need to produce something truly exciting to stimulate them.

It’s going to be a television show. I think it may prove less revelatory than most people think because a) Dan Savage has done so much to move the chains on where our baseline discussions about sex being, b) I don’t know that he’ll necessarily be as compelling a speaker as he is a prose author—the guy is a very funny, smart writer, and c) his sexual ethics are less revolutionary than most people think they are. I don’t know that any of this makes him less compelling as a personality, but not everything needs to be on TV. Something like Jersey Shore, which shoves America’s faces in the logical extensions of our addiction to absurd reality television, is always going to be more genuinely shocking and revealing than a married gay dude telling kinksters to mind their manners when it comes to orgy birthday parties

I was glad to see that the ratings for The Killing were good the first night out. It’s an excellent show, and an unusual one as I wrote in The Atlantic last week:

Part of what’s so unusual about The Killing is its format: the 13-episode season is devoted—much like the shorter runs of British series like Prime Suspect or State of Play—to solving a single crime. American procedural shows tend to have a case per episode, a body of the week. Even those that are dedicated to unraveling a larger conspiracy, be it the Baltimore drug networks of The Wire or the identity of the mysterious man in White Collar, generally have at least one mystery they can solve definitively within the programming hour. By contrast, The Killing has only one problem to unravel, and its progress can be maddeningly slow.

But there’s something authentic about that itchy impatience, the fits and starts of an investigation. Enos was pregnant with her son while she was filming, and said she avoided doing the immersive and intensive research she might have otherwise pursued. But Veena Sud, the show’s creator and executive producer, has worked on an unconventional cop show before, the dreamy procedural Cold Case, and had spent time with undercover police officers. Enos says she had help from an unexpected source—one of the still photographers for the pilot was a former homicide detective.

“His hobby had been photography, that’s kind of how he kept himself balanced,” she says. “He retired, but it had been his part-time profession, being a still photographer. He understood both worlds.”

The comments on the piece were illuminating for me, particularly the sense that a show with a female cop as the lead on her own won’t make it. I don’t know that I believe that’s true: certainly, The Closer has a following. But it is revealing, I think, that the mixed-team partner setup has become the hallmark of our police shows. It wasn’t so long ago that Law & Order: Special Victims Unit could partner two white men, John Munch and Brian Cassidy. But I think that pairing would be impossible now. Partner teams are always varied by race or by gender, and there’s much less of a sense most of the time that one person is the lead partner, whether it’s Olivia and Eliot on Special Victims Unit, or Mary and Marshall on In Plain Site. I do think The Killing is unique in the sense that an experienced woman homicide detective is leading an investigation while showing a younger male cop the ropes. But the show is the same as its counterpart (if not peer) shows in its insistence that the police force has to represent all of us.