io9 reports that Marvel has picked Doctor Strange as the next superhero slated for a movie franchise—or at least a movie. If they’re going to do that, Marvel should just make an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 1602, the eight-issue story he wrote in 2003 that transplanted the Marvel pantheon back to Queen Elizabeth’s court.

It wouldn’t be as farfetched as it sounds. 1602 is an independent continuity, sure, and it’s an elaborate period piece. But the two best superhero movies of the summer were reasonably elaborate period pieces. And because Doctor Strange’s powers are openly acknowledged to be magical and mystic, instead of merely a kind of science so sophisticated and futuristic that it seems like magic, in a way he’s a much better fit for a world where magic vied equally with science for predominance. I’ve always been sort of entertained by the idea that Doctor Strange ended up in Greenwich Village in the 1970s—San Francisco or Portland might have been a better option, but I do appreciate the effort to find a magician a place where he might plausibly feel at home in the twentieth century.

And it’s not just that Stephen Strange fits better in an earlier century. 1602 is a nice little experiment in exactly how many circumstances superhero concepts can be resonant in. For the X-Men, the struggle between Professor Xavier and Magneto is as applicable to the inquisition as it is to black liberation or gay rights; men like Nick Fury will find hire in any generation; it’s got one of the most distinct and thoughtful Thor stories on record; and the power of the American idea doesn’t acquire its magic with the Shot Heard Round the World. That last point is particularly important: I’m not sure Gaiman has a distinct American idea in America Gods, but he manages to conjure up something akin to an originary American blessing and tragedy in 1602, a sense of chosenness for the land. And now that we’ve met all of these characters, or at least, most of them, you could just tell the story without worrying about spending a lot of time on origins. It would even redeem the Fantastic Four, and force folks to start over given that Chris Evans is Captain America now.

It’ll never happen, of course. It’s too weird. It doesn’t lend itself to an ongoing storyline because it has a central, resolvable mystery. It would be confusing for audiences who don’t follow comic books and aren’t used to juggling between multiple continuities at once. But Marvel has these people signed for nine-movie contracts. If it’s going to wring every last drop of potential profit out of them, it’d be fun if towards the end, they did something weird and brilliant, and more intensely engaged with the American idea as a whole than most of the stories it’s putting on-screen now.

In a piece checking in with some of the more flagrantly ridiculous reality show stars of recent years, Spencer and Heidi Pratt, of The Hills notoriety, Kate Arthur seems to confirm that the pair’s final fallout from MTV came when show producers tried to get Spencer to hit his sister, who has addiction issues, on camera:

He had gotten into a huge fight with a producer named Sara Mast, whom he said tried to get him to cause his fellow castmember and sister, Stephanie, who has had on-again, off-again alcohol and drug problems, to “hit rock bottom.” In his version, Mast tried to get him to punch Stephanie. “Her exact quote: ‘That Snooki effect,’” Spencer said, referring to a Jersey Shore episode in which castmember Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi was hit by a fellow bar patron.

“That’s when I snapped,” Spencer said. “To the point when I said—and this is when the producers got scared of me—‘You want me to punch my sister in the face? Are you trying to get me to kill you?’ I didn’t say, ‘I’m killing you.’ If I did, MTV would have had me arrested.”

A source close to production who requested anonymity, and is no friend of Spencer’s, confirmed his version of what caused the fight, but also added that Spencer was, in fact, quite scary about it. Through her agent, Sara Mast declined to comment for this story. Creator DiVello’s PR representative was told specifically about this claim and did not respond. MTV would not comment either.

I’m not incredibly sympathetic to people who can’t make the calculation that getting plastic surgery you don’t actually want to get a short-term payoff isn’t actually worth it. But if that actually happened, it’s a pretty disgusting thing to ask anyone to do, no matter how far. I try not to get moralistic about what kinds of popular culture get produced: as distasteful as I find, say, the existence of the Saw movies, I don’t think Eli Roth should be enjoined from making them. But there’s room for a real conversation about what it means that we’re really excited to see real women get punched in the face, whether by previously-anonymous gym teachers, or by their own brothers that doesn’t dismiss these shows as stupid, ironic flashes in the pan that we can afford to treat as if they’re unimportant. It’s incredibly easy to treat the genre as if it’s just a place where already odd people exhibit themselves, that would exist with or without our custom, an odd blind eye to the powerful capitalism that governs the rest of the industry.

We keep getting very excited about art about reality television—I was surprised to find, when I looked it up, that The Truman Show, which is about the morality of raising someone purely as a reality television experiment even if you give him as nice a life as possible, made $126 million domestically. And people have purchased millions of copies of The Hunger Games, which is more broadly about what it’s like to live under a murderously repressive dictatorship, but explores that theme largely through a reality television show, though it confines itself almost entirely to the question of what it’s like to participate in the production of that show and not to what it’s like to watch it. But the coverage of the adaptation of that series is focused much more on sexy bakers and brooding hunters and how good Jennifer Lawrence looks wielding a bow and arrow. We’re awfully good at making things phenomena while ignoring the parts of them that inconvenience us.

Robert Lloyd has a provocative essay about the increasing dullness of prestige television’s anti-heroes up in the L.A. Times that I largely agree with:

We are not yet out of the age of “The Sopranos,” which, when it muscled in on the cultural conversation back at the end of the 20th century, made darkness and dysfunction the norm, first for premium cable, then basic cable and broadcast TV: “Nip/Tuck,” “Rescue Me,” “Deadwood,” “The Shield,” “The Tudors,” “The Borgias,” “Damages,” “Sons of Anarchy,” “Weeds,” “Dexter,” “Californication,” “Mad Men,” “Boardwalk Empire” and “House” are, to varying degrees, its progeny. Many have been among the best things on television. But as much as I love Hugh Laurie, I am over the hopeless Gregory House; his ups and inevitable season-ending downs feel more contrived with every passing year, tricks to make a static character look dynamic.

In the same way, though Tony Soprano began as a person in apparent flux, long before the tardy end of “Sopranos” it was clear that the character was fatally fixed…Gilligan has smartly declared next season the last for “Breaking Bad,” but part of me — the part invested in the narrative, not quite paradoxically — wants Walt stopped now, not so much for the payback but to stop the insanity. No one he knows is better off for knowing him. The show belongs to Jesse now, who, though he has much to answer for himself, remains redeemable; he is quietly haunted where Walt is loudly self-justifying. Jesse is an antihero, too, but one with room to grow.

It seems important for shows to consider why a character ought to be an anti-hero. As I’ve written before, something like The Sopranos felt as fresh as it did when it came out because it let audiences test their sense of their own moral sophistication against the challenge of sympathizing with a sociopath in his struggles to commit more effective murders, to run a more efficient crime syndicate, to surmount the challenges of family life. But twelve years after the premiere of The Sopranos, that’s no longer a new proposition, and our collective ability to emotionally invest in very bad people is extremely well-established. And once we’ve proved that, character stasis becomes more important, and more frustrating, for audiences.

That’s not to say that there can’t be power in stasis. Characters who try to change, and fail, like Stringer Bell, can be as fascinating as characters who undergo long-lasting and hard-won transformations. But if you’re going to create an anti-hero, reveling in making badness compelling is probably no longer enough to produce an immortal show.

The Wire stands above other cable shows that rely on bad men as their main characters because their anti-heroes all have very specific roles. Stringer Bell’s experiences show the intractability of institutions in two directions, the inability of the drug trade to become truly efficient, and the labyrinthine nature of government regulation, which makes it easy to shut out new entrants and presents opportunities for corruption. Frank Sobotka can’t grow because he embodies a defeated institution that’s out of chances to evolve and survive—his death is the catalyst for his union’s death, and they go down together in the darkness. For a while on House, House’s irascibility was a useful illustration of the equally intransigent and uncaring approach to healthcare practiced by the hospital’s administrators, though now it’s mostly just an excuse for increasingly baroque darkness. The Tudors, which I think is not necessarily a good show, though it does have some good things in it, is an illustration of what happens when an anti-hero doesn’t have to chafe against the restrictions of society because he has dominion over them. I’m only a couple of episodes into Deadwood, about which much more to come, but Al Swearengen strikes me as an embodiment of pure capitalism that may not change over time, even as it manifests itself differently.

All of these shows have specific uses for their anti-heroes beyond the sheer, savage pleasure of watching people we like behave badly and get away with it. Not all anti-hero shows have to use those characters to illustrate social or institutional problems—Breaking Bad works despite the fact that I’m still now sure how the show’s creators feel about the Drug Enforcement Agency, something I intend to write about later in the week. But I do think that social analysis is often a good match for anti-heroics. The world’s not composed of saints and angels, and saints and angels may not be the people who see the world with the greatest clarity.

After my appreciate of Ghostwriter last week, my friend Erica Newland, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology, pointed out that not only is the show a model of race and class diversity, but even thought it was filmed before the Internet made its commercial debut in 1995, it was a brilliantly prescient look at the way we’d come to live our lives online. She’s discussed that further here, and for the rest of the week, I’ll be taking a look at some of the pop culture artifacts from the earliest days of the internet to see what we got right, and what we didn’t.

By Erica Newland

Last week, Alyssa wrote about Ghostwriter, a PBS children’s series about thoroughly normal kids from Brooklyn who solve neighborhood mysteries with the help of their eponymous ghost friend. Although it aired from 1992-1995, Ghostwriter works surprisingly well today: in many ways it is a thoroughly 21st century show, and not just because the title character is something of a search engine for the real world. In making computers a central part of the Ghostwriter characters’ lives, the show anticipated the role that the Internet would play in our lives and our television shows.

Television today is awash with Internet-themed episodes. Last season, Brick from The Middle developed an Internet addiction, Liz Lemon of 30 Rock was impugned on a Jezebel-like website, and Chief Webber discovered Twitter on Grey’s Anatomy. But even in these episodes, digital devices and the connectivity they enable are gimmicks that drive a storyline, not the third limbs and backup brains that they have become in the real world. With a couple exceptions, like The Big Bang Theory and iCarly, remarkably few characters on TV while away hours reading blogs, cement relationships over instant messager, make important life decisions via email, or Google a contested point in the middle of an argument.

It can be tough to turn scenes like these into good television—and it’s an open question whether we really want our on-screen doppelgangers as chained to their devices as we are. But the brains behind Ghostwriter deserve extra credit for figuring out a way to turn computer use into entertaining TV.
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On Friday, Todd VanDerWerff tweeted that one of the producers of Starz’s new political show, Boss, told reporters that “At no point during the show do we refer to parties.”

It’s entirely possible to make shows about politicians without referring to their party affiliations, especially if you show them mostly in isolation, brooding over power and tactics, and even easier if you don’t engage with policy, just with the exercise of brute force. But especially if you’re making a television program about tough-as-nails Chicago politicians, eschewing party politics means you’re giving up most of the means by which that brute force is exercised, and by which the objects of that force are defined. If you’re going to have enemies in political stories, you have to figure out who they are, and parties are useful identifiers, whether your foe is an ideological rival, a procedural one, or your rival for position within the hierarchy of the party itself.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that the folks who make smart television don’t want to risk their audience before a show even starts airing, especially if, like Starz, you’re trying to establish yourself as destination channel for smart original content that doesn’t involve people getting naked and killing each other in arenas. But Democratic and Republican politics don’t play out the same way on the local level — even in big cities — as they do nationally. Parks and Recreation‘s been an incredibly effective demonstration of that. It would be entirely possible to have Kelsey Grammar, who is playing a Rahm-like politician on the show Boss, have Rahm’s personally aggressive style without attaching Rahm’s voting record and stances in the Obama administration to him, using a series of local issues and relationships with local stakeholders to define him as a Democrat or a Republican.

Or even if that’s too touchy, why not invent a couple of fictional political parties? That kind of work happens most often in science fiction, scabrous satirical humor, or in Dave Barry books, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done in more realistic dramas, in ways that are usefully thought-provoking. I’d be curious to see a long-running exploration of what it would be like to have one party that’s fairly interventionist on both moral and social safety net issues, opposing abortion, equal rights for gay couples, and the death penalty while supporting universal health care and heavy taxes on the wealthiest citizens positioned against a much more staunchly libertarian party that’s pro-choice, low-tax, low social services, etc. One of the best things about Kings was that it didn’t spend a lot of time explaining the new framework that it was operating in: the show just sort of plunged in and let you figure out the importance of the powerfully active military-industrial complex. While I like Kings, it’s also reasonably obvious why it didn’t find a network following — the lead actor simply isn’t very good, and the religious stuff is incredible, but probably would have found a more natural audience on a network like HBO, which also would have found alternative ways to support its heavy production costs.

But I don’t think that fate would necessarily attach to a show that was more of our world, with smaller but significant tweaks to the positions that, bundled together, define political parties. We can make a nigh-infinite number of television shows about the nature of power as a raw, elemental thing (especially if they star Ian McShane). But they’re not the only kind of fiction we need to help us consider our political system and the future that our politics will define. Our parties are held together by duct tape, temperamental similarities, entrenched hatred, tears, and determination, but not necessarily by consensus or logic. We’re settled into them for now, but at some point, someone more effective than the Reform Party, or No Labels, or Unity ’08 might come along and present a viable alternative. Our pop culture’s daintiness about parties is in odd contrast to the brutality of our political contests.

-Batgirl beats DC.

-This is a great list of cynical Tom Lehrer songs, but incomplete without “I Got It From Agnes.”

-George Pelecanos on his childhood and why he likes writing not about racists, but about “people who don’t think they have any of those bad feelings.”

-Chuck Lorre is killing off Charlie Sheen.

-It sounds like NBC has absolutely no idea what made Prime Suspect a great show, and has decided instead that it’s cigs and a fedora.

Especially given the conversations we’ve been having about Captain America: The First Avenger’s whitewashing of the history of segregation in the armed forces in World War II, I’m moderately excited about Red Tails, the movie Lucas executive produced about the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black Air Force unit that served with distinction in that conflict:

A lot of this looks like it will be a fairly standard enthusiastic integration movie, which is fine. But I’m glad to see the trailer, at least, give a nod to the extent to which the military resisted accepting the service of talented African-American pilots, even at a point when the air war wasn’t going well for the States. “I don’t believe your boys have scored a single arial kill,” a white officer says with the air of having won some sort of argument, only to have Terrence Howard bat back at him “It’s damn hard to shoot down the enemy 100 miles behind the front lines.” I hadn’t known this before looking into it, but apparently the reason the school was at Tuskegee in the first place was because after a campaign to force Congress to allocate funding for training black pilots, the Defense Department responded by shunting the money to civilian programs. It’s an impressive demonstration of racism that the normally acquisitive Defense Department would turn down an opportunity to take money if it meant taking black people. In any case, given the reverence normally attached to our military in pop culture, it’s a good thing to see this kind of internal critique show up in the movies, particularly prestige ones.

And as much ill-will as I have stored up about Lucas, this actually looks kind of in his wheelhouse. He’s always been better at the flyboys-with-destiny stuff than anything else.

In our discussion about the unattractive behavior of athletes, Dirk Lester asked “How do you think this compares as a dilemma to the deciding whether or not (or how) to consume media created by the likes of Roman Polanski or Charlie Sheen?” It’s a good question, though not one with a simple answer, I think, because of the different power dynamics when an objectionable person is a decision-maker than when they’re a role player. And my calculations here are personal, and not meant to tell anyone else how to watch sports or movies or television.

Charlie Sheen feels to me like a good analogue to how I feel about Albert Haynesworth. Both are objectionable men whose salaries I don’t really want to contribute to. But they also both work with people who don’t have a demonstrable track record of enabling dreadful people. As Saul Tannenbaum wisely pointed out in that same thread, Myra Kraft personally vetoed Christin Peter’s continued membership in the New England Patriots after learning about his extensive and disturbing record of violence against women, and the team released him three days after drafting him. Chuck Lorre has a somewhat difficult reputation, but Sheen aside, he doesn’t seem to have extensively coddled any stars who behaved far outside the bounds of propriety. So I weigh the individuals as exceptions against the overall lived values of the organizations that employ them, and against my affections for the folks who end up having to work with them, who likely don’t get much say in it. It’s not Angus T. Jones’ fault his Two and a Half Men star has a record of violence against women, and it’s not Wes Welker’s fault that Albert Haynesworth once stomped an opponent in the face. In those cases, I can keep watching the Patriots, because I think on balance, the team still shares my values. Fortunately, I don’t care enough about Two and a Half Men to agonize over whether I’m justified in watching it, and most of Sheen’s other work I want to engage with is available through Netflix Instant, where I don’t have to feel like I’m directing additional income in Sheen’s direction.

Polanski feels like a different case to me. I’ve read extensively on the subject, I’m aware of the problems with the trial, but I can’t reconcile myself to the idea that he’s a victim. And I find it fairly distasteful the number of prominent and well-paid actors and actresses who insist on treating him as such, or insist that once you get to know him, he’s really a lovely guy, because it’s a way of convincing themselves that it’s all right to work with him. Roman Polanski may be popular in Hollywood, but I don’t really think politely turning down a chance to work with him is a career-ender. And it’s not like Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster, or John C. Reilly, who are starring in his next movie, Carnage, are vulnerable or in need of a career boost such that an opportunity to work with Polanski is critical to their future success. So I’m much less inclined to treat the involvement of untainted people in Polanski’s movies as a reason that I should excuse his past behavior and send money his way. I still haven’t seen The Ghost Writer, though I very much want to, and hope to find an occasion where I can see it for free, or on an airplane, or in some other context where I don’t have to direct any additional money in Polanski’s direction. I suppose if I was invited to a critics’ screening of a Polanski movie I would go.

This is a messy industry, and a lot of my job is assessing content that I don’t think is perfect (much less the stuff that’s downright offensive). I don’t have a blanket rule to extract from either Sheen or Polanski, and as with sports, I take them case by case, though I do keep an eye out for patterns. If the Patriots, as an organization, made the collective decision that a record of repeated violence against women wasn’t disqualifying for team membership and started signing a lot of folks with domestic violence and assault convictions, I’d stop watching. My approach here isn’t perfect, and it hasn’t shamed Polanski into submitting to justice or Sheen into doing redemptive work for domestic violence groups, nor do I expect that it will. Fixing them is not what this is about. Instead, I’m searching for positions that make me comfortable in the long term, with all the compromise and shading that inevitably entails.

I guess Miley Cyrus is probably getting too old for me to think of her as young and adorable (Annie Liebowitz photoshoots aside), but I’m glad that one of her acts of goofy late-teenaged rebellion turns out to be tattooing an equal sign on her right ring finger to celebrate the first day gay couples could legally marry in New York. I tend to be skeptical about the impact celebrities have on actual adults, and it’s true that the gesture is more than a little bit flip. But I think there’s a real utility to a star who is technically branded as if she’s from the heartland and whose main appeal is to tweens and teenagers taking a firm pro-equality stand in front of the 1.8 million people who follow her on Twitter. If kids these days are going to use their Internet machines to threaten Justin Bieber’s girlfriends or whatever, they might as well get an earful of the idea that celebrating the full lives of gay people, not merely accepting their existence, is important enough that a major star in the market got a permanent reminder of it.