Josh Eidelson’s right that working-class people aren’t proportionally represented on television, noting, “The people of TV-ville compose a community far removed from our own: a town with a data-capture expert but no dishwasher, a rocket scientist but no sanitation worker, and a tech magnate but no truck driver. [...] Compared to the rest of us, they’re much more likely to be wrangling with underlings or regulators rather than bosses.” But while I think it would be nice to have more working people on television, I think Josh misses a couple of critical points about why we don’t have more of those shows, especially in this paragraph:

After mounting defenses of the inherent drama of their favorite occupations, I imagine those executives would suggest that they’re giving the people what they want. They’d say that viewers who are underpaid or underemployed would rather come home to the sexual hijinks of young doctors or the maneuvering of high-powered executives. As long as executives snatch up shows about New Yorker cartoonists and diamond magnates while neglecting shows about people on the assembly line or behind the register, there will be few opportunities to test that hypothesis. But my experience organizing in low-income communities suggests that Roseanne is right to blame the professionals rather than the viewers. There’s no lack of high-stakes drama in the lives of poor people, and there’s an audience ready to see it reflected on TV. Whether advertisers are ready is a different story.

1) It’s not actually clear to me that there’s an enormous untapped audience for shows about working class characters. Ugly Betty, which is explicitly about the confrontation between someone from a working class background and a luxury industry, pulled 11.3 million viewers per episode in its first season and the ratings marched steadily downward. The very good Raising Hope is exactly the kind of show that I think Josh is looking for. The main character runs a gardening business with his father, while his mother works as cleaning woman. The show pulled an average of 6.4 million viewers, which is fine, but not spectacular. Mike and Molly, also new this season, about a romance between a public school teacher and a Chicago beat cop (categories that may not make them working poor, but I think most people assume makes them working class), did somewhat better, pulling an average of 11.14 million viewers per episode. The Middle, about a saleswoman and a quarry manager, pulled 6.9 million viewers in its first season and 8.11 million per episode in its second. CMT tried to do a show called Working Class, about a single mother who tried to get her kids better opportunities by moving them into an upscale neighborhood, drew 1.2 million viewers for its first two episodes, tanked thereafter, and was quickly cancelled. Each of those is less than half the 21.5 million episodes Roseanne pulled during its first season — numbers that declined steadily every year it was on the air.

I don’t know what Josh hears from the folks he organized, but if, as he suggests, there’s big pent-up demand for shows about working people, something in here should have broken out bigger than it has. Blaming this on advertisers doesn’t really seem accurate, especially given that shows about working people who are successful in their niches, like Tyler Perry’s sitcoms (which are about a fireman and a guy who opened his own nursing home), The Simpsons (about a homemaker and a power plant worker), or The Family Guy (Peter’s worked in factories and as a fisherman, Lois is a homemaker and gives piano lessons), both stay alive for a long time and have been spun off in multiple iterations. It may be that there’s a market for more shows about working class people, but the numbers don’t suggest a massive unfulfilled demand for them.
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Questionable Content, Jeph Jacques’ tale of post-college discontent, Massachusetts coffee shops, and tiny eccentric robots is one of the most famous and emotionally realized comics published online. Over the years, Jacques’ characters have run small businesses, entered treatment for depression, bonded over Toto songs, and grappled with what to do when weapons-grade lasers get installed in your personal computer. Jacques was kind enough to take some time to answer my questions about the stalled professional life of his main character, Marten Reed, what the world would look like if the U.S. hadn’t given up on space exploration, and what he’s learned about drawing lesbian characters from his readers.

With the exception of Dora, who is a small business owner, and Raven, who’s back to school, finding career paths seem like fairly low priorities for your characters. Is that an intentional decision to leave a clear path to focus on their emotional lives? A function of time moving more slowly in the strip than it is in the real world? Is it a function of living in a college town without a lot of non-academic industries or a terrible economy? And whatever happened to Hannelore’s counting business?

A lot of it is based on who I was in my twenties, and the Northampton folks I know who are that age now. When you’re living in a college town and all you’ve got is a liberal arts degree, you’re pretty much gonna take whatever job you can get that pays the bills and isn’t too demanding. I think the philosophy is that working a job that is relatively low-responsibility and low-committment gives you more time and energy to focus on the stuff you REALLY care about. That’s certainly how I felt about it when I was 23!

But I also think that is a bit of an illusion and a trap that you can get caught in. Even if it’s a low commitment job, you’re still giving it hours and days and months and years of your time — suddenly you’re 25, or 29, and you haven’t really “done anything” with your life, and you’re not entirely sure how that happened. And that’s something I’m planning on exploring more in the relatively near future, with Marten in particular.

I imagine that Hanners still does the counting business on the side. With her family connections, she probably doesn’t actually NEED to work to support herself, but it’s important to be at least somewhat free of that kind of a family dependency. Working at CoD is more of an enrichment exercise for her than a means to make money.
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I’m writing a new column for The Loop21*, and the first piece is about remakes that switch characters’ races from white to black, among them Chris Rock’s foreign-film remakes, Will Smith’s adaptations of classic children’s movies as vehicles for his kids, and Clint Eastwood’s A Star is Born. Of these, I tend of find Rock’s remakes the most interesting. It’s not so much that they’re good movies, as the specific way they work on race:

“I Think I Love My Wife” is careful to demonstrate that cheating isn’t the only kind of behavior that transcends race: In one scene, a white teenager shows up in the elevator rapping the same song that a black teenager disrupted the morning quiet with earlier. And a bourgie black dinner foursome and a Japanese executive repeat the same concern about Michael Jackson: “I don’t care about “Thriller”. What kind of grown men has kids sleeping in his bed?”

White elevator passengers and Japanese corporate titans may not have to worry that an overenthusiastic music fan or a troubled pop star reflect badly on them, but we can all shake our heads at the same foolishness.

And while the sibling rivalries in “Death at a Funeral” are as old as Cain and Abel — and as persistent — there’s an additional layer of processing when Rock and Martin’s characters find out that not only is their father gay, but that he was having an affair with a man with dwarfism. They have to reconcile those challenges, and the fact that their father’s gay-dwarf lover was white.

The thing that I think is really interesting about racebending is less that it happens than the casualness with which characters are switched from people of color to white, and the general deliberateness that accompanies a switch in the opposite direction. Hollywood, it seems, never needs a justification as to why a character should be white.

*If anyone out there’s interested in race, politics, and culture, and is looking to break in to writing about things, The Loop21′s hiring writing fellows right now. It’s a great new set of editors over there, so definitely worth checking out.

Commenter Dirk mentioned on Twitter that he’s always wanted a Disco Dazzler movie, which is really all the excuse I need to post a link to what Meredith Woerner accurately describes as “the insane Dazzler script starring Cher and Robin Williams.” It is awesome great, by which I means it sounds like a terrible trainwreck with hilarious possibilities:

Peter finds himself tumbling through sub-space, falling down a seemingly endless tunnel-like vortex. He doesn’t know what’s going on or where he’s going, but he figures that he’d be better off facing this as Spider-Man. He doffs his outer clothes, pulls on his mask and kathump! Suddenly lands back in reality. He appears to be in Manhattan, and yet, something isn’t right about it. Before he has time to ponder, though, the sounds of battle catch his attention. Not far away he sees the Avengers and Disco Dazzler fighting weirdly-garbed horsemen mounted on very weird lizard-like steeds! The Avengers and the Dazzler appear to be protecting a guy in a regular business suit, Cheetham, who’s standing nearby, looking rather uncomfortable in his typical Rodney Dangerfield way.

Spider-Man enters the fray, and quickly, the mounted soldiers are put to rout. The heroes then gather around Cheetham and begin asking a dozen questions at once.

Cheetham thanks them for their kind intervention and assures them that they’re in no danger of being sued. Cheetham speaks in a strange sort of legalese. “Where are we?” Spider-Man asks. “Manhattan,” Cheetham replies. Actually, he explains, they’re between Upper Hatten and Lower Hatten…in the Demilitarized Zone, where all the fighting goes on. He thinks it was once called Central Park. In response to other questions, Cheetham explains, in his somewhat obfuscatory manner, that this is the future, that all history officially ended with the coming of the Great Disaster. He’s not to sure what that was, since no one kept a history of it. He thinks it had something to do with casino gambling and frozen yogurt.

The pitch raises a larger point that I think is valuable, though. The idea with Marvel’s expanding lattice of movies is that by the time we get to The Avengers, mass audiences will be well-acquainted with all the characters and their backstories. I think the considerable risk is that folks will get burned out on origin stories and wonder why they should go see yet another superhero movie, even though it’s when we start seeing superheroes working together that interesting stuff starts to happen and a vastly greater diversity of storylines come into play.

Also, I really want an apocalyptic movie about how humanity’s downfall was caused by casino gambling and frozen yogurt. That’s some Canticle for Leibowitz stuff, especially in the details.

In no particular order, things mostly political thoughts that struck me about the shows and roles that garnered Emmy nominations this year:

1. No love for Archer? I don’t adore the show, but it’s spiky and smart, a useful deconstruction of espionage in a pop culture that generally lionizes spies. And the animated programs feel tremendously calcified.

2. The movie or miniseries and casting nominations for Cinema Verite and Too Big to Fail are richly deserved. I loved both movies, which I thought were smart, stylish, and really valuable and entertaining distillations of big issues — the blurring line between reality and entertainment, and the financial crisis. Both augur good things for the large number of political projects HBO has on its slate.

3. Louis C.K. deserves every accolade he gets. I doubt he’ll beat Steve Carrell or Alec Baldwin for best actor in a comedy, but where those two performances toe up to the vast ocean of male insecurity and run away from it, Louis goes swimming in it. Presumably with his shirt on over a bathing suit.

4. Ditto for Idris Elba. The lack of Emmy love for The Wire or David Simon more generally is mystifying. But I do think Luther uses more of Elba’s range than Stringer Bell. And I’d like to see more British shows with short seasons get in the Emmy pool through the miniseries or movie category, if they’re not going to get in through the main series ones. I haven’t watched The Big C yet, so I’m yet to form an opinion on his guest role there, but clearly he’s an Emmy favorite. It’ll be interesting to see if an American network notices that and acts accordingly.
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-Adam Serwer on Battlestar Galactica and suicide bombings.

-Neville Longbottom is the true hero of the Harry Potter series.

-The man who bought MySpace explains why.

-Nikki Finke: “If you accept the premise that the film business is the folly of the filthy rich, and the indie film business the folly of the stupidly rich, then the fashion business must be the folly of the insane rich.”

-A good analysis of how shifting the lead in a TV show changes its ratings.

Noah Berlatsky, one of my favorite internet sparring partners (we met in a spat over Twilight), responds to my post on the arid romantic lives of The Wire‘s drug crews with a wonderful meditation on homosocial relationships in the show:

The main focus of homosocial tension in the Wire, though, is between Avon and Stringer Bell. For both, their partnership is the defining relationship of their lives, and at several points that relationship is explored not just through business, but through sex. The clearest instance of this is when Avon gets out of jail. He’s interested in making time with an attractive woman at his coming home party, but Stringer keeps cornering him with business talk. Finally, Stringer drops a frustrated Avon in a luxury apartment. Avon stands and fumes for a couple of seconds…and then Stringer reappears, the attractive woman and a bonus attractive woman in tow. The whole sequence is a sexual tease, and the teaser is Stringer. He uses the women he’s bought for Avon to seal their partnership and friendship with sex. [...]

The parallels between Omar’s relationships and the other drug dealers’ relationships calls into question the heterosexuality of the entire milieu, a fact of which the other drug dealers seem nervously aware. Both Avon and Stringer initially want to kill Omar because he robbed them — but what really pisses them off is that he’s gay. Avon ups the bounty on Omar when he learns that he’s a “cock sucker”. And as for Stringer, while it’s never made explicit, it seems clear that part of the reason he uncharacteristically participates in the torture of Brandon, Omar’s lover, is because Brandon is gay. The killing of Brandon, and Omar’s reaction to it, ultimately ends in Stringer’s own murder. Male-male love is the only kind on offer in the world of the gangs — but it’s a love steeped in disavowal, which ultimately leads to tragedy and death.

I think there’s a lot of truth to this. David Simon makes clear the social costs of the drug trade in obvious, powerful ways. But dropping out of school or becoming an addict or landing in prison isn’t the only way you can circumscribe your own life.

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 intellectual property rights 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.

Of all the Republican candidates in the 2012 field, Newt Gingrich is the one who’s invested most of his career in crusading against so-called obscene art and public funding for the arts. But he’s also the rare politician who is also an artist, having published a spate of historical novels throughout his career:

1991: As controversy raged about the National Endowment of the Arts’ support of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work Gingrich, then a Republican whip, encouraged his colleagues to vote for a bill that would have prohibited the NEA from funding projects that in any way “promote, disseminate or produce materials that depict or describe in a patently offensive way sexual or excretory activities or organs.” The furor was to provide a major theme for Gingrich’s tenure as speaker of the House after the Republican victories in the 1994 midterm elections.

1993: Cobb County, Georgia, a major bastion of Gingrich support, cut arts funding, saying that it helped promote a “gay agenda.”

1994: When Gingrich unveiled the Contract With America, it proposed cutting National Endowment for the Arts funding by 50 percent. Gingrich said he hoped to go even further, privatizing the NEA and public broadcasting.

1995: As the battle over the NEA’s continued existence kicked off, Gingrich said on C-SPAN: “I am for the Atlanta Ballet. I’m for the Metropolitan—maybe the greatest art museum in America—in New York City. But I’m against self-selected elites using your tax money and my tax money to pay off their friends.” After a fierce battle, the NEA budget was slashed by 40 percent, but it wasn’t killed immediately.

He did find common ground with Democrats, though, when the Clinton administration slapped Chinese exports with a 100 percent tariff over persistent failure to enforce laws on piracy of software, music and movies, Gingrich supported the administration’s move. He also held some of the first major meetings between top Republicans and Hollywood studio chiefs, at which piracy was a major point of discussion, aimed at trying to recruit a traditionally Democratic industry as a Republican constituency.

This same year, Gingrich also publishes the first of many historical novels, 1945, an alternate history of World War II in which America is left isolated against Nazi Germany. He would follow with series on the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and continue his World War II novels with the same co-author.

1997: After a bruising battle, Gingrich moderated his stance on the arts somewhat, inviting Alec Baldwin and other to Washington to discuss funding mechanisms for the arts. Republicans still attempted to close NEA and replace the agency with a block grant program to the states, but that effort eventually failed and efforts to defund the agency puttered out.

1998: Consistent with his long-running interest in technology and the development of the internet Gingrich founds Congress’s High Technology Working Group.

Today’s debate over public funding for the arts is essentially a retread of Gingrich’s efforts to shutter the NEA, minus the rhetoric about support for gay art. The narrower focus on deficit reduction might make more sense politically, but it’s also failed to galvanize outsized passions, which may be one reason it’s sunk so swiftly below the political waves. Similarly, Gingrich’s support for copyright enforcement prefigures the positions of most of his colleagues in the race, who see piracy as a key trade issue.

Mark Harris’s piece fretting that the art form that is moviemaking is in mortal danger seems a trifle overwrought to me. I think it’s easy to mythologize Hollywood of earlier eras and to forget how many incredibly terrible movies the studios have always cranked out. John Wayne may be a Hollywood legend, but he also has 171 actor credits, which include such gems as him playing a drag-racing schoolbus driver or punching Commies in the schnoz in Hawaii. Christopher Lee has an astonishing 273 movies to his credit. Humphrey Bogart started out his career playing an upper-class twit repeatedly, and then lower-class thugs repeatedly. Repetition and derivativeness are not precisely new to the business.

And more to the point, Harris bemoans the perception in Hollywood that Inception was a favor to Chris Nolan to bribe him into making another Batman movie, rather than a viable model. Sure, it would be great if studios took risks on more truly original ideas. But are we seriously decrying a situation in which an auteur who makes dark, developed, intensely political, and wildly commercially successful action movies* is able to force his studio to let him make hugely personal, beautiful blockbusters? There are worse things.

*I also categorically reject the idea that serial storytelling, whether it’s about superheroes or not, is inherently devoid of ambition or unable to be great. But that’s a conversation for another day.