The origins of my deep and abiding love for Michael Fassbender include Neil Marshall’s bloody showdown between Romans and Picts, Centurion:

So I’m pretty excited to hear that he’s going to direct one of the most important sequences in the next season of Game of Thrones, based on George R.R. Martin’s novel A Clash of Kings, a battle in which one side manages to trap the other. Marshall did a very nice job of communicating the panic of both a plan gone wrong and reacting to a plan gone horribly wrong in a (relatively) confined space, and so I’m excited to see what he’ll do with the larger dynamics of that scene.

And more importantly, it strikes me that Marshall’s a good fit for Martin’s material, which makes war out to be incredibly ugly. Marshall’s one of the few directors who, like Zack Snyder, has an extremely distinct visual style. But unlike Snyder, who tends to make things look burnished and as a result, creates some emotional distance between viewers and events, Marshall’s good at a kind of hyperclarity that brings events closer. This battle in Martin’s novel is literally hell. If Marshall can do on a small screen what he did on the big one, he’ll make that fear and cognitive shutdown even more direct.

This isn’t a typical first look, since Homeland, Showtime’s excellent new national security drama, doesn’t actually premiere on television until Oct. 2, but the network’s been kind enough to put the pilot online with some sexy bits blurred out, and I’ve watched it twice since it hit the Internet. And I think Homeland has the potential to be what a lot of other pieces of popular culture have tried to be: a truly great examination of what we did to ourselves in the wake of September 11.

The title has a double meaning. Claire Danes plays Carrie Anderson, a CIA agent who has returned from Iraq with some boundary issues and a prescription for anti-psychotics, and is convinced that there’s more to Nicholas Brody, a POW who’s been rescued from the Iraqi insurgency, than simply a family man with high upside potential as a political symbol. As Nick tries to return home to a family that moved on from him and is trying not to show it, Carrie begins investigating him, risking her career and credibility in the process. They are both seeking different kinds of American security.
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Dr. Keith Ablow has a long and nasty record of saying unpleasant and inaccurate things about sexual orientation, gender identity, and the media. He’s insulted Chaz Bono, calling him a “very disordered person”; speculated darkly that a J. Crew ad will sow widespread gender confusion among children; and declared that prison normalizes homosexuality. As my colleagues at ThinkProgress have repeatedly pointed out, it’s an embarrassment that a serious news network would give this much space and airtime to someone whose idea have as much science behind them as patent medicine.

But Ablow’s association with the network does mean we got to see his colleague Megyn Kelly, who periodically pops up to say something awesome about, say, the medieval state of maternity leave in the United States, absolutely dismantle Ablow’s claims that Bono’s participation in Dancing With the Stars will convince legions of American children that they’re not comfortable with the gender they were born into (and also that transitioning is like giving liposuction to an anorexic):

While I don’t think that anyone’s going to switch their gender identity because Chaz Bono is a public figure appearing on a dance show, I’d stop short of saying it’s a totally neutral act. If the somewhat older audience for Dancing With the Stars watches the show and realizes that Chaz Bono is just another guy going through the same process of making himself vulnerable and awkward as all the other candidates, and as a result, feels like transgender people are a little less foreign, that strikes me as a pretty good thing.

It would be wonderful if Fox didn’t credential Ablow by counting him as part of their medical team. But I do think there’s real value in giving folks who believe the same noxious, fictional things that he does some airtime so they can be exposed as the hateful frauds they are. Good for Megyn Kelly for pointing out just how specious his theories about media influence are, and even more importantly, asking, “Isn’t there enough hate?” And good for Bono for refusing to give Fox interviews and refusing to play Fox’s two-faced game, bashing people one day and expecting them to play nice the next.

Novelist David Liss likes to send his heroes up against sweeping forces of societal change, whether Jewish boxer-turned-detective Benjamin Weaver is running up against the rise of the stock market and paper money in books like A Conspiracy of Paper and The Spectacle of Corruption or Ethan Saunders is investigating the circumstances surrounding the founding of the Bank of America in The Whiskey Rebels. In his newest book, The Twelfth Enchantment, Lucy Derrick, a young woman with more than a passing resemblance to some of Jane Austen’s most famous heroines, finds her community and her life under threat by the rise of the Industrial Revolution. And Lucy learns that she has the magical talent to stand against some of the more destructive forces at work behind the rise of England’s mills. We spoke about writing political fiction, Austen’s secondary characters, and magic as a social get-out-of-jail-free card. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You’ve written mostly straight historical fiction in the past. How did you decide to make the switch to fantasy?

I’ve always loved genre fiction, and at some point, I knew that I wanted to do something like this. It might be more accurate to say did I decide I wasn’t going to write genre fiction? I got started on a different track…I was in grad school and I decided I want to write a novel. I went with the old adage that you should write what you know. What I knew was 18th century Britain, so what I decided I would do is write a novel based on my dissertation research. For whatever reason, I decided to play it straight and not doing anything paranormal with that book. I’ve always been resistant to being pigeon-holed and being told that because this was the kind of novel I’d written, this was the kind of novel I had to keep writing. I’ve been able to get away with it so far.

Well, even though The Twelfth Enchanment is a fantasy novel, it’s deeply engaged with social issues. It’s always fascinating to me that Austen’s novels, which are very brittle and funny about class, aren’t really engaged with larger social issues.

[There were] two different things I wanted to do. One, which I wrote about in io9, was magic as it was understood in the period. The other thing was I was really interested in was what you were talking about, the narrow view of the Jane Austen novel. She was living in and writing about a period that was going through an incredible economic upheaval that rarely in any way creeps into her books, and then only in the most oblique ways. That was where I began. In terms of the character’s evolution, I guess what I would say is I’m very resistant to writing characters who are contemporary people who happen to be living in the past. I wanted to write about someone who felt to me like a realistic 19th-century character with a realistic set of 19th-century worldviews and interests. To have her start out as someone who is conscious of and aware of and active about these issues never felt realistic to me. Her evolution from apathy to interest I always felt needed to happen in the book, rather than to be introduced to his woman who is a social activist.
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I’d sort of forgotten that we were getting yet another Men in Black movie next spring, but that news reminded me just how good the first flick was on immigration. The MIB are, after all, effectively a full-service immigration agency, monitoring the, as Kay puts it, “1500 aliens on the planet, most of them right here in Manhattan. And most of them are decent enough, they’re just trying to make a living.” They deliver alien babies. They get alien ambassadors courtside tickets to choice basketball games. They solve the 1977 New York City blackout when some immigrant with a twisted sense of humor gets out of hand.

The movie’s immigrants aren’t merely saintly. They’re cranky newsstand attendants, family people who break laws to try to get their wives and kids out of the way of harm, cranky elementary school teachers. The Bug’s a conservative nightmare of unending anchor babies. The movie literally begins with a hyper-violent alien posing as a Mexican illegal immigrant, hiding in the back of a truck that’s supposed to be smuggling back across the border. But Kay treats the actual humans in the shipment with dignity and cracks down on the alien because he’s a repeat offender who’s proven he will be nothing but detrimental to American society. Jay aces his entrance exam when he shows restraint in a shooting exam, saying: “Well, first I was gonna pop this guy hanging from the street light, and I realized, y’know, he’s just working out. I mean, how would I feel if somebody come runnin’ in the gym and bust me in my ass while I’m on the treadmill? Then I saw this snarling beast guy, and I noticed he had a tissue in his hand, and I’m realizing, y’know, he’s not snarling, he’s sneezing. Y’know, ain’t no real threat there.”

It’s a smart, compassionate approach to enforcement. There’s no assumption that aliens are wrong to come to the U.S., or that we can keep them all out. Instead the characters operate with the sense that aliens will keep trying to make a life here and it’s better for everyone concerned if we try to make that immigration process as orderly and efficient as possible. And this whole gestalt is bolstered by a healthy sense of humanity’s place in the universe. To some aliens, we’re “nothing but undeveloped, unevolved, barely conscious pond scum, totally convinced of their own superiority as they scurry about their short, pointless lives.” To others, we’re a refuge. But either way, we win by letting folks in and building manageable lives, both because they contribute to our society, and because they give us a sense of where we stand in the universe.

The bridge is yours.

-Taylor Branch on college sports.

-New hobby: writing a script to match this political photoshoot.

-Hollywood hearts Diane Feinstein.

-Dear CBS, We don’t need another Sherlock Holmes show, we have Sherlock. Love, Alyssa

-Two great tastes that go great together:

As the title suggests, these are my first impressions of these shows, and therefore not definitive judgements. Obviously, all the posts in this series contain spoilers.

The sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a controversial one: the creators didn’t know they were going to be able to make it; Buffy’s decidedly dark and depressed; and Willow’s addiction is admittedly uneven. But I love it because I think it’s a fantastic acknowledgment of how hard that first year out of college is for everyone, and in particular, how difficult it can be to make it in the adult world without the academic credentials you’re expected to have if you’re someone of a certain class background. I also just think that Sarah Michelle Gellar is very, very good at playing fragile and scared, and showing what it’s like to summon your strength when you’re at the absolute bleeding edge of desperation.

All of which means she’s working a lot of her strengths in Ringer, the first episode of which aired last night, which looks like it’s going to be an extended meditation on the difference between the appearance of goodness and its actuality. Gellar plays twins, first Bridget, a former stripper and recovering addict who caused the death of a young boy, then later Siobhan, Bridget’s twin. When Siobhan disappears off a boat, Bridget impulsively jumps at a chance to reset her life (and avoid testifying against a dangerous crime figure, one of the few Native American characters I’ve seen on television in a long time) and pretends to be Siobhan, knowing that Siobhan’s husband and friends don’t know that Bridget exists.

The plausibility of this ruse is pretty dubious. Bridget has next to no time to do research on Siobhan’s life, and her impersonation is, well, imperfect. “You look absolutely anorexic,” chirps Siobhan’s best friend Gemma. “You must share your secret.” And when Siobhan’s husband Andrew comes home, he immediately notices huge differences in the way his wife is reacting to circumstances, explaining that “I love it. I just don’t believe it.” And now Bridget’s going to have to fake a pregnancy, which I’d suspect will work about as well for her as it did for Terri on Glee.

But if she can pull it off, it will be because Siobhan turns out to be such an awful, manipulative person that the people around her chalk up her inconsistent behavior to her terminal duplicitousness. It turns out the so-called good sister is sleeping with Gemma’s husband Henry; driving Henry nuts by refusing to see him — and then refusing to acknowledge that she’s carrying his baby; engaged in what’s essentially a fake marriage with her own husband; shipping her stepdaughter off to boarding school. Maybe she lied about Bridget’s existence not because Siobhan was ashamed of her or hurt by things she’s done but because it’s part of a pattern of bad behavior and lies. And maybe whatever happened to her on that boat was by Siobhan’s design, not a suicide but an escape, a vindictive attempt to stick Bridget with her life. We have a lot of television about bad behavior by rich people, but less about the fact that we tend to equate wealth with virtue, often as a way to make ourselves feel better about wanting it. Having a main character repeatedly come up against the fact that what she thought about her sister’s life based on its polished surface was wrong is an interestingly direct way to engage with that myth.

I don’t really think Ringer is good—for it to be that, it would have to build its mythology a bit more slowly. The pregnancy reveal should have been a couple of episodes in, and we should get more time to see Bridget make the decision to replace her sister and figure out how she’s going to pull it off. And if it’s going to be this dark, we need to see the darkness, not just be told that it’s out there, somewhere, in this brightly-lit, fancy world. Bridget’s terror should feel real. And the show should have at least some sense of fun about Bridget’s new life. If she’s stolen Siobhan’s place in the world after years of living lean in Wyoming, there should be some guilty humor in the gorgeous clothes, house, and husband.

Iranian state television has apparently just handed down a ban on shows where men appear shirtless, and is looking with disapproval on shows about men and women who work together. If True Blood and The Office are out, here in no particular order are five shows we (and the U.K.) could try exporting to or remaking for our favorite wacky-leadered Middle Eastern nation:

1. Entourage: It’s not like any of the show’s romantic relationships (other than Ari and his wife) are remotely compelling, so edit out ever scene of Vince having anonymous sex with a groupie, every scene of Domenick Lombardozzi (can’t. unsee.) and other characters having sex with hookers, and you’ll have a tight little Hollywood business drama. Ari’s Judaism might be a challenge for the Iranian market, though.

2. The League: What more comforting national stereotype can we export than the idea that America’s top doctors, lawyers, etc. become absolutely helpless between September and March in the face of the football season? The League is the perfect tool to explain to international audiences why we’re moving towards a multi-polar planet rather than a uni-polar one, while also expanding our soft power through the unifying awesomeness of football. The sight of Ochocinco rapping is enough to mollify all enemies.

3. Men of a Certain Age: Aches, sexual anxiety, and getting treated badly by your domineering father are all universal emotions. Plus, now that it’s canceled, I bet TNT is hungry for a syndication deal to keep the profits coming from it.

4. Spooks: See what happens when those decadent westerners let men and women work together in charged circumstances? Someone has an unfortunate encounter with a deep-fryer.

5. Real Housewives of…: Hey, if you want women to stay out of the office to avoid tension and can’t stand the sight of passionate romances, it’s hard to do better than the passionless marriages and substance-free lives of Bravo’s Real Housewives. As long as there’s not a ban on wig-snatching or table-flipping, the ladies should do just fine by Iranian state television censors. Or just shoot Real Housewives of Tehran already.

Great, great essay by Becky Chambers on science fiction and social change, and how it kept her going when she was doing socially conscious theater that she felt wasn’t reaching people in the way she wanted to:

If I tell you a disturbing story, and I say, “this is how it is right now,” you may be motivated to do something about it. More likely, however, you will end up like me and my friends, picking at fries and feeling hopeless. You’ll feel pessimistic and disillusioned. You’ll feel like our species totally sucks.

But if I show you a fantastical place – even a scary one – that lights up all the little imaginative parts of your brain, and I tell you, “this is how it could be,” that opens up a whole new realm of possibilities. If the underlying message is positive, then just like Dr. King said, you’ll feel empowered to work towards that future…

The danger, of course, is getting so caught up in those alternate realities that we lose touch with the real world. This is what society thinks of when it thinks of geeks – sexless misfits devoid of social graces and personal hygiene. And yeah, those geeks exist. For some people, life is just so unpleasant that they wear their fictional worlds like a suit of armor. However, what we are dealing with here is a case of squares and rectangles. Some shut-ins are geeks. Not all geeks are shut-ins.

Or, to put it another way, just because you are a geek does not mean that your interests are without societal value.

Progress is impossible without imagination.

The challenge is activation. I’m not saying that the measure of a work’s worth should be how many people it convinces to say, get out of their chairs and go into STEM fields. Fiction is fiction, and primarily should be judged at how well it brings you into another world while you’re consuming it, whether it’s the stifled air of the early 1960s or the cold, dead atmosphere of space. But I would be curious to see more examples of things like the Harry Potter Alliance, or the Browncoats, where people are doing charity work based on the tenets of fiction, or documentation of scientific discoveries or breakthroughs that have been inspired by fiction.