I’m on record as being pretty excited for Tower Heist, and for a movie that considers the non-extremely wealthy of Bernie Madoff’s fraud. And it seems like Bernie Madoff revenge fantasies or victim stories are everywhere this fall. Ponzi schemes play a role in 2 Broke Girls and Apartment 23. A Bernie Madoff grotesque is one of the assassination targets in Colombiana

But the obsession with Madoff isn’t just a bad thing because it’s a derivative trope. If pop culture makes him the sole scapegoat for the financial crisis, our television shows and movies will be dodging a complicated but important issue. I understand why Madoff’s convenient. If he’s to blame for people losing their trust funds and job opportunities, shows can give us a slightly shrunken New York, a recessionista version, as it will, without blaming all those cute investment bankers who are potential love interests for our heroines. But that’s a dodge. Not every story should be a complete chronicle of the entire financial crisis, but shows set in New York or with interests in our reshaped economy should be clear that you didn’t have to be criminal to cause an incredible amount of damage even if they’re not incredibly specific about the mechanisms of the damage.

A lot of the pleasure of the early episodes of Deadwood was the way the unsettled gender politics of the frontier meant that women both have the opportunity and are forced into roles beyond the ones they expect of themselves. There are all these glimpses of the country that we’re going to become in Deadwood, and so it’s tremendously powerful to see the way the community is distant from our own in a moment of tragedy.

I knew William Bullock’s death was coming, but that spoiler (as validated by science!) actually made the run-up to that horrifying moment when the horse got loose, doubly tragic. The formal tenderness of Seth asking William, “Are you sometimes permitted coffee?” the tentativeness of their negotiation towards their first real conversation, shows what might have been between them. There could have been a world where Seth really felt like William was his son, where that affection was the basis for something solid and lasting between Seth and Martha. William is, as I suppose most doomed fictional children are, a little too good to be true. “Mr. Bullock’s been missing Father,” he tells his mother on the morning of his death, engaged in an act of kindness. “He talked to me about it this morning. If Pop liked a sunflower, I figured Mr. Bullock might as well.” But that doesn’t mean his loss doesn’t feel any more wrenching when it comes.
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After Gibson Guitars was raided by federal regulators for the second time this year, the company’s chief executive, Henry Juszkiewicz, parlayed the company’s legal troubles into a publicity windfall, casting himself as a victim of overregulation and overzealous enforcement of import laws. And he became a Republican celebrity when Rep. Marsha Blackburn brought Juszkiewicz as her plus-one to President Obama’s jobs speech. But environmental advocates say that fears about what the law that Gibson fell afoul of, the Lacey Act, mean for American consumers are overblown, and suggest the Republican rush to embrace Gibson isn’t the best way to show support for American small business owners. “No one is coming to take your Les Paul guitar,” said Andrea Johnson, the Forest Campaign director for the non-profit Environmental Investigation Agency on a conference call. “Companies can and are complying with this law.”

The Lacey Act, first passed in 1900 and expanded in 2008, is the first federal wildlife protection law, and is essentially intended to prevent the sale of illegally killed, captured, or harvested material in the United States. The original intent was to stop poachers who were killing endangered species in one state and selling them in another. Now, it’s intended to block the demand for wood illegally harvested from places like Madagascar’s national parks or protected Indonesia forests. But it’s also been a boon to domestic hardwood manufacturers who saw their business decimated by the collapse of the housing market and ongoing recession.

“Perhaps they didn’t really do the research before they jumped on the bandwagon,” said Jameson French, chairman of the Hardwood Federation, which represents American producers. “I can assure you that large numbers of the 13,000 small businesses that are members of the Hardwood Federation many of them are Tea Party and many of them are Republican voters, the vast majority of them are…I think the small businessman is saying ‘What’s going on here? We like the Lacey Act. It’s helped keep jobs in our facility.’”
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It’s always nice to see powerful pop culture figures use their drawing power for good, so I get a kick out of the fact that the Beatles apparently included routine desegregation clauses in their concert contracts. Something like this could actually be a good way to force conventions to start adopting good sexual harassment policies. If Hall H participants, for example, said they wouldn’t agree to screen movies unless San Diego Comic Con got it together to create and enforce a sexual harassment policy, I imagine that would come together fairly quickly. Similarly, if a critical mass of much sought-after panelists set the same condition — and it would have to be a really large group of people, composed of both men and woman — they could probably make quality sexual harassment policies an industry standard fairly quickly. The key is just getting momentum going, maybe with the enlistment of a big name in nerddom like Joss Whedon.

I’ll admit I started watching The Playboy Club with a certain measure of ill grace and anti-Eddie Cibrian bias, and even after watching it, I think my skepticism is correct. There are a lot of intriguing elements in this show — a former mob lawyer who’s now representing black Chicagoans in housing discrimination cases; an aging Bunny trying to move into the ranks of management; a black Bunny who sees the Club as a refuge from the outside world’s discrimination; the problematic but interesting notion that being a Bunny was a way to reinvent yourself, even if it was a highly controlled and limited one — that are essentially swamped under some deeply clunky writing and overacting by the leads. But the first episode did have one surprise so gratifying and so potentially important that I’ll be back for another round of the show, even if it’s a storyline that’s only five minutes a week.

A lot of the Playboy Club’s problems, I think, stem from a lack of self-awareness, of the pilot’s unwillingness to explore the uncomfortable assumptions behind the things the characters are saying to each other that should be the essence of a show like this that’s all about a moment when one set of behaviors became not okay and another set of behaviors and identities fought ferociously for their right to exist. When some young Club patrons learn, to their surprise, that they can’t sleep with one of the Bunnies for the grand total of $1.50, the Bunny in question explains to them, “And I’m not a waitress, either. I’m Bunny Janie.” The interesting bit here is that self-delusion, the idea that she’s achieved some separate category, and what it takes to convince herself of that. When Hugh Hefner says in the voiceover that opens the show, “it was a place where anything could happen to anybody. Or any Bunny,” that’s true, only if bad things can happen as well as good things.

The other challenge the show faces, and I’m curious to see how Pan Am will handle this, is how to create an atmosphere of pervasive sexism and racism without making the characters who say sexist and racist things seem totally revolting to an audience who will refuse to identify with them in ways that will allow the show to actually explore issues. When one Bunny jauntily declares that if she overeats at the Mansion’s breakfast buffet, “I just stick my finger down my throat and throw ‘em up. It’s this new diet I heard about,” it’s alienating rather than creating affinity between an audience who knows the cost of bulimia and a character who’s embracing it as a trend.
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The bridge is yours.

-Because what America needs right now is a reality television show about Sarah Palin’s beauty shop.

-When I was a kid, the Grand High Witch’s rotted-out face scared me so much I put post-its over all the illustrations in The Witches.

-Further proof for Jane McGonigal’s theories.

-Leslie Knope: making actual choices, like a real person!

-Zombie Captain America!

When Netflix announced the division of its services into Netflix and Qwickster yesterday, I did what I’ve been meaning to do for a long time and finally cancelled the DVD service, pledging to send a dusty envelope with a couple of episodes of Being Human in it back to the warehouse. But one thing that strikes me as potentially good for Netflix, if insanely frustrating for customers, is the possibility that folks won’t cancel because even if it means managing two accounts, it’ll still be easier than trying to figure out what combination of services best covers your entertainment consumption needs.

One thing that I think was underdiscussed in the early discussions of the announcement was the fact that Qwickster is part of a bid to add gaming to the overall company’s portfolio; the new service will let you rent games by mail for part of your monthly fee. So we’ve got the following options:

-Qwickster: movies and television on DVD, also games, available via mail

-Redbox: movies, television, and games on disc, available via nearly 28,000 kiosks

-Netflix: streaming movies and television

-Amazon Prime: streaming movies and television, free two-day shipping on most Amazon purchases, perhaps a couple of Kindle books a month

-Hulu Plus: streaming television from current seasons, though when the shows go up varies by network, and a back catalogue of streaming television and movies

-HBO GO: Available only to HBO subscribers, streaming HBO original and licensed content

That’s a lot of services to build combinations out of, and what’s right for you will depend on your preferences. I’ll never be a serious enough gamer to have that alone keep me a subscriber to Qwickster; I’d rather just buy the occasional game. I have HBO for work (one of a bunch of services I subscribe to for work), so my access to HBO GO also means I don’t need access to HBO discs, but for other people, discs are the only way they can access shows like The Wire or The Sopranos or Sex and the City. Then, when I want to watch a streaming show, it sometimes feel like the constantly shifting selection means I have to stay subscribed to all of the other services to make sure I can hit everything. When I started watching The League, all of both seasons were on Netflix. Halfway through, season two disappeared, only to reappear as available for a very limited time on Hulu, so I ended up scarfing down the entire second season in a day. I use my Amazon Prime account for streaming much less than I initially expected to because the selection isn’t very good, and it can be hard to figure out if something’s available through it.

I know I watch far more broadly and randomly than the average consumer, but still, it feels like this is a difficult moment to be an informed consumer and to find the options that work well for you. I’ve said in the past that HBO GO always struck me as a way of gaining leverage in the contract negotiations with whatever service eventually gets HBO’s content streaming. But given this landscape, I honestly wonder if there might be a future in services that cater to broad taste tranches if only so it’s easier to find out what you need for what you want.

I want badly for Kat Dennings to have a great career, and have ever since she stole The 40 Year Old Virgin away from the movie’s adults every time she was on screen. It was frustrating watching her play second banana to the leaden Natalie Portman in Thor, and I really hope she breaks the streak in 2 Broke Girls, a show that, among other things, seems to be about the Bernie Madoff scandal and small business ownership, as well as about the gentrification of Brooklyn.

That gentrification thing, first. Part of Michael Patrick King’s schtick in Sex and the City was giving the sense that he was ahead of the curve on New York Trends: the show helped create the country-wide sense of the Meatpacking District as cool and cupcakes as a thing. But 2 Broke Girls feels like it’s desperately trying to catch up and prove its cred. Max’s (Dennings) monologue that’s been all over the trailer — “I wear knit hats when it’s cold out, you wear knit hats because of Coldplay. You have tattoos to piss off your dad. My dad doesn’t know he’s my dad.” — is both unfunny and a couple of years ago. Only the final, dry line about how unaroused her customers’ rude behavior makes her has any sting. Similarly, Max’s lament that “The cliental used to be all Eastern Bloc criminals and crack whores, but then he took it over and ruined it,” would be funny if Brooklyn wasn’t already so ridiculously gentrified and if there wasn’t something a little bit weird about treating folks from the former Soviet Union as they’re all sleazy, slutty crooks.

Then, there’s the Madoff thing. Caroline, Max’s blonde foil, is the daughter of a Madoff-like con artist named Martin Channing, and apparently, we are supposed to feel sorry for her, even though my reactions trended much more towards Max’s. I feel some pity for Mark Madoff, who finally figured out his father’s fraud, reported it, and eventually committed suicide as the investigation into Madoff’s frauds mounted. But I find it a lot harder to feel pity for someone who just totally missed that her lavish lifestyle was financed by extensive white-collar crime, and who very belatedly is having her first experience with the idea that people have to work to support themselves. And the show overcompensates by making Max’s other boss, a Manhattan socialite, so pathologically stupid it’s impossible to imagine how anyone stands to be in the same room as her. She’s a walking hathos alert.

All of that said, I think this show has potential. Dennings is very good about keeping her character from becoming sour; in 22 minutes, she’s stressed, seduced, warm and wry. Beth Behrs, who plays Caroline, may be stuck with some unfortunately high-concept characterization, but she’s got a nice way around a line reading, whether she’s telling Max’s loser boyfriend to get up out of her Chanel when he tries to hit on her, or coming up with a new business plan on the spot. That last bit is the smartest thing in the show: the frame device for at least the first season looks like it’s going to be Caroline and Max working together to save the start-up capital to earn a bakery. It both feels timely—the recession prompts people towards alternative jobs and start-ups—and a good character synthesis. Max is hustling, but so exhausted she doesn’t have the energy to put together a bigger plan, and Caroline is irrepressible enough to give her the kick she needs, even as she needs Max to keep her honest and from doing things like stealing the extra money she’s charging for cupcakes. That’s a great, sturdy setup, if the writing calms down a bit. And if the show stops making bad jokes about people getting raped at Duke.

I wish I was as optimistic as Erik Kain about the possibility of Mitch and Cam tying the knot on-camera in Modern Family:

You see, I’m almost positive that during the show we’ll see the couple get officially, legally hitched. I’m not sure if this will follow the return of gay marriage to California, or whether they’ll tie the knot-tying into the show in some other way, but I do think we’ll get the wedding. The act of getting married on the show would be far more powerful and emotionally moving than having Mitch and Cam married from the outset. Hell, I got all teary in the “Hawaii” episode when Phil threw Claire the surprise second-wedding.

I could be wrong, of course, but a wedding makes for great television. A gay wedding on Modern Family would not only be fantastic TV, it would be a really great moment for gay rights, equality and social progress in America. Furthermore, Americans are ready for it – for the first time ever, more Americans support rather than oppose gay marriage.

One commenter objected to the idea that Mitch and Cam should have gotten married already because marriage rights were only available briefly in California, though when the show began, the pair had been together for years, and given that they were planning to adopt, it seems fairly reasonable that they might have tied the knot first to make sure their future family would be protected.

And I think that gets at why Erik’s wrong. If Modern Family has Mitch and Cam get hitched without the force of law behind them, they’ll be doing something that Friends did in 1996, putting on a ceremony that a lot of viewers won’t know doesn’t actually convey any legal rights or responsibilities to the couple going through it. And if they wait until marriage is legal in California again, that feels like really kicking the issue down the road, following rather than leading. I’m not say showing Cam and Mitch’s wedding wouldn’t have an impact (though I fear it would also be an occasion for the show to take one of its unfortunately frequent detours into gay stereotyping), but that it would also be forceful and quiet to just assert that normal is a world where two men who are raising a daughter and talking about having a second child are married, and why can’t the rest of us catch up? The show appears to want some credit for leading, even if its creators joke that they’re just normalizing trophy wives. If so, they should do the work to actually be out in front.