I know I fell off the Cheers blogging over the summer in favor of catching up on Breaking Bad and Deadwood, for which I sincerely apologize. But it felt sort of appropriate that I started up again the same day that Scott Lemieux wrote this post about the bizarre impermissibility of abortion in romantic comedies and pop culture in general.

I’ve written repeatedly about the ways Cheers feels ahead of its time — in fact, the ways it feels ahead of the television of our time, whether it’s trusting the audience to get highly intellectual humor, or addressing the issue of gay athletes in the midst of the AIDS crisis. But one area it feels fairly conventional is on the subject of abortion. I understand that part of what’s funny about Carla is her enormous pack of kids. And it says good things about the bar’s community that in “Father Knows Last,” that everyone takes up a collection to help her support the latest baby. But it would have been interesting if that collection had gone towards her having an abortion, a prospect the show never really considers.

Similarly, in the fourth season episode “Fools and Their Money,” there’s this interesting little moment when Sam is trying to confess one thing to Diane and she thinks she’s gotten someone pregnant. “What’s her name and so many months?” she asks. It would have been fascinating to see those two have a conversation about how Sam feels about fatherhood, and how he’d handle a pregnancy that he didn’t want to see go through. Instead, it’s a misunderstanding, and they move on to the topic of how Sam will tell Woody that he didn’t place a bet that would have made Woody a great deal of money. And I wish it wasn’t another missed opportunity. But I suppose you can’t ask one show to do all the work. I just wish any piece of pop culture would take this bit of work on.

I’ve tended not to think that The Boondocks is as funny as an animated show as it was when it was a syndicated newspaper strip (particularly in the early days). But there’s something resonant, angry, and sad about Huey’s plan to break a brother in the cause out of death row on the eve of Troy Davis’ execution:

The idea is that the court system provides us with some measure of impartial justice, inspired and guided beyond our petty politics. But what happens when, as Emily Hauser wrote in The Atlantic, “a long list of legal experts have, in fact, come forward to say that the case against Troy Davis is far too thin to support the death penalty…The entire case against Davis is based on eyewitness testimony — and seven out of nine eyewitnesses have either recanted or changed their testimonies…There is no physical evidence tying Davis to the crime. Just the word of people who have since said that they were frightened into lying.” It is terrifying when a supposedly apolitical branch of government becomes clearly political, but in a way that leaves us no political recourse to respond.

We can protest Troy Davis’ upcoming execution for a crime he didn’t commit, but there is no mechanism by which we can guarantee the process be halted, no way to break him out of jail, no civil disobedience that would put us between his body and the needle that will deliver his lethal injection. Huey’s fantasy isn’t just hard to watch because it’s goofy. It’s hard to watch because it’s an illustration of our own disempowerment in the face of our own broken system.

Daily Intel, reading through Rick Perry’s 2008 book on the Boy Scouts, finds the governor of Texas trying to hone in on my job and do politicized culture criticism. He wrote, apparently, “Even a casual listener of the Dave Matthews Band or The Police must nod his/her head in ascent [sic] at the notion that we are all like ‘ants marching’ or ‘packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes, contestants in a suicidal race.’ Life should be simpler, slower. We should have more meals with our family, with the television turned off and conversation turned on.” I guess you don’t have to be the kind of teenaged rebel who really hated eating dinner with your parents, or your parents, period, to end up the kind of guy who sits in with ZZ Top. And Dave Matthews and The Police are about as reformist and unrevolutionary as rock can get, the kind of thing where you smoke a little weed, brag about your sex life, and go back to enjoying being rich and influential. They’re an escape valve, not an organizing tool, even if Matthews is a big Obama fan.

In the past decade, the National Football League has quadrupled the number of minority head coaches by implementing a new affirmative action rule. Given the policy’s success, it’s now being considered in an even more challenging environment: the English Premier League.

The Rooney Rule, which was enacted by the NFL in 2003, requires teams to interview at least one non-white candidate for head coaching vacancies. Though nearly 70 percent of NFL players were African American, just 6 percent of the coaches were before the NFL implemented the new policy. This season, a quarter of all teams are led by minority coaches, due in no small part to the Rooney Rule.

In the English Premier League (EPL), however, both the statistics and culture are even more daunting. For England’s top soccer league, the need is obvious: though more than a fifth of players are black, including some of its top stars like Didier Drogba and Ashley Cole, there are no black coaches. In fact, among England’s 92 league clubs, there are just two black coaches in total: Birmingham, a middling team in the second-ranked division, and Charlton, which plays in a division further below.
Read more

Longtime readers know that I love Tamora Pierce’s novels, and I just got around to finishing the last series of hers I’d never read, the Protector of the Small Quartet. For those not in the know, most of Pierce’s novels (except the Winding Circle books) are set in a fictional medieval-style kingdom called Tortall where some people have magical abilities, and most of them follow a female character as she goes through the process of becoming part of a larger institution, whether it’s a girl disguising herself as a boy to train to become a knight; a young woman going through training to become a full officer in Tortall’s equivalent of a police force; a woman with unusual magical abilities undergoing training by Tortall’s top court mage while also helping out the people who run a unique paramilitary unit; or a girl who ends up running an insurgency in a rival kingdom.

The books are very different from George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice Novels: they’re more optimistic about human nature and substantially less dark; they’re about a country in the process of reform rather than in need of revolution; there is a lot more magic; and they’re young adult novels, so they are for a younger reading level (though still I think very enjoyable for adult readers) and they’re shorter. But read together, I think Pierce’s Tortall novels are a fascinating multi-perspective alternative to A Song of Ice and Fire for people who find Martin’s books beyond their trigger level, and would make really interesting and useful reading for folks who like A Song of Ice and Fire but are interested in alternative ways of exploring some of the same themes and using some of the same tropes.

East Meets West

I tend to think one of the fairest, strongest criticisms of A Song of Ice and Fire — and I think particularly of the HBO adaptation — is the way the franchise treats the Dothraki and people in Essos generally. The novels at least give us some sense of Vaes Dothrak and Dothraki culture in a way that’s completely cut out of the show, which explains neither the way the Dothraki treat other religions nor the tradition of eating the horse’s heart nor Dany’s visceral terror of becoming part of the Dosh Khaleen, and essentially forced into permanent cronehood before she’s had a chance to live. But the novel does spend much more time on the cultures of Westeros and in the heads of Westeroi characters. It’s not entirely without justification — this is a Westeroi throne they’re fighting over, after all. But even if the novels are exposing the idea that Westeroi and Dothraki culture are equally brutal (and Dothraki culture may be more meritocratic), it introduces Dothraki brutality much more quickly and leaves it much closer to the surface.

By contrast, Pierce’s novels introduce an artistically and theologically sophisticated nomadic culture, the Bazhir. While initially, Tortall is trapped in a dynamic where forces led by knights fight on Bazhir raids, the two cultures eventually forge an accord. The Bazhir introduce the Tortallan heir to a new way of governing that brings the two cultures together. That doesn’t mean the dynamic is easy; Bazhir gender roles are even stricter than the already somewhat strict ones in Tortall, and that’s a flash point as Tortall attempts to incorporate the Bazhir into the kingdom. But Bazhir warriors are sometimes more progressive than Tortall is about new kinds of magic, and they also introduce new fighting tactics to the realm. A clash of cultures turns out to be worth working through for the benefits to both sides.
Read more

The bridge is yours.

-A three-part proposal for how to pay college athletes.

-Don’t worry, Netflix users! Starz may be gone, but Discovery’s reupped!

-Steven Spielberg doesn’t want his Lincoln biopic to become political fodder.

-Does Amazon really think it’s an okay standard to not have air conditioning in its shipping fulfillment centers?

-Daniel Radcliffe, book supremacist:

Get More: Movie Trailers, Movies Blog

I was talking to the awesome Chloe Angyal from Feministing a couple of weeks ago about how we need a more specific set of terms so people don’t use Manic Pixie Dream Girl to describe all annoying female character tropes. One friendly person (if it’s you, holler and I’ll provide proper credit, I swear) on Twitter had suggested Paper Dolls for replaceable action starlets. Chloe came up with Insert Girl Here for the girlfriend the male lead dumps so he can fall for the lead woman, and Lesson on Legs for women who exist to provide the male lead with an important lesson before heading off to live the rest of their lives presumably in service of their own interests. In The New Girl, Zooey Deschanel is an archetypal Girltergeist, a character who despite her ephemerality manages to be impressively annoying. She would be a female Peeves if she seemed capable of intentionality.

The thing that’s frustrating about the character is that the show makes her seem stupid, rather than goofily endearing or unsocialized in a way that seems charming because it exposes social rituals as artificial and contrived. No grown-ass person thinks that humping a plant is a way to fulfill a stripper fantasy. It’s not actually charming to spend your first days in a new apartment crying loudly in common areas and totally hogging the TV without any consideration for your new roommates. Going up to someone in a bar and addressing them as “Hey, sailor,” is just weird. As is refusing to do as much as order a glass of wine to hold a table in a restaurant and instead asking if you can have more free things when you are an adult with a job. As is being spacey enough to burn your own hair off. None of these things expose anything about social rituals, or calcified senses of how women ought to behave. They’re just infantilizing and strange.

A long-term commenter suggested that I might like the show because of a scene where one of Jess’s new roommates, Nick, suggests that he can guide her back into the dating market, only to have her reply in a quaver, “Like Gandalf through Middle Earth?” Nick’s game, talking her through it and suggesting “First, let’s take the Lord of the Rings references, let’s put them in a deep, dark cave, where no one’s going to find them, ever.” Instead of laughing, blowing her nose, and returning to the world, Jess keeps going in that baby voice, telling Nick: “Except Smeagol. He lives in a cave.” If this is what nerd girls are supposed to be, people who dodge adult conversations by retreating further into fairyland, count me resolutely out. And it’s not like there’s any sign here that Jess is really a nerd, just that she watched the same couple of movies that all of us watched because hey, they’re awesome. This is nerd-pandering, and I have other options. I’m not so desperate for references to the nerd canon that I have to watch this to get some affirmation that Hollywood knows that I exist.
Read more

We are one episode into 2 Broke Girls and already people are calling for Kat Dennings to lose 10 pounds. I wish I could be more articulate about this, but it’s hard for me to express how enraged and sad this makes me, even if the only people expressing this sentiment are Internet trolls. Even though I have some reservations about the 2 Broke Girls pilot, Dennings’ performance is one of the most precise and fully realized in any of the new fall TV shows, and she has sexual charisma to burn. It just destroys me that we cannot have one single woman who represents a marginally different kind of beauty in mainstream popular culture without people coming out of the woodwork to demand she fall in line with their particular preferences.

Nobody would be harmed by a world where not every single woman in entertainment and public life is sculpted to meet a narrow standard of beauty that has nothing to do with what most people find desirable in real life. Enormous numbers of people are harmed by narrow-minded, vicious little standards of sexual appeal that say if you don’t fit into a sample size, you can’t be gorgeous, and that if you desire people who aren’t a sample size, your desires are illegitimate. Kat Dennings is a goddess. If you don’t like her, you have many, many other options. Scuttle off and enjoy them and let the rest of us appreciate the awesomeness that is her, and Amber Tamblyn, and to mourn the fact that this is about as good as it gets in terms of body size diversity. I never understand what drives people to say hateful things like this on the Internet. Even less so in cases like this where the ugly opinions people are propagating have basically won.

I’ve always found Leonardo DiCaprio a somewhat rigid actor, but that’s a quality that should serve him well playing J. Edgar Hoover, in what looks to be a handsome biopic directed by Clint Eastwood.

It looks like Eastwood is going with the interpretation that Clyde Tolson was Hoover’s lover, or at least the emotional center of his life, and planning to explore the impact of Hoover’s closetedness on his spying on people like Eleanor Roosevelt in hopes he’d be able to exploit fears similar to his own and blackmail them. But one hopes, especially given that Eastwood is going around talking about what a libertarian he is, that the movie mounts a broad-based critique of Hoover’s violations of civil liberties and chilling influence on American life. It’s really not enough to say that J. Edgar Hoover spied on us because his mother was mean to him. And it’s important to remind viewers that there is this authoritarian strain in American life, that domestic surveillance is a recurring tendency we need to consistently resist.