When Torchwood: Miracle Day returns to television tonight, Gwen Cooper will have to come out of retirement from Torchwood to save the world—and the health care system—when everyone on Earth suddenly becomes unable to die. I talked to Eve Myles, the actress who plays Gwen, about what this season of Torchwood has to say about leadership and David Cameron, what it’s like to play an action star who’s also a mother, and why Gwen and Captain Jack Harkness should never get together (though she previews a big scene between the two later this season).

I’ll be recapping Miracle Day for the rest of this season, but this post will function as an open thread for tonight’s episode. A fuller review of the show, with particular attention to its healthcare implications is here. And I’ll be curious to hear what y’all think about Torchwood‘s move to America, and the health care storyline that forms the core of this season.

Obviously transporting Torchwood from Wales to the U.S. is a big shift. How did it change your experience of the show? What about the experience of having a team that’s a blend of old Torchwood members and American intelligence officers?

Well, I mean, initially, I’m playing the same character, so that’s always a help. So I didn’t have to delve into a different pair of shoes. It’s just the surroundings and the situation have changed. The way it’s written is Gwen is finding it all quite awkward…It was just something that we had to do with the series this year. If we’re going to top Children of Earth, we have to make it bigger and better, and the only way to do that was to bring it to the United States. We wanted to make it a blockbuster, and hopefully, that’s what we did.

You’ve got all these individuals with very strong personalities. We’ve been asked constantly about us having a bigger budget and it beging more of an explosive series, because it is aesthetically better, no doubt. But the most engrossing part of the drama is when you’ve got all the individuals under one roof sitting around a table talking to each other.

The main story in Miracle Day’s also quite explicitly political—at least, coming off of health care reform, it’s going to seem that way to American audiences. Do you think it’ll resonate in the UK in the same way?

Well, I think there’s all sorts of resonances in there. There’s so much politics being written into this story…Obviously, with us having a new PM, and David Cameron being so young, it’s all about decision-making. And what the humans do to each other to get by, and it’s disgrace.

Well, and even sex is political. I was particularly struck by that scene in the third episode where Jack and the guy from the bar talk about whether you have to use protection if no one’s going to die.

If you ask people, if the universe is going to end in 24 hours, so many people would say I’d get drunk, and I’d have sex, and I’d do crazy things, and I’d have a wonderful time. But the reality of it is, is if you do get hurt, if you catch a dreadful disease, you have to live with it for eternity. It doesn’t go away. They don’t stop hurting, or being in a terrible kind of state. If you’re involved in something that happens to you because of something you’ve done to yourself, or you’ve had that one-night stand, actually there is a consequence to everything you do. It’s highlighting you have to take care of yourself, because these things do last forever.

Initially, you think it’s a good thing. But you start scratching the surface on it and it’s a curse.
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I’ve got mixed feelings about the fact that TOMS, the seller of fashionista-approved canvas shoes that distributes a pair to a needy child every time someone ponies up for a pair for themselves, is partnering up with uber-conservative social issues group Focus on the Family to get their shoes to folks who need them in Africa. As Irin Carmon notes, ” Focus On The Family isn’t the only group TOMS could have turned to for collaboration, nor is it the only Christian group involved in charitable missions. It carries significant cultural and political baggage, for good reason.” And I would like to know how TOMS made the decision to partner with Focus on the Family, as opposed to other aid groups working in Africa that might have more effective distribution networks, and whether either partner in the deal’s imposed preconditions on the other.

But as long as Focus on the Family hasn’t made it part and parcel of the deal that they get to slip abstinence or anti-gay pamphlets in the shoes, or required TOMS to donate to abstinence-only education, or to do anything that has a negative effect on people’s health and safety and as long as the shoes get to people who need them rather than being diverted, I have a hard time getting incredibly upset about this. You don’t need to pass an ideological test to want to make life more livable for the world’s poorest people. If TOMS shoes make it easier for more African kids to walk to school, or for folks to get to health clinics, or make it easier for them to carry clean drinking water, that’s a good thing. This collaboration may not be good for TOMS brand in the long run, and I think it’s worth watching closely, but if it works out, it could help a lot of people.

Spoilers through the first seven parts of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars in this post; if you want to spoil beyond that, please label your comments accordingly. And for next week, let’s finish the novel.

It’s intriguing to consider why Kim Stanley Robinson tells certain parts of the story of Mars through certain people. Obviously, some members of the First Hundred are more involved with certain seminal events in Mars’ history than others—it wouldn’t make sense to have Vlad, for example, narrate the treaty negotiations with Mars that’s told from Frank’s perspective. When it comes to a more generalized event like the revolution, though, we could have come back to Maya’s perspective, or Ann’s, or gone into Sax’s head as his work is ruined, accelerated, becomes accident rather than design. But I think it’s fitting that as her work’s turned to instruments of murder, that the story returns to Nadia—and turns her from a creator into a destroyer.

At first, the revolution is a chance for Nadia to demonstrate her value all over again, and on a much larger scale than she did among the First Hundred. She, who built if not Mars, but the things that made it possible for people to survive on Mars, is now struggling to save the planet, harnessing not just her own capabilities but the raw material of Mars itself:

There were no robots on hand, but Nadia had found she could start an operation with as small a seed as her programs, a computer, and an air miner. That kind of spontaneous generation of machinery was another aspect of their power. It was slower, no doubt of that. Still, within a month these three components together would have conjured obedient beasts out of the sand: first the factories, then the assembly plants, then the construction robots themselves, vehicles as big and articulated as a city block, doing their work in their absence. It really was confounding, their new power.

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Torchwood: Miracle Day premieres on Starz tonight at 10pm, asking what would happen to sex, religion, politics, and the health care system in a world where no one can die—but everyone can feel pain and continue to suffer from disease. As the action moves to the United States, I talked to veteran TV writer Jane Espenson about what it was like to come on to the famous franchise, what she’s learned about writing political science fiction from her work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica, and writing a scene where the immortal Captain Jack Harkness and policewoman-turned-alien investigator Gwen Cooper lay it all on the table. I’ll have an interview with Eve Myles, the wonderful Welsh actress who plays Cooper, up in a couple of hours.

What were some of the challenges of bringing Torchwood to the U.S.? Were there things that you thought it was possible to do on Starz that weren’t possible on the BBC? Certainly, the show is somewhat more sexually explicit in a way I think that really works, but I don’t know if there were other things that airing on a different channel made possible. One thing Eve Myles mentioned when we talked to her is the way Torchwood‘s sort of found its stride when it’s able to fit long arcs into a number of episodes appropriate to it: do you think it’s worth it for other American shows to explore shorter seasons, or seasons of variable length on purpose?

I never wrote for the show when it was on the BBC, but I think the freedoms there in terms of language and sexuality are much more on a par with the rules at Starz they would be with a major US broadcast network. I think writers who had worked for the BBC writing Torchwood would have probably felt pretty constrained by some of the network restrictions. Being limited to only the mildest of epithets and making everyone keep all their clothes on—that’s no way to tell a tense and sexy thriller! And yes, I love the idea of developing stories with an eye toward the number of episodes that fit the story. It’s not often that something is both obvious and revolutionary, but that is. Yes, it would be fantastic if that became something that was implemented here.

How did you settle on the health care plot arc? How do you think it’ll resonate in the U.S. and the U.K., which are in very different stages on the road to universal health care?

Russell had the story seed already planted in his brain when I was brought on board, and he’d already thought through a lot of the implications. Then, as a group, we discussed it all at even greater length. Then we brought in a doctor and discussed it all again, and every time it just felt better and deeper and more important. I think it will resonate with US audiences in particular since the warring opinions on health care are so remarkably far apart. I’m less familiar with the UK system, but I knew that Russell obviously had an instinct for what would resonate there.
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I’m generally supportive of efforts to get more women working in and around professional sports, whether I’m re-reading Nora Ephron’s classic “Bernice Gera, First Lady Umpire,” a must-read if you care about women and baseball, or cheering Kim Ng’s ascent in the front-office ranks. And I’m also not a big fan of policing anyone else’s sex life or personal conduct. But as a long-time lady Red Sox fan, I’ll admit that I cracked up when the Boston Globe’s Pete Abraham tweeted “If anybody at Fenway sees @HeidiWatney in the beer line, tell her the game starts at 10:05.” Whether Abraham intended it as a dig at the buxom blonde NESN sideline reporter or not, it was funny, and a sad commentary on the roles women can end up with in sports journalism.

Because as much as I want more women writing about sports and doing good sports journalism, Watney’s awful. She does the world’s fluffiest sideline interviews — during one recent game, she took a ride on the train that shoots oranges when someone hits a home at Minute Maid park, the player she was interviewing staring at her chest all the while. Watney’s also been rumored to have affairs with both Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek towards the end of his marriage and short-lived Sox infielder Nick Green. Even if she never slept with either man, socializing with them outside of a professional context and in a way that invites comment about the nature of that socializing seems like a substantial violation of journalistic ethics that would get an actual reporter like Amalie Benjamin (or for that matter, Mr. Abraham) promptly cashiered, but I guess it doesn’t particularly conflict with her role as a sideline cupcake.

Sideline reporter is not necessarily the most glamorous job in the business, either, but Suzy Kolber and Michele Tafoya have proven that women can do the job with dignity and use it in pursuit of actual information (even if drunken athletes hit on them), and while Craig Sager may have the world’s worst collection of suits, at least he’s got a sense of humor about his place in the game. In a world where women have a hard time being taken seriously as commentators, Watney plays to the worst stereotypes of women in the game, a baseball Annie who doesn’t even have the cardinal virtue of the original, that she’s a genius at the sport. The standards for women in and around sports are, I’m sorry to say, higher. And having Heidi Watney’s worse than having a man in that spot. Boston’s a city with a lot of female sports fans. Surely, we can find one who gives good camera and good interview, and can do it without playing into the idea that women are either airheads or groupies when it comes to athletes.

-Favianna’s prints are gorgeous, and I hope folks donate to her graphic novel project if only so I get a chance to read it.

-The Center for American Progress is aware of all Internet traditions.

-Melissa McCarthy is everywhere.

-Now I want a movie where Hugh Grant solves a phone hacking mystery through adorable blundering.

-Man, I hope I’m not feeling this vindictive on my wedding day:

This post contains spoilers through the third episode of the second season of Louie.

As someone who became a homeowner in the not insanely distant past, the prospect of watching Louis C.K. look at real estate for a half hour was sort of delightful. The rhapsodic myth of homeownership disguises an unpleasant fact: that most real estate is kind of terrible. There’s the dark apartment about which a realtor reels off a list of absolute untruths. There’s the theoretically empty apartment that turns out to be occupied by a widower in his underwear, so pathetic that the friend Louis’ enlisted into house hunting with him ends up cooking him eggs before declaring, “Thanks for the reminder, fellas. Fuck men. I’m Audi.” There were definitely days in my apartment search when, despite my incredibly kind, patient, realtor, I totally felt that, or a variation of that. Condo fees over $400 a month for a place where all the public doors have a sticky quality to them and the front yard looks downright dangerous? This is what we’re supposed to base a society on?

And then, there’s the moment when Louis finds an amazing apartment, old New York architecture, where Lenny Bruce used to live, where, as the realtor tells him in an increasingly hypnotic chant: “Your girls would be happy here. Even happier than they are at their mother’s house. And no one could judge you, or say you’re anything other than a wonderful, wonderful father. Buying this house would fix everything, everything, everything.” It also, of course, costs $17 million, and Louis has $7,000 in the bank and child support payments. “What about Obama?” he asks his accountant plaintively. “What about it?” his accountant asks back. It’s a wistful illustration of our common national dilemma, reconciling ourselves to the fact that the things we want are out of reach, and in reality, were always out of reach.

I have to admit, though, that as diverted as I was by the apartment hunt, the show’s depictions of women are sticking in my craw a little bit this season. As I wrote last week, I enjoy the fact that the program shows me the world through guy-colored glasses, but I’m a little worried that in the world of Louie, every woman I see through those glasses is kind of crazy, be she a passive-aggressive daughter, anxious pregnant sister, sexually traumatized PTA mom, or weird real estate pal.

I think the show is funniest when it gets at the cruelty of things that can really happen, which is why the stuff with Louis’ youngest daughter and her constant carping about the superiority of Louis’ ex-wife as a parent is both so hilarious and so cutting. But I’m not as amused by setting up a wildly baroque scenario, like a female friend starting to randomly cook and care for an old guy who isn’t wearing very many clothes. It’s not as funny in part because defaulting to “fuck men” as a punchline isn’t that funny. And I’m also just highly dubious that the vast majority of women would go into an apartment after they figured out a strange man was in there and undressed, much less immediately go into mother-hen mode over him. It feels like too much of a setup, and in a season with a lot of baroque setups coming at women’s expense, it feels like Louie could dial it back a bit.

There are a lot of disturbing ideas in the pledge that the FAMiLY Leader is asking Republican candidates to take, among them the idea being gay is a choice (presumably heterosexuality’s totally genetic), or the statement that sex is inherently better after marriage. But I think it’s worth singling out the part of the pledge where candidates who take the pledge — to this date, only Michele Bachmann — promise that they’ll provide “humane protection of women and the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy..from human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, abortion, and other types of coercion or stolen innocence.”

The whole thing is a lovely illustration of ways Bachmann’s out of the American mainstream. Equating pornography with human trafficking, prostitution, or infanticide suggests that Bachmann doesn’t know very much about any of those things, or much about the sex lives of actual Americans (particularly those she claims to represent). And if Bachmann interpreted that pledge as a mandate to seek a governmental ban of pornography and pornography broadly defined (rather than, you know, folks doing the work to keep kids away from material they don’t want them to access), it would be a demonstration of what startlingly low value Bachmann places on the First Amendment. “All forms of pornography” can be interpreted to include a lot of art and popular culture. None of this is surprising, I think, but it’s not minor. And it merits pointing out and pushing back against.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

The problem with transitioning from governor to national ideological symbol is that American politics don’t line up neatly from the local to the state to the national level. A governor’s appeasement of a key constituent group with a gesture is a national ideological enforcer’s rank betrayal of principal. And so it’s interesting to watch Sarah Palin’s evolving position on the arts as her function moved from semi-pragmatic governor of a small state composed of eclectic constituencies to a symbol of small-government conservative purity. Palin may not be an official candidate for president yet—and she may not run at all in 2012. But she creates so much heat and light in the race that it’s worth looking at her positions anyway.

2007: As a Republican governor, Palin signed a highly standard proclamation designating an Arts Education Month on the grounds that “arts education contributes to increased self-esteem and the development of creative thinking, problem solving, and communication skills. Arts educators strive to improve arts education opportunities for students in the arts and to stimulate interest in the arts among students and teachers.vStudents who study the arts score higher on verbal and math SAT scores than those without arts in the classroom. The arts challenge and extend the human experience, and the cultural arts honor Alaska’s unique heritage.”

That same year, the Anchorage Daily News noted that she appointed Aryne Randall, her Wells Fargo loan officer to the Alaska State Council on the Arts.

2008: Palin signed a bill creating a special labeling program for arts and handicrafts made by Alaska Natives to help promote their sale. Her rationale for the bill? U.S. States News reported she said, “Alaska Native art is admired around the world. This bill is about fairness and respect for our Native culture. I appreciate Senator Stevens and the Native artisans who worked so hard on this bill.” Palin may never have believed that government should subsidize the production of art, but at one point, she appeared to believe that the government should promote the sale of some art if such sales coincided with other interests.

As a vice presidential candidate, Palin ran into one of the disputes between Republican candidates and musicians that happen every cycle: Heart sent a cease-and-desist letter to the campaign over Palin’s use of “Barracuda” on campaign stops. The Republican platform that McCain and Palin ran on included calls for China to obey its World Trade Organization obligations particularly as they applied to intellectual property issues.

2009: After the federal stimulus passed, Palin turned down half the money allocated for Alaska, and cited federal funding for the arts as a cause: “I don’t want to automatically increase federal funding for education program growth, such as the National Endowment for the Arts, at a time when Alaska can’t afford to sustain that increase.”

After her resignation, she took a number of speaking engagements, including one in Hong Kong where she repeated her 2008 campaign themes about China and intellectual property rights.

2010: Palin has proven not to be shy about defending her intellectual property rights. When Gawker published excerpts of her book America By Heart prior to publication, Palin successfully sued to have them removed.

2011: That decision about the stimulus was the moment when Palin found her talking points about federal arts funding. She told Sean Hannity: “NPR, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, all those kind of frivolous things that government shouldn’t be in the business of funding with tax dollars — those should all be on the chopping block as we talk about the $14-trillion debt that we’re going to hand to our kids and our grandkids. Yes, those are the type of things that for more than one reason need to be cut.”

And her concerns about her own intellectual property persisted: earlier this year, Palin and her daughter Bristol successfully trademarked their names.

These kinds of contradictions and shifts, from things particular to Alaskan politics and general to the kind of appeasements governors make to folks who get excited about things like arts education (which has next to no resonance in national politics, but plenty on the local level), to broad statements of governmental should and shouldn’t, are the reason people will always wonder if Palin could be something other than what she’s become. But even though Palin is a singular figure for reasons having to do with her use of media, her personal popularity, and her immunity to mid-level scandal, the actual substance of her shifting position feels rather typical. Unlike, say, Mitt Romney, there are fewer major commitments to limit her, or for her to disavow.

This post contains spoilers through last night’s episode of Burn Notice.

Increasingly, it feels like this season of Burn Notice is a comment on the whole series’ unsustainability. Tonight, Michael’s inveterate freelancing leads him to accidentally blow the cover of an FBI agent working a long-running operation, something that illustrates exactly why, if he were actually burned, he’d never be allowed to carry on as he’s been carrying on, the mayhem he causes in Miami notwithstanding. Similarly, tonight’s episode raised the prospect that Michael’s inability to let go of the people who put said burn notice out on him is an addiction, something he’s unable to shake and that the show needs to find a way around if it’s going to transition into a long-running program that isn’t centered around a single problem.

I think the second meta element is a bit less interesting, and at least in that last episode, was a bit more heavy-handed. Fiona’s buying Michael a shredder and then urging him to trash the files of his investigation didn’t actually spur him to action. Instead, it provides a physical reminder of Michael’s obsession smack in the middle of his and Fiona’s newly-shared loft that seems likely to be an irritant to both of them all season. And I’m curious as to whether that division will break them up, particularly with Michael’s mother lurking around the sidelines saying things about their decision to live together like, “It’s moving fast. At this rate, they should be married by 60.” That tension between wanting to behave like a normal person and being drawn to live in ways that are sort of inherently deviant is an interesting one, but I’m curious to see how it’ll shake out, since Michael’s not a particularly dark character. His impulses are almost painfully rectitudinous in end goals, they’re just abnormal when he considers what tactics are most likely to succeed.

The more interesting plotline centered on the acknowledgement that in the name of reeling in bad guys, undercover government agents often have to do pretty terrible things. The best-case scenario for Michael’s client, the frozen yogurt store proprietor stuck with her husband’s gambling debts, is that her store got smashed up a couple of times and then was safe. The worst-case scenario for her was a best-case one for the government: an undercover agent kept smashing in her display cases, and then she went into witness protection. Either way, that’s a pretty miserable outcome, and a high level of disruption, if not of personal damage. Burn Notice has already suggested that Michael might find government service boring. Now, it appears the show’s suggesting that he might find some of the things it requires of him repellent. I think the show absolutely had to try putting Michael back in government service as a way to move the plot forward. But if it turns out that he doesn’t want to work for the government any more, I have no idea what he, and his network, are going to do next.