Recaps for Sunday shows will go up on Monday, rather than Tuesday, as they normally would. I get the sense we’re going to have a lot to say about the Breaking Bad finale. And I know this episode of Homeland ends in a must-discuss moment.

Also, the next week is a slightly nutty one for me: I’m helping run a conference for CAP today and tomorrow (video of me, Zack Stentz, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Doug Wolk talking superheroes to come!) and then running up to New York for New York Comic Con and maybe a side trip to Occupy Wall Street. I’ll be blogging, but at a reduced pace. So to keep things hopping, I’m bringing in a team of all-stars to help out. More about them first thing on Tuesday morning. Have a great long weekend!

Beyonce’s new video is a lot of fun:

But man is “Countdown” super-wifey. It’s not that I have any objection to the idea of cooking your man dinner or whatever, but lines like “I’m all up in the kitchen in my heels, dinner-time,” or “Ladies, if you love your man, show him you the flyest / Grind up on him, girl, show him how you ride it,” feel super Cosmo-y to me, and took me, I admit, a bit by surprise.

If you’re confused about the point of Occupy Wall Street, here’s a great essay by Matt Stoller.

Or you can go even deeper (and weirder) and read Distraction, Bruce Sterling’s wildly entertaining and spookily prescient 1998 satire of American society in 2044. The book begins with our protagonist, political operative Oscar Valparaiso, trying to understand a video that shows a group of seemingly uncoordinated people showing up in a town and working together to demolish a bank in just a few minutes. (Sterling was describing a political flash mob five years before the term “flash mob” was even coined.) Throughout the course of the book, Oscar comes to understand the power of social-network political action and its implications for American democracy.

Oscar and his campaign crew — having just won a U.S. Senate election and now at loose ends — cross over into Texas from Lousiana, where they’re stopped by members of the nearby Air Force base for “voluntary contributions” to their “Air Force bake sale,” because the federal government’s budget crisis is so bad it’s unclear whether the base is being funded any more:

It had never occured to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the same grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus cause large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities.

It was no longer fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave.

The American economy collapsed years before the book takes place, with a vast divide between the moneyed elite and nearly everyone else, whose abilities have been made economically obsolescent by computing technology, international competition, and the demise of intellectual property. In one exchange, the campaign bus driver tries to explain to Oscar that the forgotten Americans are figuring out how to “make their own lives by themselves”:

“Why are there millions of nomads now? They don’t have jobs, man! You don’t care about ‘em! You don’t have any use for ‘em! You can’t make any use for them! They’re just not necessary to you. Not at all. Okay? So, you’re not necessary to them, either. Okay? They got real tired of waiting for you to give them a life. So now, they just make their own life by themselves, out of stuff they find lying around. You think the government cares? The government can’t even pay their own Air Force.”

“A country that was better organized would have a decent role for all its citizens.”

“Man, that’s the creepy part — they’re a lot better organized than the government is. Organization is the only thing they’ve got! They don’t have money or jobs or a place to live, but organization, they sure got plenty of that stuff.”

And this is only one piece of Distraction‘s complex, silly, and dark world, which involves a war-time romance between Oscar and the brilliant neuroscientist Greta Penninger, whom he helps take over a scientific research facility on the budget chopping block as she works on remapping cognition. They then have to defend the facility from the takeover attempts of the insane governor of Louisiana, who is trying to save his state’s people as global warming puts it underwater. Meanwhile, the President is waging war against the Netherlands, and the senator Oscar elected, an eco-architecture billionaire, becomes mentally ill after conducting a hunger strike with all of his vital signs monitored by millions over the Internet.

Sterling’s extrapolations from 1998 into the near-distant future verge on the absurd, but it’s the absurdity of a world changing faster than most people can adapt, one where reputation on social networks can translate into real political power, where it’s hard to tell if things are working great or broken beyond repair. In other words, it’s a lot like the world we live in today.

This post contains spoilers through the “Day 0″ section of Reamde. If you want to spoil beyond that point, please label your comment as such. For next week, let’s read through “Day 2.”

This is a brick of a book, and the plot doesn’t really take off in these first two sections of the novel, but as is often the case with Neal Stephenson, I’m not sure really sure I mind that much because I’m so interested in two things that he’s doing: meditating on Midwesternness, and looking at how those values translate into the two main characters, Richard Forthrast and his adopted niece Zula.

Stephenson’s a wild, sprawling plotter, but he’s also a wonderfully immersive world-builder, and it’s nice to see that he still has his touch when he takes on a setting that doesn’t involve thief kings, or mouse armies, a world that’s essentially like our own. It’s hard to tell if the Forthrast ancestral homeland is at an inflection point. Things are clearly changing, as demonstrated by the wind turbines, which Richard sees as “these pharaonic towers rearing their heads above the prairie, the only thing about this landscape that had ever been capable of inspiring awe. Something about their being in motion, in a place where everything else was almost pathologically still, seized the attention; they always seemed to be jumping out at you from behind corners.”

That tension, between what’s enduring and essential about this point of origin, and how much the characters can adapt beyond it, strikes me as something that’s going to be critical to the novel. Richard seems to see the fact that the Forthrasts landed were they did as proof of some sort of animal instinct: “Richard sensed a gradient in the territory, was convinced that they were on the threshold between the Midwest and the West, as though on one side of the crick you were in the land of raking red leaves across the moist, forgiving black soil while listening to Big Ten football games on the transistor radio, but on the other side you were plucking arrows out of your hat. ” And even when he’s behaving in a way that seems singularly un-Midwestern, as is the case when he goes after Zula’s absent initial adoptive father, he realizes that, in his own Hummer-renting, leather-jacket wearing way, he’s just bringing Forthrastness into a new generation, “manifesting, not as an avatar of Richard, but as an avatar of his whole family.” There’s a wildness to the Forthrast legacy not expressed by “the offspring of Nicholas who had settled down and lived exemplary, stable, churchgoing lives in the upper Midwest,” a sense that the true legacy of the family isn’t in settling, but in the journey that got them to their ancestral home in the first place, Richard’s sense “that it probably had something to do with the farm in Iowa and his knowing, even at that age, that whatever Dad’s last will and testament said—however things were handled after his father’s eventual demise—he wasn’t going to be part of it. If he wanted to own land, he’d have to go out and find some.” And of course, even at home, things are different. As Richard notices when he stops on his drive:
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The Ides of March, George Clooney’s adaptation of the play Farragut North by Beau Willimon, is the kind of movie that will be mistaken for a profound meditation on the state of American politics. This strikes me as deeply unfortunate, not just because it’s not a particularly good movie, but because what few ideas it has back up a reactionary idea of what makes someone good at governing. Spoilers to follow.

Gov. Mike Morris, the Democratic frontrunner, may be the silliest Hollywood conception of a politician since The American President. He is, apparently, a veteran of President Bush’s Gulf War, an opponent of President Bush’s son’s incursions into the same reason, a genius who’s managed to dramatically improve the educational performance of Pennsylvania students (take that, skeptics of education reform!) and balance his state’s budget in a recession. When he’s asked about how he’d feel about the death penalty if his wife (the always welcome but woefully under-used Jennifer Ehle) were murdered, Morris says he’d kill the killer himself and then accept the consequences. These are no positions that have a basis in political reality. If Andrew Shepherd’s speech and declaration of ACLU membership in The American President is a parody of liberal dreams of progressive toughness

the idea that a candidate could declare in a debate “I’m not a Christian…my religion, what i believe in, is called the Constitution of the United States of America,” and win over an electorate that isn’t even close to electing a Jewish president, that’s skeptical of a Mormon, much less an atheist, is just woefully out of touch. Saying, as one character does, that “we know they’ve nominated a jackass,” in response to a question about whether Democrats have nominated an atheist is not an answer to that plausibility problem. It’s just smug.

Morris is a paper man, composed of position papers rather than blood and guts, and that’s a problem when we’re supposed to believe that a moment of marital infidelity is utterly damning. We have no idea what his relationship with his wife is like. If the movie made an argument that Morris’ relationship with his family is a repudiation of an idea that Christianity is a necessary guarantor of values, his decision to sleep with an intern might be momentous. Joe Klein’s Primary Colors and the movie adaptation of the novel made the argument that the emotional profligacy that led fictional candidate Jack Stanton to sleep around was also critical to his success because it bound potential supporters to him for life. But we have absolutely no sense of what Morris is like as a human being, so it’s hard to know what his infidelity means. Is his aura of control a facade? Was it just a stupid mistake? Do we actually want to promulgate the idea that your personal life is a litmus test for your ability to do meaningful political work?
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This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 6 episode of Community.

Last season, Chang came to feel, for me at least, as if he was Community‘s version of Sue Sylvester: an aggressively wacky character who doesn’t really fit into the core tone of the show and often leads it off in odd directions, but has an occasional big payoff. Unlike Sue, though, who is so monotone as to not be a real person, Chang sometimes feels like he’s a bunch of people all at once, and not just when he’s playing Gollum. That said, I actually enjoyed the time we spent in his head — and the storage space he’s crashing in behind the Greendale coffee bar — as Chang went through a day at Greendale as a cut-rate, Asian Sam Spade.

There’s something kind of wistful about his ascent over the course of this episode. “Really made my bones with that last collar, babe,” he tells the mannequin leg who’s sharing his futon in the storage closet. The parody of hardboiled dialogue veers between hit — “She was a real dame. Legs that went all the way to the bottom of her torso. Arms that had elbows.” — and deeply surreal — “Let her go. Like a lobster claw letting go of a small balloon. For lobsters.” And I wish the show had spun out Chang’s ascent a little bit longer. I’d like a realistic arc about him rebuilding himself after losing both his wife and his job, rather than a wacky co-dependent relationship with the Dean.

And just as the show found something good to do with Chang this week, it also seems like they’ve figured out a role for Michael K. Williams’ Professor Kane: as the person who, through his isolation from the outside world and general common sense, points out the ridiculousness of Legos, Greendale in general, the study group in particular. “As someone who just spent the majority of his life in prison, what happened with Legos? They used to be simple,” he asks at the end of class. “I’m not saying it’s bad. I just want to know what happened!” Then, when the study group crashes his office to ask if they can pick their own lab partners, he confesses his general bewilderment. “What is happening at this school? I have so many conversations that make no sense!” He even punctures Magnitude’s balloon

He’s not alone in his observation that the study group’s dynamic has gotten a little intense and weird, noting: “We had a name for people like you in prison. The mean clique.” And after he witnesses Britta accidentally incinerating a turtle, Todd, the Iraq veteran and other biology student who’s been temporarily absorbed into the group declares, “Your love is weird, and toxic, and destroys everything it touches!” It’s sort of true, and that’s an interesting dynamic. The show has flirted with the idea that people might need to move away from the group (Pierce at the end of last season) or from spending too much time together (Troy and Abed tonight) to move forward, but it keeps backing away from a definitive break. There’s a good, if more depressing, show in the idea that a group that initially helped people acclimate to a new and difficult situation is now bringing out their worst qualities. I’ll be curious to see if Dan Harmon’s willing to take the show in a darker direction. If he does, I hope there’s actual growth somewhere in there, not just mocking diabetic Iraq veterans.

A special notice! Friend of the Blog and frequent commenter Zack Stentz and his writing partner Ashley Miller have sold a TV adaptation of The Magicians to Fox. This is awesome news (plus, er, the impetus I need to read The Magician and The Magician King this weekend), so lots of high fives to Zack if you see him in comments.

-Netflix: still signing up pretty good content deals.

-Bein’ sexy: not an automatic recipe for a hit TV show.

-Erik Kain is watching and blogging The Wonder Years.

-The trailer for Young Adult is out, and it looks like Patton Oswalt might be the best thing in it:

I’m not exceptionally excited about the idea of a remake of The Thin Man due both to the perfection of the original and because I have no idea how the alcoholic lassitude broken up by bouts of crime-solving will play for contemporary audiences. But I am intrigued by the news that Billy Ray is the most recent writer attached to the project.

Ray wrote and directed what I think are indisputably the two finest Washington movies of the last decade: Shattered Glass, about the New Republic fabulist Stephen Glass, and Breach, about the operation that brought down FBI traitor Robert Hanssen (though he also wrote the remake of State of Play, which was too inert to be actually bad). There are a reasonable number of movies that get, in particular, the national security apparatus in Washington generally right. But pop culture almost never nails journalism, and Hollywood is currently stuck in a moment where it doesn’t understand that there’s a professional blogging corps, so it’s spending a lot of time scapegoating journalists as pajama-clad, basement-dwelling amateurs. Shattered Glass actually had a real sense of the dynamics of communities of young, ambitious journalists in Washington — as well as some of the problems the New Republic habitually faces, including a young staff and editor churn:

Breach, like Shattered Glass, is an unconventional thriller, full of extreme boredom as the young agent assigned to crack Hanssen goes through the motions and waits for something to happen, punctuated by the extreme risk of exposure. It’s quiet, and lonely. In some of the tensest scenes, the worst thing that could happen is not that someone will get killed, but that someone might say something irrevocable:

So what does all of this mean for The Thin Man? Ray doesn’t write exceptionally funny, but the guy does write a good, tense mystery. And he does a great job of squeezing the drama out of the institutional settings where his characters work. The former could mean we’re getting a less-quippy Nick and Nora, which might make them an entirely different thing. And there isn’t really a hook for the latter in a story about two wealthy people who essentially work out of their apartment. It might be best, in fact, if the movie ends up being The Thin Man in name only, and like the Prime Suspect remake, really ends up being something entirely different. William Powell and Myrna Loy are a tough ticket to beat. Johnny Depp, who’s stepping into the Nick role, might be wise not to really try.

It’s unsurprising that after running the gamut of defiance and contrition, Hank Williams, Jr. has responded to ESPN’s displeasure with his comparisons between the Commander and Chief and the Fuhrer by complaining that he’s a victim of censorship:

ESPN said on Thursday that it was its decision to end its long association with the singer, but Williams disputed that notion on his Web site: “After reading hundreds of e-mails, I have made my decision. By pulling my opening Oct. 3, you (ESPN) stepped on the toes of the First Amendment freedom of speech, so therefore me, my song and all my rowdy friends are out of here. It’s been a great run.”

Freedom of speech means you’re at liberty to express whatever nonsense you like, not that anyone, particularly a major corporation that relies heavily on black athletes and a non-partisan image to maintain its audience, is required to give you a platform for said nonsense. And given that Hank Williams Sr.’s major influence was an African-American bluesman, and that he helped build white audiences for gospel and blues-inflected music, his son might want to consider how his remarks fit into the family legacy. Class will get you a long way.

This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 6 episode of Parks and Recreation.

Before I get into the specifics of this episode, let me just say what a pleasure it is to watch a show with characters and politics this good to be at the top of its game. Parks and Recreation is so good, and so warm-hearted that it’s not remotely work to watch it. And I desperately hope Amy Poehler wins an Emmy for this season so we can see her give an acceptance speech as Leslie a la Emma Thompson when she won her Golden Globe for Sense and Sensibility.

I think the show could have easily messed up tonight’s A plot, in which Leslie, who has claimed that she’s born and raised in Pawnee in her new book, finds out, to her horror, that her mother actually gave birth to her in Eagleton because “Pawnee hospital was overrun with raccoons at the time…did you expect me to give birth to you in an infested, disease-filled room?” Because the stakes here aren’t nearly as high as they’d be for President Obama, and because the investigation is motivated by Joan’s perpetual and personal enmity for Leslie rather than institutionalized racial animus, the plot doesn’t work without making us feel the stakes for Leslie, and Poehler pulls it out brilliantly. When she moans, “I wonder who else was born in Eagleton. Voldemort, probably,” her anguish is palpable. I didn’t particularly love last year’s “Eagleton” episode, but seeing the payoff here makes it all worth it.

And the show does a nice job of satirizing all the people who have set Leslie up to be exposed without falling too far into a partisan divide. The reason the question of Leslie’s birth is important is not because of conspiracy theories, but because she made it important, using it as a peg to hang her book on and the crux of her campaign. So the people who question her are trying to answer a legitimate question they have about her honesty, rather than pursuing a nonsensical theory in hopes of subverting the democratic progress. It’s also in keeping with what we know of Joan, a vindictive schemer whose heart is presumably permanently cold and dead now that Lil’ Sebastian has passed beyond this vale of tears, so when she declares perkily, “We will pull out the world map and speculate wildly,” then rocks out to the Gotcha Dancers, it’s consistent rather than unrealistic. When one attendee at Leslie’s reading yells at her, “That sentence was confusing! You might as well be from China!” he might be stupid, but the situation is legitimately kind of confusing! All of this works beautifully within the world of the show while also showing why the actual birther conspiracy is so completely ridiculous and damaging.
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