-Hop in the comment threads on the first installment of the Red Mars book club. And get your requests for summer TV recaps in by Monday.

-Colin Hanks is going to kill a bunch of ladies.

-Not content with the medieval decadence in Game of Thrones, HBO will make an I, Claudius miniseries.

-A Gawker-as-Bright-Lights-Big-City movie is not actually the world’s worst idea.

-I’m traveling this weekend for one of my dearest friend’s wedding, which means the Game of Thrones open thread might be a little late on Monday. But it will happen, I promise, and you will get a little something extra over the weekend in exchange. And in honor of David and Joanna, Spoon’s cover of The Damned’s “Love Song”:

I’ve never really fallen for competition reality shows before. I dislike American Idol‘s tendency to humiliate candidates who aren’t remotely qualified. I can’t taste the food on Top Chef. And I did watch my way through a full season of Project Runway before its move from Bravo to Lifetime, but it never quite stuck. But I’ve finally fallen for one: I am totally, insanely obsessed with The Voice. Too many good things cannot be said about the competition: there are, by design, no duds in the lineup of uniformly strong singers; the format’s oriented toward craft and positive reinforcement, and rewards humor; the mix of judges is genuinely productive and fun to watch.

But I’m also really digging the way the show’s developed as a rebuke to Idol’s habitual weirdness on gay rights — the dominant competition reality show asked a gay contestant to remove any references to his sexual orientation in the first season, ostensibly to make sure he didn’t end up with an unfair advantage, and in season five, ended up with a competitor who was maybe a supporter of the ex-gay movement. Adam Lambert’s non-denial denials about whether he was gay ended up seeming forced and absurd the longer they dragged out. By contrast, the two standouts on The Voice are not only gay, but refreshingly, gay people who the show isn’t forcing to conform to media-friendly stereotypes of lipstick lesbians or fashion-obsessed effeminate gay men. There’s something kind of awesome about watching Beverly McClellan stomp out on stage in a kilt, military jacket, and her shaved head and tattoos, tear into a Melissa Etheridge track, and to have Blake Shelton, who earlier in the season got himself in hot water for rewriting a country song to have weirdly homophic lyrics, tell her how attractive he finds her:

Or to watch her prove that you don’t need to be a pantsless wonder like her coach to light up a crowd on “Lady Marmalade”:

The show’s not perfect, of course. It was really too bad that the show labeled Nakia’s partner Robert his “friend” in subtitles after Nakia’s battle round, especially since he’s talked extensively about how important Robert is to him, and how he’s doing the show as a thank-you to Robert for all the support he’s given him over the years:

American Idol may do national auditions, but The Voice, from its competitors to its mix of musical styles, actually looks like America and how Americans listen to music.

I always hate that moment in the campaign when reporters start asking presidential hopefuls what’s on their iPods, not because I think candidates’ pop culture preferences are irrelevant, but because I think they never actually tell the truth about what they listen to and watch. So just for the heck of it, I decided to search the newly released trove of Palin emails for entertainment terms to see what turned up. There aren’t a lot of them, but Palin adviser Meghan Stapleton urged Palin to butter up movie producer Ian Bryce when he was in Alaska for work on Michael Bay’s first Transformers movie — one aide suggested she have people working on the movie to dinner, and jokingly take credit for fixing the weather that was making shoots difficult.

But the best thing in there? Todd and Sarah went to see Juno in March 2008, “our second movie we’ve seen together in the last four years.” Somehow, I don’t think Bristol hollered, “Thundercats are go!” when her water broke.

Since I’ve had a couple of requests in comments for recaps of television shows, I thought I’d open up the floor and see if we can put together a unified lineup. I’ve promised folks I’ll do True Blood and Burn Notice. I’ll note I don’t feel super-confident doing Breaking Bad because I’m not caught up, but pretty much anything else is fair game. Let me know what you want, and I’ll try to work out a schedule by Monday.

I had been skeptical of the idea of reintroducing Mitch McDeere, John Grisham’s Hero Lawyer from The Firm, as the main character in a television series. Grisham’s quite a plotter, even though his prose is pedestrian to the max and his characters are all pretty much the same person, but most of his narratives are movie-length, and I’m not sure how well they’d translate into the longer arc of a season without serious exposition—though I guess that’s what co-writers are for. Plus, I like the idea of Mitch and his wife Abby hanging out in the Caribbean, and maybe opening up a private detective agency they run off a boat or something (USA Network, call me! It’s the perfect idea for your Fairly Legal reboot!) But the more I’ve thought about it, and with the news that Josh Lucas is going to play McDeere, a role I think is perfect for him, I’m slowly coming around on the idea.

I think, though, it’ll be important for the show to figure out what role the FBI is going to play in it. My understanding is that the show catches up with McDeere 10 years later as he and his family leave witness protection, though it’s not clear if he’ll be doing what he explicitly didn’t want to do in the novel and testifying against his old colleagues at law practice that was a money-laundering operation for a Chicago mafia family.

Grisham’s perspective on the FBI is mixed. Hugely powerful and long-serving FBI director F. Denton Voyles is, to a certain extent, far more of a hero than any of Grisham’s blank men in beautiful suits. Voyles plays key roles in The Pelican Brief and The Client, as well as The Firm. As Jeffrey Jay Folks notes in his Southern Writers at Century’s End, Voyles puts Darby Shaw’s life in danger in The Pelican Brief, and in The Client and The Firm, he is ill-served, and in one case even betrayed, by incompetent subordinates. Grisham’s characters often end up outthinking the FBI agents who are supposed to help them but are ineffective at tradecraft or strategy. But Voyles is able to see the long game, and even if things don’t go as planned at every step in the process, he’s never utterly deluded or off-base.

He’s still human, though — Voyles is emotionally invested in cases, and he doesn’t think he’s God, unlike Teddy Maynard, the creeptastically manipulative CIA director who appears in a number of Grisham’s books. Grisham seems more comfortable with officials who have accumulated a lot of power in a domestic space, rather than a foreign one, which is interesting given how much he appears to believe the law is manipulatable, sometimes in the interests of justice and sometimes in direct contravention of it. I’ll be curious to see how much of that perspective makes it into the show. Grisham’s skepticism about the efficacy of the justice system and the people who work in it is a departure from much of what we see on network TV. It’s not always the most socially critical one (though he’s very hard on overcriminalization of homelessness in The Street Lawyer), but that skepticism is useful.

My friend Tyler and I have talked a couple of times about how he feels uncomfortable watching 30 Rock because of the extent to which the show relies on Tracy Morgan’s real-world issues for humor. I was reminded of that today when a man named Kevin Rogers reported that at a club show, Morgan went off on an anti-gay tirade:

What I can’t take is when Mr. Morgan took it upon himself to mention about how he feels all this gay shit was crazy and that women are a gift from God and that “Born this Way” is bullshit, gay is a choice, and the reason he knows this is exactly because “God don’t make no mistakes” (referring to God not making someone gay cause that would be a mistake). He said that there is no way a woman could love and have sexual desire for another woman, that’s just a woman pretending because she hates a fucking man. He took time to visit the bullshit of this bullying stuff and informed us that the gays needed to quit being pussies and not be whining about something as insignificant as bullying. He mentioned that gay was something kids learn from the media and programming, and that bullied kids should just bust some ass and beat those other little fuckers that bully them, not whine about it. He said if his son that was gay he better come home and talk to him like a man and not [he mimicked a gay, high pitched voice] or he would pull out a knife and stab that little N (one word I refuse to use) to death.

It’s worth noting that it’s not like Morgan suddenly revealed new political opinions here. In 2009, he said sexual orientation is a choice in a performance that got him applauded by Spike Lee and Jane Krakowski.

This is the Charlie Sheen problem all over again, right? You can’t hire someone for their crazy*, and then expect to only get the crazy that’s beneficial to you, that’s harmlessly funny, the stuff of “I am a Jedi” skits, the falling asleep on your neighbor’s roof jokes, and an episode based on pretending you own someone else’s boat. Morgan’s latest rant is a very inconvenient form of crazy, especially since Tina Fey accepted an award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation this spring for her work on 30 Rock (which in some way is sort of weird, since the show doesn’t have an out gay character in the main cast and the show doesn’t have any long-term engagement with gay issues other than running jokes about whether Liz dresses like a lesbian). I doubt he’ll get fired for this since the Hollywood apology machine is very efficient at helping people keep their jobs, and there’s a lot of leeway for comedians. Morgan’s already issued this apology through his reps:

I want to apologize to my fans and the gay & lesbian community for my choice of words at my recent stand-up act in Nashville. I’m not a hateful person and don’t condone any kind of violence against others. While I am an equal opportunity jokester, and my friends know what is in my heart, even in a comedy club this clearly went too far and was not funny in any context.

But 30 Rock‘s in need of a refresh anyway. The wacky-Tracy bits were getting old even before this added an ugly overtone to them.

*A couple of folks on Twitter have, I think fairly, questioned the use of the term “crazy” to refer to Mr. Morgan. I meant the term more in the sense of a “wild and crazy” guy kind of way, though Morgan’s character is meant to have diagnosable mental health issues, and to the extent that Morgan behaves eccentrically in real life (and my understanding is that he is a recovering alcoholic), I think that sense of unpredictability if not outright instability was one of the things that make him an appealing hire for the role.

Count me non-plussed by the news that Robin Wright is in talks to join David Fincher’s House of Cards remake, which I remain uncertain about in any case. She was far and away the worst thing about the mediocre State of Play* remake, though that wasn’t entirely her fault. In cutting six hours down to two, that character, once a conflicted politician’s wife to put The Good Wife to shame, essentially vanished. But there’s nothing spiky about Wright: she’s kind of limpid and dignified, a Madonna of Montecito. It seems like a weird choice. I guess I’m just on my guard.

*For people looking to discern what turns me on as a critic, watch the original British State of Play. It’s downright magnificent.

The rules for book clubs are the same as for recaps: there will be spoilers through the first two sections of Red Mars in this book club in this post and in comments, so venture there at your peril if you’re concerned about that. If you want to spoil beyond those two sections in comments, go ahead, but label spoilers as such. All set?

Kim Stanley Robinson has to do an incredible a amount of heavy lifting in the first two sections of Red Mars: introduce a huge cast of characters and the loves and animosities that will bind and divide them for decades, provide background context on the rationale and support for the settlement, and lay out a number of very complex political debates. Fortunately, he has two central metaphors that wrap up all of those problems: escape velocity and terraforming.

On a technical level, achieving escape velocity and starting their trip to Mars is the easiest part of the mission. As a metaphor, it raises a larger, perhaps unanswerable, question. As Robinson puts it “What kind of Dv would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course? The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.” Whether or not to terraform — to deliberately alter Mars’ atmosphere in order to make the air breathable and soil arable — is a more immediately relevant question, and one that the characters will battle over fiercely, even as they start experimenting with things like architecture and their approach to work assignments.
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I think Kay Steiger is absolutely right that if you’re going to have sexist characters, language, and storylines in pop culture, it’s probably best if they is some purpose, be it characterization, plot, or political commentary:

The critically acclaimed Mad Men series certainly includes moments of sexism. But what’s different about how the AMC series portrays this perspective is that the very point of inserting such comments is intended to make a point about how far we’ve come (or haven’t come) with women in the workplace. Mad Men, like earlier films 9 to 5 and Working Girl included sexist joke to make a point about sexism, mainly how awful it is for women to be on the receiving end of it.

That said, I think she’s wrong about X-Men: First Class specifically. In First Class, Sebastian Shaw’s treatment of Emma Frost is meant to signal that he’s a creepy jerk, even beyond the whole Nazi affiliation, just as Xavier’s preference for very normatively attractive women shows his shallowness, and the limits of his focus on mutant integration. And more broadly, Moira MacTaggert’s different perspective makes her brave enough to sneak into the Hellfire Club, open-minded enough to accept the possibility that mutants exist, and smart enough to see their strategic value. Her CIA colleagues’ dismissal of not just those insights but her as a woman are clearly presented as a disadvantage they’re bringing on themselves through their narrow sexism.

And I think there’s a larger challenge here. I think it’s important to criticize purposeless and blatant sexism in media, but I also think it’s important not to jump the gun. I’d bet money that most of the folks who got really upset over sexism in Game of Thrones never returned to the show, even though without the grinding, painful moments of horrible treatment of women, far worse than anything Mad Men ever dishes out, the show wouldn’t have the emotional power and the arcs that make George R. R. Martin’s books powerful, and that could make the series a real landmark for women on HBO. Obviously, viewers have their tolerance levels, and I’d never tell anyone to watch something that makes them viscerally uncomfortable even if I think it pays off. But for the most part, as a critic, I try to be sure of what I’m seeing before I pull the trigger.