I’m sure Bravo has the legal right to air episodes of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills that feature the late Russell Armstrong, who seems to have grown increasingly unhappy with his portrayal on the show and convinced that his participation in it had ruined his marriage before he killed himself earlier this week. Reality show legal departments are devilishly comprehensive that way. It seems that Bravo intends to delay the start of the second season of the show, and perhaps to edit it substantially.

Irrespective of what they can do, it seems at minimum what the network should do is edit out all appearances by Mr. Armstrong, acknowledge his death at the beginning of the season, and make a substantial donation to a well-vetted suicide prevention resource. Bravo’s always walked an extremely fine line between classiness and traditional reality-show tackiness, and the fact that it’s walked it so well has been of critical importance to maintaining the brand. This is the kind of thing that’s meant to happen to sloppier, sleazier networks like VH1, which cancelled an entire category of reality show programming when a former contestant on one of its shows killed his ex-wife. Bravo should think of its whole brand here, and be sober as a pack of judges.

I’m not particularly fond of The Sarah Silverman Program, because I’m not incredibly compelled or amused by the character’s aggressive ignorance and lack of sense of appropriateness, which feel much like artifice than an effort to reach something genuine. Saying something ridiculous and offensive that no one would ever say is funny in a limited way—saying something ridiculous and offensive that many of us think or feel but almost no one would dare vocalize or admit to thinking is both funny and scathing. But I’m more intrigued by the show she’s apparently trying to sell right now, a thinly-veiled riff on her life after her breakup with Jimmy Kimmel. I’ve really loved Silverman in smaller roles, like that of amoral news producer Alexi Darling in the movie adaptation of Rent:

Or as Mike White’s abrasive girlfriend in School of Rock:

Rather than offering herself, or a persona, up for judgement, both of these characters judged and categorized other people in ways that were sometimes grievously wrong. I’d be curious to see her do something less artificial than The Sarah Silverman Program, where she’s actually self-aware, and sympathetic despite her flaws because of it. I don’t think she’s as lacerating as Louis C.K., and given that this will be on NBC rather than cable station, I imagine the subject material will be somewhat toned-down. But I give Silverman credit for being less afraid to beat up on herself or be ridiculous than say, her network-mate Whitney Cummings seems to be:

On your recommendations, I’m about halfway through Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is marvelous. One thing that’s struck me in the second season, though, particularly with the introduction of Toph, is that while the show’s extremely adept at building up strong, nuanced female characters, it doesn’t have a single example of a strong father-daughter relationship.

This is an area I’m particularly interested in so maybe I notice it more than most, but I think it’s notable. Perhaps this’ll change later in the series, but Katara didn’t seem to have a particularly strong relationship with her father before he left to fight the Fire Nation. When Hakoda sends a message to Katara and Sokka, Sokka’s much more insistent on the importance of reconnecting with their father even if it means deviating from their journey with Aang. Her mother’s sacrifice is obviously a totemic act for her — mothers in this universe seem to be strong people, but still in a position where they have to give their lives or their honor for their children, rather than being able to hold power and protect them. The show’s adamant that there are real advantages to feminine power — Sokka and Aang are hopeless when a refugee the group is traveling with goes into labor, and Katara’s healing abilities are venerated, proof of her particular talents — and I appreciate that.

And her not particularly strong relationship with Hakoda looks positively healthy next to Toph and Azula’s relationship with their fathers. Toph’s parents keep her cloistered, and when they discover the true extent of her earthbending abilities, they’re determined to keep her even more swaddled in cotton wool and surrounded by steel to the extent that they’ll order her kidnapping rather than let her determine the course of her own life. Azula, by contrast, is the perfect expression of her father’s desires, which ends up meaning that she’s a highly talented sociopath. None of these are particularly encouraging models: having absent parents actually seems to be the best thing that can happen to a teenager in this universe. Get too wrapped up in your idea of your parents and you’ll end up on a quest that will burn you out or taint your soul, and be loved too much, and you’ll be denied the chance to be a full person.

Since apparently we’re getting a Navy SEALs television drama in addition to all those movies, it’s worth thinking about what that show might look like.

Unlike other shows that set up implausible collaborations between government agencies, or that empower its characters beyond the bounds of things they’d normally be allowed to do in the course of their day-to-day jobs, Navy SEALs do a wide variety of things, and regularly work with other agencies, particularly the CIA. It would make a lot of sense to follow the NCIS model on this and have regular plot points about the challenge of inter-agency cooperation, information-sharing, and operation-planning. All-out mayhem’s interesting to a certain extent, but it’s even more interesting when the people carrying out missions have to follow constraints, whether it’s not leaving a crashed helicopter on the ground in Pakistan or extracting a contractor without revealing his ties to the American government.

Second, I’d like to a procedural that isn’t just a case-of-the-week format. Part of what’s interesting about the SEALs, as narrative devices, is the planning process, and the acknowledgment that you can’t ever really prepare for the real thing. If the SEALs do the equivalent of killing Osama bin Laden in every episode, each mission will lose power quickly, but if we get to see the build-up over a couple of episodes, there will be real tension there.

And third, and perhaps hardest, I hope this show figures out something interesting to do with the families of the SEAL team members we’re apparently going to have as part of the show. It might be a decent idea to have them there especially if missions are going to be stretched out over a couple of episodes in a plausible way. And I respect the desire to dramatize and give respect to the struggles of military families. But I worry that this is a way to get another implausible case-of-the-week in there. Military families go through enough; there’s something a bit odd about beating them up on-screen and using it for our entertainment. If they’re going to be in the mix, I hope the show finds something creative and thoughtful to do with those characters that doesn’t result in an implausible or overly-busy program.

It’s striking to see the juxtaposition between Jennifer Hudson’s declaration in the pages of Self that “I’m prouder of my weight loss than my Oscar! I hope it has inspired people,” and the news that Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson, and Rachel Weisz have jokingly formed the British Anti-Cosmetic Surgery League, with Winslet declaring that plastic surgery “goes against my morals.”

I feel incredibly conflicted about both of these statements. I think plastic surgery often becomes a way of removing distinctions that make people unique and in extreme cases can become a tool of self-hatred, but I don’t think it’s immoral to have it. My assumption is that fillers in particular are going to keep improving, so by the time I want to erase a wrinkle or two, I won’t have to risk freezing my face permanently, who knows? Maybe I’ll do it. Similarly, if someone wants to lose weight for health or personal esteem reasons, as long as they’re not making themselves sick, I’m perfectly fine with that though I am deeply in sympathy with the goals of the folks who advocate health at any size. And who am I to say what goes in Jennifer Hudson’s head? But I can’t help but feel sad that Hudson feels proudest of ridding herself of the thing that made her unique, that made her a fit for the role that won her an award in the first place.

In Hollywood, men’s bodies signify so much less. Jonah Hill can lose a bunch of weight and nobody questions his integrity and self-image. Christian Bale can starve himself for roles twice in a way that’s sufficiently dangerous that he says he wouldn’t do it again, but everybody trusts that he knows when to stop. When Rupert Murdoch has a bunch of cosmetic surgery, folks might think it’s a bad decision or silly, but no one feels a need to describe it on moral terms, or as a sign of self-harm. But anything women do to their bodies or think about their bodies is presumed to have great meaning for both themselves and others, the subject of infinite speculations and judgements. There’s no way to do the right thing for your career, yourself, and other women.

-I don’t really think that single-player gaming will be dead in three years. At least I hope it won’t! I still have so much to learn!

-Sometimes it takes litigation to make Google not be evil.

-Stephen Soderbergh: secretly filming a chick flick.

-Spoilery footage of The Avengers shooting a fight scene.

-I think I’d be looking forward to this more if it was about how Captain America reacts to being unfrozen. Otherwise, it looks like just another Quirky Lawyer Drama:

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the planned Dirty Dancing remake will keep the abortion subplot from the original. But there’s been surprisingly little speculation about whether a planned Sex and the City prequel will include Carrie and Samantha’s abortions as plot points. The original show had a fairly nuanced perspective on abortion,* embodied most notably by the storyline in the fourth season where Miranda got pregnant accidentally and decided to keep the baby, as Carrie worried about telling Aiden that she’d had an abortion after careless, condomless sex at 22:

We also know that Samantha had one abortion while in college and one later. If the show is an origin story, showing us how the characters met when they were in their early 20s, it would include the years when Samantha and Carrie terminated their pregnancies. I don’t now whether the CW, which is apparently developing the prequel, has the bravery to do this, but it’s important to show heroines not just helping other women get abortions if they need them, but having abortions themselves and moving on to have healthy, fulfilled sexual and emotional lives.

*Relatedly, it drives me insane that Sex and the City is never really in conversations about the revival of television as a medium. I imagine that’s in part because its run mostly overlapped with The Sopranos, which laid down the anti-hero template that’s become so popular in the shows that followed, but I think it’s also because it’s a comedy aimed at women. But it is, for the most part, excellent, and a decent thing for guys to watch if they want to understand the ambitions and anxieties of smart women. Also, I am SO a Miranda despite the whole writer=Carrie thing.

::sighs::

I guess ritual humiliation is the price we pay to love hip-hop in public, whether it’s Davis thinking he has what it takes to be a bounce producer on Treme (apologies for the video quality, it’s what I could find):

Or K.C. trying to court Val on Single Ladies by passing off OutKast lyrics as his own smooth talk. Maybe there’s an exception for extraordinary novel, but we’re not all Justin Timberlake or Jimmy Fallon:

I don’t blame Andy Serkis for wishing he’d be eligible for acting awards. He hasn’t just pushed forward the use of motion-capture technology; he’s challenged the idea that the only thing that humans can convincingly and compellingly play is other human beings, which I think in the long run will help us develop, in particular, much more sophisticated science fiction.

But I think it’s impossible to nominate Serkis alone for an acting award, just as it would be inappropriate to nominate his effects team and not nominate him. Without Serkis, there’s no performance to build on top of, no facial expressions and no physicality to transform into something else. But without the effects team, there’s just a dude in a funny suit. It’s like nominating an actor’s bones but not his skin, or vice versa. And because the interdependence is so much deeper than, say, an actor and a makeup artist, or an actor and wardrobing, any solution that recognizes only half the team responsible for the performance isn’t really acceptable. It’s not like the use of motion capture’s going to decrease over time, so delaying some sort of definitive ruling will only make the clamor more intense, not less. Could you nominate an entire team for an acting award? It’s probably an imperfect solution, and I’d be curious to hear other thoughts. That people should get credit is an important principle — and not just in small, fast-running type at the end of credits sequences.