In an effort to curb fan violence at its soccer matches, the Turkish Football Federation decided to ban male fans from certain games — the first of which was Tuesday’s match between Manisaspor and Fenerbahce SK in Istanbul. More than 40,000 women and children showed up, and the result was wildly successful — the teams played to a 1-1 draw free of violence between their fans.

The most important takeaway from the game, however, wasn’t that female sports fans are less violent than their male counterparts. It’s that they’re just as passionate:

It’s not new here or abroad that sports are, stereotypically, a guy thing. But in international soccer, there are especially large barriers to women’s equal participation as fans or players. The Brazilian men’s national team is the pride of the country, but the women’s team barely receives enough funding to train. In Iran, women are banned not just from attending men’s matches, but from watching national broadcasts of them as well. FIFA, the sport’s international governing body, banned the Iranian women’s team from an Olympic qualifier because its members refused to play without wearing headscarves.

But even when countries and cultures make it harder for women to be fans and players, it’s amazing to see how female athletes and sports fans are pushing for equality. Brazil’s World Cup team narrowly lost to the well-funded American side in the quarterfinals of this year’s tournament. Iranian women risk severe punishment by dressing up as men to attend soccer matches there. And, now, as the 45,000 singing, chanting, jersey-clad Turkish women showed the world Tuesday night, passion for a sport or team isn’t just for the guys. No matter what barriers exist, women around the world keep showing that these are their games too.

I think these two episodes, particularly coming back-to-back, are my favorite of Deadwood‘s third season. It’s sort of hard to imagine seeing them separately in their perfectly complementary explorations of two events that are simultaneously public and private: a funeral and a wedding.

Both events are lovely in their own way. In the first season, funerals were tiny affairs, held at the edge of town and poorly attended. Now, they’re events that bring the entire community together, that inspire Trixie to inspect Al’s entire stock of whores to make sure they’re respectable; that gets Jane in a bath even if it’s not enough for her to complain that the water “burned my snatch”; that it finally snaps Martha out of her brittleness and convinces her to invite the town in. And the wedding gets Trixie in a truly beautiful dress, her loveliness inspiring Jewel to come up with the money, we know not from where, to outfit her with jewelry for the occasion; to get Jane not just bathed, but in a dress and dancing in the streets; for Al and Sol to finally make their peace. “Ain’t you two a fucking picture?” Al comments from the rooftop where he observes both events, refusing to take direct part. “Whirling her around’s okay, Star, just don’t step on her fucking toes.”

Of course, the couple that really comes together in these episodes is Seth and Martha. When Martha asks Seth if it’s all right with him if she keeps teaching even after William’s death, he reacts with genuine passion for the first time, telling her, “I would, yes, I’d be delighted.” And that discussion of how Martha will approach her classroom provides a way for them to talk about losing the son who was Martha’s by birth and Seth’s by sense of honor. “I believe if I teach them with love and joy, I won’t make them afraid,” Martha explains her anxiety about wearing mourning in the classroom, despite her powerful need to have an outward symbol of her grief. “And I don’t want to lose him.” “You’ll never lose him,” Seth promises her. A moment later, he takes her hand. In that moment, he makes her his wife as he didn’t when he said his vows. And later, she finds the first sprout from William’s sunflower seeds, the promise he rescued from a broken vessel and brought to Deadwood to tie his father by blood and his father by marriage. The universe has proven confirmation of Seth’s comfort, tying them closer together.
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I am not particularly predisposed to like Frank Miller’s upcoming terrorism-fightin’ comic Holy Terror, but I read through the first couple of pages Newsarama has up. And apparently, Watchmen’s Rorshach is back and narrating, because man does this start with lengthy rooftop rants about how terrible Empire City is, apparently because it’s wet, and other things. I’m not really sure what the purpose of this framing is. If you want to make an argument that terrorists are wrong to see our society as decadent and corrupt, it might make sense to present a more compelling and coherent version of that case and then debunk it. If we’re supposed to take these complaints seriously, and think about the idea that Empire City is complacent and thinks too highly of itself, and maybe had an attack coming, that perhaps might need to be clearer.

Similarly, there’s a really interesting (if uncomfortable and not for everybody) story to be told about the September 11 hijackers and their lives before their terrible, historical crime. What did it mean to them to spend their final days drinking at bars and failing to tip strippers? What did an extended stay in America make them feel about the country they were trying to destroy? Did anyone waver? And if so, how they keep the group together? We’ll never have definitive answers to those questions, but I think they’re reasonable ones for speculative fiction to explore. I don’t really expect the rest of Holy Terror to do this, or do it in a nuanced way, but there are hints of those questions, so I’ll probably read the whole thing. I just can’t help myself sometimes.

I think Marc Bernardin has some good points about why, even in an era full of excellent television shows, we arguably only have two science fiction or fantasy shows that operated at the same level of, say, The Sopranos throughout or through most of their runs: Battlestar Galactica and Lost (his choices, not mine). But I don’t really think this is the case:

GENRE IS THINKY. If you look at the average night of television, you’ll see that most drama shows are about doctors, lawyers or cops. Because people – from the audience all the way up to network heads – understand how those shows work. Because a patient will always roll into the ER, some schmuck will always go to court, and someone will always get murdered in “the Big City.”

But science fiction, particularly, is a genre of ideas – ideas that usually resist the reduction into the doctor-lawyer-cop mode. And all too often, when people don’t understand a thing they either don’t let it on the air – unless they monkey with it to such an extent that the ideas are gone and it’s a husk of what it could’ve been – or they don’t support it once it does get on the air. A show with no marketing or scheduling support is a show no one knows to watch, or when to watch it even if they wanted to.

All of the best shows of the Golden Age are deeply idea-based shows. The Wire as treatise on capitalism, bureaucracy, and education is almost too obvious to mention. The Sopranos is a meditation on the nature of evil — and the efficacy of therapy, to the point that the show’s ending mirrors the let-down of terminating. Breaking Bad is a similarly stark moral show, one that also touches on everything from health care reform to the War on Drugs. Deadwood is about the emergence of civil society from the quite literal muck. And not only are all of these ideas-based shows, they’re shows that directly comment on the predictability of genres like doctor-lawyer-cop shows. Levy gets called out by Omar. The cops who beat Bubbles don’t get redeemed by their good intentions and concern for victims. No medical professional is compassionate about Walter White’s cancer, but they are very willing to take his money.

And I think more to the point, this may be jumping the gun a bit. We’ll see how Game of Thrones goes, but in between that, its big order for American Gods, and its big Michael Chabon-written magicians-fight-the-Nazis show Hobgoblin, HBO is making heavy future investments in fantasy. It takes a lot of efforts, and a lot of misses, to produce the shows that define our new Golden Age. The halcyon years for genre may just arrive a few years later than the Golden Age for more general interest television.

It’s a matter of public record that I thought the last season of Glee was a travesty. So it’s almost surreal to see them get an issue right (with the standard minor factual errors that Hollywood always seems to make about the political process). Semi-contrary to what was promised in the pre-season news, Sue Sylvester is running for Congress, and channeling Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who this year destroyed his state’s arts agency, meaning Kansas can’t get National Endowment for the Arts funding, which she’s decided to make her central campaign platform:

You know what’s getting me down in Western Ohio? The arts in public schools. Why? Because America is failing. China is on our ass, people. This isn’t the 1960s anymore, when jobs were plentiful…The arts are expensive, and we can’t afford it anymore…I will suspend all public school arts programs and reject all federal and state funding for the arts until every student reads at or above grade level.

Now, obviously a member of the House can’t turn down arts funding on behalf of their state. But otherwise? Economic and competitiveness insecurity? Check. Treatment of the arts as if they’re a luxury? Check. Folks responding to these kinds of attacks by whipping out arguments about the efficacy of the arts rather than their intrinsic worth? Cue Mr. Schue, who comes back at Sue with “The arts help kids do better in school. Kids in the arts record the lowest instance of substance abuse,” before retreating further by explaining that he really just needs job security because he wants to start a family with…a woman he hasn’t slept with yet. I mean, this is Glee. It would be too much to expect full-on emotional coherence.

But still, it’s Glee actually setting up a season-long arc that makes sense — for the first time since the first season, the Glee Club actually has an imperative to perform to survive, and the stakes are larger than simply disbanding the club. If they can stick with it longer than an episode, and come up with tactics more convincing than Will glittering Sue (if nothing else, the show should get credit for showing how silly glittering someone is as a way to make a point), the show will actually be contributing to an ongoing national debate about state and federal arts budgets. Which is rare for any show, much less one as schizophrenic as this.

The bridge is yours.

-How to navigate PSN’s terms of service.

-This praise of My Boys over The New Girl is absolutely correct.

-An argument that I didn’t think needed making.

-How to think about obnoxious people who make good art.

-I know some people think Lana Del Rey is awful and manufactured and such a sellout, but man is this gorgeous:

Great, great post from Julian Sanchez on an odd divide among wealthy superheroes and villains, namely that superheroes in that category tend to have inherited their wealth, while supervillains tend to be self-made men. He writes about the historical context for the cleavage:

While the pattern in comics inverts the meritocratic ideal that seems to rule in most modern American fiction, it fits quite naturally with a pre-capitalist aristocratic ethos, which persisted at least through the early 20th century in the form of Old Money’s contempt for the nouveau riche. Jane Jacobs, in her book Systems of Survival, contrasted this aristocratic view, which she dubbed the “Guardian” moral complex, with “bourgeois” or “mercantile” ethics. In this worldview, while wealth and the leisure time it affords may be necessary preconditions of cultivating certain noble qualities (whether that’s appreciation of classical art and literature, or the martial, deductive, and scientific skills of a masked crimefighter), the grubby business of acquiring money is inherently corrupting. The ideal noble needs to have wealth, while being too refined to be much concerned with becoming wealthy. It’s permissible for Stark and Kord to be largely responsible for the success of their companies because their contribution is essentially a side effect of their exercise of their intellectual virtues. Along similar lines, the Fantastic Four have plainly become enormously wealthy from the income stream generated by Reed Richards’ many patents, I don’t recall many scenes in which we see Richards stepping out of the lab to apply his intelligence directly to their commercialization: His inventions are presumably sold or licensed to others who concern themselves with transforming Richards’ genius into cash.

A similar pattern holds for literally noble or aristocratic power in comics. Princess Diana (Wonder Woman) and T’Challa (Black Panther) are hereditary royalty. Doctor Doom and Magneto are members of despised and oppressed minority groups (Doom is Roma; Magneto a Jewish mutant) who actively seize leadership of Latveria and Genosha, respectively. Democratic power doesn’t fare too much better: Lex Luthor was briefly president of the United States.

A couple of extra thoughts. When a character comes from inherited wealth and hasn’t had to work, acquiring superpowers or a sense of responsibility that leads our hero to fight crime can be a form of extreme penance or catchup for all the years the hero spent lounging in the lap of luxury. It’s not just that a wealthy hero is getting acquainted with a high level of responsibility — he’s getting acquainted with responsibility, period, and maybe even reckoning with the fact of his past inaction or the consequences of his wealth. It’s a way of creating a character arc for someone who in normal circumstances might be further along the path to both heroism and manhood. If, say, an extremely heroic firefighter became a superhero, his powers might manifest existing tendencies he had already more strongly. But it’s not like he’s going to have to reckon with his past self and past actions. He was already a solid dude, and now he’s an even more solid dude.

And Julian has this observation, which I think is true, but I’d take a little bit further: “The logic of this, as I apprehend it, is that the hero must wield enormous power in order to effectively perform the superheroic function, but cannot seem to seek it too eagerly, even for admirable ends—perhaps particularly when we consider that they typically make use of their great economic power by translating it into a superhuman capacity for physical violence.” I also think that when a hero moves from having his wealth be the most important fact around him to his capacity for good being the most important fact around him, it invites the audience to reassess how important they think wealth actually is. These reassessments only go so far, of course. It’s not like Batman is liquidating Wayne Enterprises and giving his fortune away. We wouldn’t want to make people think that wealth itself is bad, now would we? Wealthy people who become superheroes are a great way of reconciling us to concentrations of wealth, to convince us of the idea that it’s actually a good thing for some people to have accumulate vast sums of money because they’ll channel it for public benefit.

Revenge isn’t the best show of the fall, but it’s more fun than I expected, full of the kind of dark sizzle that Ringer should have had. And while the setup’s baroque and soapy, it’s actually set around a fascinating premise. The main character is working to take out a group of wealthy Hamptonites who helped frame her father for helping provide financing to terrorists.

It’s an interesting choice. For the last 10 years, collaborating with terrorism has probably been the worst accusation you could level at another American. Such charges have been the justification for horrible attacks on American Muslims, they are the source of the fascination with John Walker Lindh. The idea of a businessman helping a terrorist group route funding without any ideological reason for doing so is difficult to imagine, and so you can see how charges like that would be horrifying. Would it be better to tell a story about false accusations through the eyes of Muslim characters, and from the basis of communities that have actually been victimized by these kinds of allegations and hate crimes inspired by those allegations? Absolutely. But it might also be a very hard sell, and not necessarily a productive thing, to have a Muslim character taking sometimes violent revenge on Americans who are too stupid, or self-interested, to separate out a religion from its fanatics. It would be pretty disastrous if an ABC soap got in the business — however accidentally — of spreading the impression that there are grievance-mongering, taqiyya-practicing Muslims all up in the Hamptons. If we’re going to have a pop take on the issue, this may be the way to go.

I don’t really think that shows like this are a major and valuable part of our debate over issues like terrorism or class (there are lots of nice little class and intra-social class conflicts in the pilot). But I do think it’s interesting that rather some baroque and non-topical way of killing off the main character’s father, the show chose something topical, appropriate, and attuned to American fears and weaknesses. I’d rather stupid, fun shows acknowledge that politics play a big role in American life and use that as the basis for ridiculousness than invent flimsy personal stories that don’t really hold up as the basis for melodramatic events (a la Ringer). We messed up our country in the way we responded to terrorism. It’s really a stretch for me to believe that bad people would use national tragedy to disgusting personal ends.

Okay, we’ll start with this, and as folks coalesce around a sense of what fall shows they want to discuss, we’ll revisit this. But we’re definitely going to do Boardwalk Empire, The Good Wife, Homeland, The Walking Dead, Community, and Parks and Recreation, which will start tomorrow. I was also thinking of doing a joint post on Pan Am and The Playboy Club, which I think belong in conversation with each other, if that’s agreeable to folks.