The 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate is one of very few movies I’ve ever walked out of, so I’m intrigued to see that Showtime’s Homeland appears to be a season-long a variation on the sleeper-agent story:

The show comes from 24 executive producers Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, so it remains to be seen where the show comes down on torture. From trailers, it looks like the potential mole’s status as a war hero precludes Claire Danes’ agent from going hard on him or anyone else, leaving her to rely on conventional investigative techniques. And of course, her character is also supposed to suffer from bipolar disorder, which is a convenient way to give her credibility issues with her superiors at Homeland Security. I’m curious to see how this comes together. Because it’s not on a network, it’s unlikely to have as significant a cultural impact as 24, but it still would be nice to see a show build the case for investigative work and targeted actions as a response to terrorism, rather than all-out war.

A moment of reckoning about the American relationship with Pakistan sure seems like a good time for an adaptation of Midnight’s Children, doesn’t it? Turns out we’re getting one, filmed in Sri Lanka in secret after a late 1990s attempt to make the movie there failed, and almost derailed after a diplomatic complaint by Iran, which is apparently still pretty attached to the fatwa against Midnight’s Children author Salman Rushdie. This already sounds promising, and it helps that the movie’s starring Satya Bhabha, who played Matthew Patel in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (a real gift to male actors of a certain age who wanted to flex their comedic chops) and directed by Academy Award-nominated Deepa Mehta.

Midnight’s Children, which takes place in both India and Pakistan, definitely has a current-events hook for American audiences who want to understand the region better, though its perspective on the two countries’ troubled relationship, the State of Emergency, and pushes for state lines based on language, among many other issues, aren’t defined by American strategic interests. That may mean fewer people in the States end up seeing it, which would be too bad.

Midnight’s Children may not have the galaxy-spanning reach of something like Thor, or the immediate post-September 11 emotional gratification of the Spider-Man movies, but in its own way, it’s much more consequential. “If he and India were to be paired, I would need to tell the story of both twins,” Rushdie writes in his introduction to the book. “Then Saleem, ever a striver for meaning, suggested to me that the whole of modern Indian history happened as it did because of him; that history, the life of his nation-twin, was somehow all his fault.” There’s something a little sterile about watching Spider-Man brawl his way through New York, about watching a trainful of New Yorkers carry his battered body aloft as if he’s Christ, replicating the collective decency of the city in the wake of its worst catastrophe. We’re safe reliving both the damage sustained in the movie, feeling warmed by the depictions of compassion, because the wreckage isn’t real, and the neither is the need to care for a wounded hero. In Midnight’s Children, the outcomes are real and our fictional superheroes help us work our way up to confronting those realities. It’s as if The Dark Knight was an alternate history of the Bush administration’s surveillance programs, instead of just a metaphor for them.

If you’re in Washington on Tuesday and don’t have anything to do after work, come out and meet me! I’m doing a panel on feminism and television at the Women’s Information Network along with veteran entertainment reporter and American University professor Lorrie Lynch Meier and Howard University’s Tia Tyree. The conversation kicks off at 6:30 at 1900 L Street NW, and I imagine it could move to drinks afterwards.

Game of Thrones and True Blood may be HBO’s hottest shows this summer, but the network’s making a big investment in a more grounded direction. It has adaptations of Dick Cheney biographyAngler and 2008 election chronicle Game Change in the pipeline, and is gearing up for Veep, a dark comedy series about an overwhelmed female Vice President, which will air next year. In that environment, HBO’s adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s chronicle of the financial crisis, Too Big To Fail, which premieres on the network at 9 PM tonight, is a test of whether HBO can make excellent movies and shows about the inside business of policy and politics—and whether audiences will tune in to watch them.

If Too Big To Fail is any evidence, they certainly ought to. Most movies about the economic crisis focus on the ordinary Americans who have lost their jobs and homes, whether it’s Drag Me to Hell, about the inadvisability of foreclosing on a powerful gypsy, or The Company Men, a look at masculinity in the wake of corporate downsizing. The main characters in Too Big To Fail are all secure in their fortunes: they might have to downsize to smaller apartments or give up their commutes by helicopter or NetJet, but they’re magnitudes removed from actual desperation. That doesn’t mean that the movie isn’t dramatic—there are a lot of slammed phones, and a scene of Paulson’s staffers listening to him throwing up as yet another deal falls through—but Too Big To Fail can’t rely on the immediate relatable suffering of a family losing its home or parents losing their jobs to engage the audience. It has to stand on the strength of its own writing, simultaneously explaining hugely complex financial and legislative negotiations, while also drawing humor and tension out of them.
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Game of Thrones is a big, complex story about a lot of things: the way gender roles can poison people’s lives, the gap between the highest and lowest classes of society, the interaction between religion and magic, medieval debt ceilings. But the most important question both George R. R. Martin’s novels and HBO’s adaptation is what makes for good leadership, and how to bridge the gap between roles and the people who have the misfortune to fill them.

All season, the show’s drawn out how miserable Robert Baratheon is atop the Iron Throne. Tonight, he’s smacking his wife for insisting that he’s wrong in his role, losing his temper when Cersei tells him “I should wear the armor and you the gown,” then confessing to Ned Stark, “See what she does to me, my loving wife. I should not have hit her. That was not…that was not kingly.” It’s an indication of Robert’s unsuitability that he escapes his kingship by foisting the power of his office on a man who, though he is a good and decent person, we know by now is entirely unsuited for it. Ned might be a good Hand, even a good king, in a fairy-tale world, but he governs by ideal, rather than by any sense of the pragmatic. He’s more concerned with the quality of process than with outcomes.

Similarly, it’s interesting to watch Viserys Targaryen watch his sister, and discover that there’s more to kingship than a title. One of my biggest complaints about this adaptation is that so much of Dothraki society and custom’s been cut in the television scripts, and I think the scene of Dany eating a stallion’s heart would be more powerful if the show had explained why the ritual was important. But seeing Dany do something difficult through Viserys’ eyes, and seeing how disconcerted he is by the affection the Dothraki bear her is revealing of how little prepared he is to rule, how little he knows about what makes people loyal.

And the small, contrasting stories of the Mountain and Bronn take that lesson down the societal hierarchy. Grand Maester Pycelle’s bewilderment at the news that Gregor Clegane has finally become a mad dog shows what a mistake it is to assume that a title elevates a base man. “Why should he turn brigand?” Pycelle asks plaintively. “The man is an anointed knight.” Spiritual rabies, it turns out, is more powerful than an oath. Similarly, when Tyrion bets on a sellsword to champion him in trial by combat, he and the Vale discover how little a title is worth. When he beats her champion, Lysa Arryn complains that “You don’t fight with honor.” “No,” Bronn says matter-of-factly, “he did.” Maybe there was a time when men and their roles matched comfortably. But with winter coming, it may be safer to be a misfit or an outlaw.