-Charlie Day’s casting in Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim really makes me want a mashup of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and eldritch horrors a la Shaun of the Dead.

-There are multiple kinds of superpowers, people!

-It’s nice that Glee hired lady writers, but I think it needs a certified Coherence Professional instead.

-John Dillinger’s family becomes part of the copyright overextension problem.

-How HBO moved the bar on unusual television—and how AMC is challenging them as HBO challenged the networks.

I really wish adults, from President Obama on down, would stop insisting that those damn kids turn off the television/video game console/computer and read a book instead. It’s not so much that I think books are bad — in fact, I think they’re pretty great — but this formulation’s an automatic loser, positing books as spinach.

When I was in elementary school, I absolutely smoked our town’s reading contest during Turn Off the TV Week (now Screen-Free Week) mostly because I didn’t grow up watching television, and had no sense that it was a satisfying experience in comparison to books. And this is what I’ve never particularly understood about parents who pretend they’re helpless to get their kids to read in the face of other distractions. If you value reading, read to your kids, and read them not just dry, lesson-oriented stuff, but the myriad exciting, compelling literature that’s written for children and young adults. If your kids are into a book series, read those books so you can talk about them with your children. The Hunger Games may not be Tolstoy, but it’s not bad! Obviously, it’s easy for television or the internet to be hypnotic, almost narcotic, but kids aren’t stupid, either: it is possible to teach a preference for good characterization and well-paced storytelling in any medium. If you think your kids are watching too much television, their consumption is something you have power over. If you’re worried about them spending too much time on the internet or playing video games, make sure they don’t have a personal computer or a console in their room. Go on vacations to places without televisions or video games and give everyone’s brain a reset. Visit a minor league baseball park, where tickets are generally inexpensive, there are people in goofy costumes, and the crowds are friendly. We are not living in the Matrix. It is possible to unplug.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go chase a bunch of parents who say they love books but have no idea how to promote reading off my lawn.

I love me some John le Carré and I remain eager for a good movie about the War on Terror, so I’m glad to hear that Anton Corbijn’s adapting A Most Wanted Man, le Carré’s novel about an illegal immigrant in Germany who is caught up in an American intelligence sweep, for the screen. I’ve always been impressed by the way le Carré managed to pivot after the end of the Cold War from the practitioners of intelligence to the subjects of the craft, and the way he expanded his moral critique of international affairs to more carefully trace the connections between governmental and corporate power.

The only regret I have about that development is that I’d sort of like to see what le Carré would do if he built a set of core characters for our contemporary intelligence era, what George Smiley might look like in the War on Terror. I suppose we already have that in Spooks (which, if you are not watching it already is a grievous error you should rectify immediately) and Sir Harry Pearce. In the U.S., it’s impossible to tell stories about the War on Terror right now without making your heroes either righteous ass-kickers or saintly guardians of civil liberties. You need narrators who can come at the issues sideways to provide actual clarity on them, and the U.K., as an important ally that isn’t a key driver of the current conflict, is well-positioned to provide that perspective.

David Friendly’s produced everything from My Girl to Little Miss Sunshine, so one has to assume the guy has some level of interest in female characters in the first place, even if it’s from men and boys’ points of view. But it’s still revealing to read a piece he wrote for the Hollywood Reporter yesterday about why his production company is focusing on female characters and women writers, and what it took for them to come to that decision. It turns out it was a combination of Tad Friend’s profile of Anna Faris in the New Yorker and the box-office success of Bridesmaids has him thinking along these lines:

If the Bridesmaids Effect really takes hold, imagine the possibilities. There’s the comedy about the bachelorette party gone horribly wrong. There’s the nightmare honeymoon from the woman’s perspective. The Bridesmaids Effect allows entire genres to be reimagined. Chicks on horses. Women in space. Time-shifting gals. [...] In an effort to ride the Bridesmaids mo’, over here at Friendly Films we started thinking about one of our projects in development. Why couldn’t the protagonist and friends be women? It would freshen up this reboot, and we could call upon one of these talented and funny screenwriting women who have emerged like Jeremy Renner in an action movie. Now we are combing the town and asking for meetings with women screenwriters who will transform this in an organic way.

All of these things — telling stories from women’s perspectives, recognizing that women can do lots of different things, trusting women writers to tell women’s stories in an authentic and engaging way — feel absolutely obvious to me as good ideas from a quality perspective. But it really does take evidence that something is not just good, but profitable, to get people excited about producing it.

One thing I think we can take away from Bridesmaids, though, is that the threshhold to convince Hollywood there’s an untapped market out there is fairly low. The movie is undeniably a hit, and it’s made $138,712,688. That’s not really a lot of money in comparison to Thor‘s $435,391,615 domestic and international gross so far, but it’s enough to get a lot of projects in the pipeline, both for movies and television. Now if only we could get some comparable successes, driven by multi-demographic audiences, for movies starring African-Americans, or Latinos. Hollywood just wouldn’t know what to do with the embarrassment of potential riches.

The AFL-CIO debuted a new series of comedy videos at Netroots Nation as part of a website they’re launching about collective bargaining. They’re a useful illustration, I think, of how to strike a comedic balance in critiquing corporate power—and of how much harder it is to use comedy to sell ideas rather than to criticize bad ones. Take this first video, with a Snidley Wiplash-esque corporate board discussing how to implement a new “Maximum Fun Workday” with extended hours and declaring, “We are discriminating against Americans under the age of 12 who should have the right to work should they so choose.” You can practically hear the moustache-twirling:

Now, contrast that with Portia di Rossi’s performance as Veronica on Better Off Ted:

The things the character is saying are much, much more ridiculous than the evil executives in the AFL-CIO’s video, and they’re funnier because of the utter sincerity of di Rossi’s delivery. She isn’t aware that she’s an avatar of corporate evil, and the juxtaposition of her evident conviction with the craziness of her ideas is simultaneously disconcerting and hilarious. It’s the same thing with Jack Dongahy on 30 Rock: his conviction that inventing dangerous microwave ovens or turning children orange is part and parcel with the American dream is a lot scarier than if he didn’t believe any of it and was just pure evil.

But any negative depiction of corporations is a lot easier to make funny than it is to make union organizing look wacky and hilarious. For a long time, the union narrative was essentially a dramatic one: life or death stakes, organizing as a means to reclaiming human dignity. That’s still the brand. Wacky things might happen along the way in a union campaign, whether it’s sexier-than-intended signs in Made in Dagenham or Pilar Padilla sneaking Adrian Brody out of an office building in a giant wheeled recycling bin in Bread and Roses. But the mechanics of the story are essentially dramatic ones, the power of the brand in stuff that’s tear-jerking.

Beauty pageants like Miss America and Miss USA are anachronistic and a little silly, but they’re also a useful measure of the moment when ideas become not just mainstream, but blandly uncontroversial. The fairly generalized disapproval when Carrie Prejean said she didn’t support equal marriage rights in the 2009 Miss USA competition was a harbinger of the tipping point we’ve just fallen over, where homophobia is finally, truly, radioactive.

And so this year, it’s nice to have a Miss USA who is firmly in support of teaching evolution in public schools (though it’s pretty scary that she was one of only two contestants to take that position), believes in the legalization of medical marijuana (though she stops short of full legalization), and is a Game of Thrones fan. It’s not like any of these competitions are major drivers of social change, but any affirmation of the values of scientific inquiry, sensibly drug laws, and the greatness of fantasy in an incredibly middle-American setting is useful.

When it comes to the reasons men’s magazines publish much more ambitious journalism than women’s, Ta-Nehisi suggests that it’s because the expectations of how to be a classy man or a classy lady differ:

The “gentleman” is expected to know about politics and the world, hence his “journal” would cover such matters. The cult of Ladyhood includes no such requirement, indeed in many cases it considers politics impolite. The result is that a Ladies Magazine would not be particularly likely to run a hard-hitting profile of, say, Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman. It just isn’t very lady-like.

His outline of that dichotomy (which I think is more about gender roles than class, which he suggests) reminded me of this piece Jon Zobenica wrote for The Atlantic in 2007 about the aspirations he took away from Playboy:

The typical Playboy guy — arm candy, sports car, Canadian Club, pinkie ring — may or may not have been an exponent of marriage (I knew some who were), and certainly his getup wasn’t complete without a cool splash of patriarchalism, but it’s just as certain that girlfriend didn’t threaten him. So when, at nineteen, and living in my very first apartment, I cleared out half my medicine cabinet and half my closet, and gave them over to the California blonde who’d just moved in with me, it felt as true to the life I’d seen and imagined as my red Camaro and my Brutini Le Sport shoes. This was no capitulation; this was part and parcel of the dream. She and I would get dressed up (in ensembles no less silly in hindsight) and go to classy restaurants. Or we’d cook in and watch a movie, and drink wine and grown-up cocktails. We went to clubs on Sunset, hit the slopes in northern Arizona, caught a striptease act in the French Quarter with another couple, and spent a night among friends hot-tubbing and sipping daiquiris in the Santa Cruz Mountains after a day of crabbing near Half Moon Bay. This was, it seemed to me, exactly what Playboy had espoused: finding a nifty chick and sharing the good life with her. Not that it was all good, of course (the Advisor had prepared me for that, too). We had our fights, fretted about school and work, nursed each other with less and less sympathy through various hangovers, moved into separate places, lived together again, got furious, got bored, and after five-plus years and a long, cold decline, gave it up. At the age of twenty-five, I felt like I’d been divorced but never married.

There seems to be an emotional imbalance between men’s magazines and women’s magazines and how each tries to prepare its readers to satisfy the other’s readers. Is an Esquire man really looking for a Cosmopolitan woman — and vice versa? Sugar and spice and everything nice may be what little girls are made of, but nifty chicks seem to be allowed a good deal more complexity and sophistication.

I’m told that a number of you are having comments disappear again. As with last time, can you email me at AlyssaObserves [at] gmail, if you’ve posted something only to see it vanish? Please let me know a) which post it was on, b) whether you were commenting through your Facebook account or another one, c) whether you were responding to another comment or posting one of your own. Thanks! And my really sincere apologies about this.

At a Netroots panel I went to on Friday, someone in the audience got up and asked the panel what Muslims in America who want to fight Islamaphobia could learn from the American gay rights movement. Adam Serwer rightly pointed out that one thing the gay community has on its side that Muslims don’t is deep penetration into popular culture. Even if you don’t know gay people in person, it’s almost impossible to watch television or see movies without encountering gay characters, even if only the archetype of the sassy gay best friend. Katie Couric is right that we need a Muslim version of the Cosby show. But more than that, I think we need a positive, plug-and-play archetype for Muslim characters so we can have not just one show that portrays American Muslims, but many.

Obviously, those gay archetypes are problematic: they turn people into stereotypes, they’re limited, they arguably elide the most powerful part of gay difference by being sexless, they erase the fact that there’s more than one kind of gay person. But as the thinnest edge of the wedge, they’re a powerful tool, as long as people stand behind them with a mallet and a lot of creative ideas. And I doubt we’re going to immediately get a wide, humanized variety of Muslim characters on television in America without some sort of intermediate step.

The thing is, I have no idea what that archetype would look like. I threw the question out on Twitter. Ramsin Canon suggested the main character in East Is East. Neil Lambert jokingly proposed a snappy halal cook (which would be an interesting appropriation of the foodie trend). And there were several nominations for Abed from Community, a suggestion that is, of course, dear to my own heart and that I think has some compelling possibilities. As Mike Wasson put it: “Wacky personality + being comfortable w/ US pop culture—while being distinctly Muslim—should prevent othering.” But Benjamin Blattberg, came back with what I thought was a useful framing of the question: “If Jews bring liberalism and homosexuals bring aesthetics, what’s the Muslim cultural mark?”

The sassy gay friend has its failings as a cultural trope, but it does offer something more than simply peaceful coexistence: there’s a clear value add there. If you overcome your fear (assisted by the harmlessness of the stereotype) and let your gay coworker or the Queer Eye guys into your life, you’ll emerge with a better sense of style, better taste in wine, renewed self-confidence. Abed’s a good neutral character, a demonstration that one person can love divergent religious and secular cultures. But we need something affirmatively positive, a promise to mainstream American audiences of how getting to know your friendly neighborhood Muslim will open up your world.

This post contains spoilers through the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, and correspondingly, George R. R. Martin’s novel of the same name. If you want to spoil beyond that in comments, feel free, but label your comments as such.

At the close of the first season of David Benioff and D. B. Weiss’s HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones, I think it’s important to note how impressive their achievement is. They’ve taken an astonishingly complex story that isn’t even finished, pruned it wisely, expanded in ways that have made it a richer story, and kept a careful hold on an unwieldy handful of plot lines—when this show comes to its conclusion in 2018 or thereabouts, people are going to parse the signs and portents left for them along the way, the things unseen that will bloom like evil flowers down the years. Benioff and Weiss’s mastery of the grand narrative in their control was never on better display last night in the balance they struck between explicit callbacks to the opening scenes of the first episode and propulsive narrative advances.

Given some early frustration with the show’s slowness, it’s impressive to see how far the characters have come as the episode revisits each of the Stark children grieving their father’s deaths. When the show opened, Bran could climb castle walls, and he was riding out to witness his first execution, to understand the meaning of justice in a world where such a thing existed. Now, he’s dreaming of his father’s shade, and learning that those dreams have a terrible power. Rickon was invisible — now, he’s the ghost of Winterfell. Sansa was a pretty, empty girl. Tonight, after the boy she once worried wouldn’t love her if she didn’t have sons quickly enough forced her to contemplate her father’s head and had her beaten so he wouldn’t sully himself doing it, she contemplated murder, and in that will to violence, became fully human for the first time in the series. Jon, after riding out to see his father execute a deserter at the beginning of the series, throws that in the face of the friend who asks him “Do you know what happens to deserters?” in trying to persuade him to stick with his vows, spitting “Better than you do” back at him. But it’s in letting go of his father that Jon manages to truly honor his memory. Arya, who entered the show outdoing her brothers at archery, finds her boyish toughness a matter of survival. Robb, interestingly given what those of us who have read the books know is to come, has a smaller arc—even though he ends the episode as a king, he’s still a boy, hacking at a tree with his sword, crying in his mother’s arms.

And Dany. Oh, Dany. Because I’ve read the books so often, it’s impossible for me to imagine what it would be like to see this scene cold, to not only witness Dany come into her power, but to witness the moment when the assumptions of this universe, and this story, are powerfully upset. It’s no mistake that this season begins and ends with Dany standing naked and alone. In that first scene, she’s luscious and traumatized, her body is the only thing about her that anyone considers valuable, and it’s in the process of being sold. When she walks into dangerously hot bathwater, it’s the slightly destructive act of an abused girl. But by the time her queensguard find her in the ashes, nursing the dragons who are her children, she is transformed: that body is thin from grief and a pregnancy gone bad, she is covered in ash, she has survived something profoundly strange and emerged a mother and a leader. Dany has become so powerful that she’s not vulnerable even in her nakedness. And that image would not be so stunning if we didn’t know what she’d been through. When she declares to the few followers remaining to her before she walks into the fire that “I see the faces of slaves. I free you. Take off your collars. Go if you wish. No one will stop you. But if you stay it will be as brothers and sisters,” we see that she’s come to understand human dignity in a truly full and profound way: it’s not enough to win a partnership in the marriage bed, it’s not enough try to heal the grievously broken with kindly paternalism after the fact of their trauma — her world needs a new order. Dany is the show’s true revolutionary.

There’s a lot about this show that is shocking: Ned’s death, certainly, and the revelation of Dany’s dragons. But I think the thing that’s most challenging about this episode, and about Game of Thrones in general, is the fact that this episode really emphasizes that the ten hours of television you’ve just watched are mere prologue, that the story you’ve been following about who controls the Iron Throne may not be the real story at all. Much more so than The Wire or The Sopranos, this is a show that demands commitment for the entire long arc of the show, that needs every one of the 70 or 80 episodes we’re going to get in order to tell the story — there’s exposition here, but there’s not any fat.

[SPOILER ALERT FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN'T READ ALL FOUR PUBLISHED BOOKS IN THE SERIES] And this episode did a great job of laying out future plot threads for us to unravel. When Jamie asks Cat, “If your gods are real, and if they’re just, how come the world is so full of injustice?” it’s a lovely prologue to the introduction of Melisandre of Asshai and the question of the gods’ power in the world. Cat’s rageful joy in her declaration to a grieving Robb — “They have your sisters. We have to get the girls back. And then, we will kill them all” — is a perfect summary of who she’ll become as the quest to save her children in a crazed world turns her into an avatar of bitterness. Sam’s mobilization of his friends to save Jon from himself presages the day when he’ll crown a lord of his own. And Theon’s question to Robb, “Am I your brother, now and always?” and Robb’s blithe asset will serve as a bitter reminder of just how young both men are. This is why I think the show will ultimately end up somewhere in the pantheon of this golden age: people are going to be shocked in retrospect by just how significant every single line is. [SPOILERS OVER]

The content that’s been added to the show is just tremendously good, whether it’s Jamie and Jory’s conversation about fighting to put down the Iron Islands, Robert’s melancholy reflections on kingship, Westeros-style Never Have I Ever. In fact, one thing I think the show’s done consistently and that it deserves credit for is giving actual life and dimensions to sex workers. Whether it’s turning Shae from a kindly bedwarmer into a courtesan or taking Ros, who is barely mentioned in the novels, and turning her into one of Littlefinger’s agents, the show has consistently insisted that prostitutes are real people. Given that a more mainstream show like 30 Rock gets a consistent pass on jokes about killing hookers, there is something quietly radical about this, and I appreciate it.

There are obviously some real flaws in the show. The lack of exploration of Dothraki society is really unfortunate, both because it turns the main characters who are people of color into flatter, more barbaric than their white counterparts, and because it means we don’t see everything that Dany learns from her experience as a khaleesi, both about leadership, and about what kind of woman that she wants to be. The lack of attention to religion also means that the show’s going to have to do some serious work in subsequent seasons to pose the big questions Martin asks. And we’re missing some big characters, like Roose Bolton, who are going to be absolutely critical in subsequent seasons.

But I think Game of Thrones has, through its first season, been a real achievement. It’s simultaneously brutal and tender, funny and extraordinarily grim, concerned with justice in a way that resonates in our time and profoundly not of our society. Peter Dinklage will walk away with a boatload of awards this season, but the entirely unknown actors who stepped up to hugely complex roles have done uniformly lovely work — there just isn’t an affirmatively bad performance in the mix. Yes, there are breasts, and yes, there are dragons. But anyone who dismisses Game of Thrones as genre television is missing something special and wildly entertaining. Spring 2012 feels awfully far away.