There are a lot of very interesting things in New York‘s latest profile of Joan Didion, pegged to her latest book about her daughter, an oft-glimpsed but little-explained presence in much of her work. But I’m most intrigued by the news that “Didion kept working, tirelessly. There were screenplays, which she had so often written with her husband: a movie on Katharine Graham and an adaptation of her novel The Last Thing He Wanted.”

A Katherine Graham movie is such a good idea. Obviously some of the relevant, exciting territory, namely the Washington Post’s reporting on Watergate, is covered masterfully in All the President’s Men. But as with the Pentagon Papers, which the Post ran after Attorney General John Mitchell got a federal injunction to keep the New York Times from publishing them, Graham had to make difficult decisions about publishing Watergate material and stand up to considerable federal pressure on her reporters. Mitchell’s threat that “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published,” is a revealing — and immortal line that, delivered by the right actor, would be a marvelous encapsulation of the sexism Graham had to overcome as one of the first and most powerful female publishing executives.

And it’s a genuinely moving story. Hollywood tends to overdo it on the ladies-with-self-esteem-issues, but Graham had to genuinely overcome some psychological issues, from her husband’s affair and suicide, to a crushing lack of self-confidence fostered both by her upbringing and her marriage. Her growing confidence, her friendship with Truman Capote (who founded the Black and White Ball to cheer her up), and her triumphs as a publisher, all make for a powerful illustration of institutionalized sexism, and a story about how you move a big institution forward. Graham wasn’t a perfect progressive hero — she could be tough on her unions. But she’s a fascinating women. And good journalism movies rarely acknowledge the importance of executives.

I’m working my way through the first season of The X-Files right now, and one of the things that strikes me most about the early episodes of the show is how much trouble it has figuring out how the cases are going to work, and whether they’re going to seem more like science, or like magic.

Take the first-season episode “Squeeze.” If Buffy the Vampire Slayer wasn’t four years in the future, I’d say the main creature is a straight steal from Buffy. He’s a humanoid who is really good at squeezing through small spaces, hibernates in Hellmouth-y conditions most of the time, and has emerged because (among other things), he really wants to eat Scully’s liver. He’s even got yellowish eyes, like Buffy’s vampires when they get with the crinkly faces and the biting. Other than his hibernation, there’s no real scientific design, or principal to be explored. He’s just profoundly unsettling and creepy. Of course, that’s always essentially going to be the case: this stuff isn’t real, so the faux-science is always going to have a tinge of magic to it.

But I think the show, at least what I’ve seen of it so far, is much better when it at least makes a gesture towards actual science — and actual thought experiments. Take the episode “Ice.” I don’t actually believe that worms from another age are going to mess with a bunch of chemicals in my head and cause me to go nuts on my coworkers. But the episode actually has an idea, namely, what happens to people working together in isolated, stressful conditions? What would it be like to have serious and inexplicable medical problems far away from anyone who could actually help you — which, as we know, can be a real problem? By making a gesture to actual science and actually plausible situation, the show is a lot scarier and more unsettling.

I really like David Fincher and his movies, hearing that he did this to Rooney Mara in preparation for her performance in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo really kind of freaks me out:

She followed every one of Fincher’s strange directives from day one. According to the story, “[Mara] mentions a time Fincher said, ‘Go out and get really, really drunk and come in the next morning so we can take pictures of you.’ He wanted to show Sony that she could look strung out. ‘And I did it!’ says Mara. ‘Threw up all night!’” That set the tone for their relationship, which Craig characterized as “f—ing weird!” During one dinner during filming, Fincher tells Mara “with quiet seriousness, ‘You can eat.’… Mara rolls her eyes, and Fincher laughs. ‘You can have lettuce and a grape. A raisin if you must.’ She orders a piece of fish and barely touches it.”

She’s said that she didn’t have to get unhealthily skinny for the role, and Fincher, who of course asked her to do these things, said it wasn’t “too hard for her” to obey his regimen. Which, you know, maybe is the case. People have the right to put themselves through extremely intense things for roles — Michael Fassbender dropped a ton of weight for Hunger, as did Christian Bale for The Machinist — even if they’re unhealthy, and even if it makes me uncomfortable. I can’t imagine having a job with an incentive system where the chance to work with any individual person is worth subsisting on grapes or drinking myself sick, and I’m glad I can’t. I wonder if Fincher put Robert Downey Jr. through a lot to prove he could play his role in Zodiac or if he just trusted that Downey could play an addict.

But maybe the scariest thing about all of this is the fact that Mara, who looks incredibly pale and tiny on the Vogue cover that tells us all of this, and who would look very skinny to any normal human being, including, say, a crusading left-wing journalist, isn’t actually considered to be sufficiently skinny to play a waifish hacker. We’re really defining extremely skinny down to the smallest category we can find. And by extension, labeling a lot of weights that take tremendous work and control to achieve, as “normal,” or even big.

It’s not news that cable networks like to go with risky places with sex that their network competitors can’t, but I’ve been particularly interested in the contrast between where Homeland‘s decided to go, and the direction American Horror Story, which I’m watching because I like to do bad things to myself, has taken.

In American Horror Story, pretty much all the sex we know about has a creepy edge. Dylan McDermott’s Ben has sex with a psychology student while his wife is recovering from a miscarriage, deeply damaging his marriage. When he and Vivien, Connie Britton, finally have makeup sex, it’s sex that comes out of violence, slaps and shoves turned into kisses. There’s a gimp suit in the attic, and Vivian has sex with a man in it she assumes is Ben. Meanwhile, Ben is seeing their aged housekeeper as a luscious 20-something, and keeps ending up in compromising positions with her, including getting caught masturbating to thoughts of her by a burned-scarred former inhabitant of the house — and there’s some allusion that she’s undead. One of Ben’s patients fantasizes about Ben’s daughter, Violet. And their elderly neighbor, Constance, is apparently in the habit of seducing young aspiring models (I think it would be great to have more acknowledgment that people of all ages have sex lives, but it’s played for creeps). So far, these encounters are all signifiers and no substance. We have no sense of why Vivien might get excited by the prospect of sleeping with an anonymized, restricted version of her husband. No clue as to why a man who professes to love his wife and be traumatized by the death of their son in the womb is a serial cheat, other than, as he complains, they haven’t had sex in a year. When he breaks down crying while masturbating, it’s risible, not vulnerable.

By contrast, Homeland has similar scenes, but as Alan Sepinwall wrote, “Homeland is using these kinds of scenes to really illuminate character, showing the dark place Brody is and making Jessica more sympathetic in the process.” There’s no question that the sex scenes between Jessica and Nick are uncomfortable. In their first encounter after his return, she’s shocked by his scars, and by how aggressive he is during sex—she may be consenting, but she’s deeply uncomfortable and in other situations she probably wouldn’t be, a combination of emotions that’s much more vulnerable and lacerating than anything we’ve seen on American Horror Story so far. Similarly, the masturbation scene in the the third episode doesn’t have a creepy, burned-looking murderer staring up at Nick from the yard outside, but it’s also much rawer and more frightening. Something’s happened to Brody to make him not want to touch his wife, to reach for the best she can get, even if it means totally humiliating her, making her feel powerfully distant from him.

Taken together, the two shows are an illustration of something I think is important, that some networks have cracked and others just haven’t. It isn’t the presence of sexual or violent elements in a show that make it adult, in the sense of grown up. It’s what you do with them that counts.

I still think 2 Broke Girls is pretty terribly racist. Matthew Moy retains his dreadful accent and lack of anything for which we could plausibly respect the character. Oleg is still nothing but a walking sexual harassment lawsuit. In last night’s episode, when Max asked Caroline, “Which one is your ex? The Asian one? The black one? Just kidding!” the line and the line-reading weren’t nearly precise enough to suggest that Max might be mocking Caroline for only dating rich white dudes, rather than affirming the idea that of course a woman like Caroline would only date white men, because aren’t interracial relationships hilarious! And I don’t know what’s with Sonny Lee and Patrick Walsh, who wrote this episode, but memo to them: bisexual people actually exist, and lines like, “Everyone keeps telling me they can’t decide. It’s like a support group for bisexuals,” don’t make you, or Caroline, who delivered it, seem clever. They just make you seem dumb.

And yet, as much as I want to quit this show, it’s making it hard for me. To back up for a second, almost 15 million people are tuning in to 2 Broke Girls every week, giving the show a pretty incredible platform. And while a lot of that platform’s been spent making jokes about horse excrement (also, last night, mouse poop) and general racism, the show’s spending more time on debt, financial literacy, and considerations of our values around money. And that’s kind of remarkable. A show that’s been remarkably square as it tries to show off its coolness has stumbled into being the closest thing we have to Occupy Wall Street popular culture.

Don’t believe me? Consider last night’s focus on debt and financial literacy. When Caroline makes the mistake of answering the dreaded green phone in the apartment she shares with Max, she learns two things. First, that her roomie has substantial debt. And second, that among those debts is the hole she dug herself into trying to get a degree that would give her a shot at illustrating children’s books. Max, it turns out, is almost the epitome of a We Are the 99 Percent.

And the show didn’t just take Max’s debt and leave it at that. Caroline, who is better the smarter she’s made out to be, points out that Max needs to figure out the interest rates on her credit cards and start seriously paying down her student loan debt because she can’t discharge it in bankruptcy. For a show with that kind of clout to actually explain those useful (and true) facts, and to make a story out of them, is just so profoundly smart and useful even though it seems small. In a television environment where the closest shows come to engaging with the recession is to (very entertainingly) take down rich creeps in the Hamptons via insider trading or to use the fact of a costly mortgage to explain why a family can’t leave a manifestly haunted house, for a popular show to engage with the actual problems that have sent thousands of demonstrators into the streets is bracing.

Even more importantly, the show is launching a stealthy assault on the idea that possessing extreme wealth, no matter how you came to obtain it, is desirable. 2 Broke Girls‘ hipster-bashing can seem behind the curve and resentful of a generation of New Yorkers who came up behind Michael Patrick King and stole his cred. But last night’s episode was also a reasonably incisive parody of the ridiculous things rich people spend money on, including cupcakes (an industry Sex and the City single-handedly jumpstarted) and horse rides. And when Caroline was faced with the ex-boyfriend who dumped her when her father went to prison, Max read her a useful riot act, asking her if she really thought she was a more admirable person when she was luxuriating in unearned wealth.”But now that you support yourself by earning your own money, that’s somehow shameful?” Max challenges Caroline. And of course she’s right.

2 Broke Girls isn’t going to single-handedly upend television’s obsession with wealth, and the networks’ attachment to aspirational programming. But if it manages to make financial responsibility, earning your own money, and paying off your debt seem more admirable than being the 1 percent, it’s making a contribution that shouldn’t be totally dismissed. We should demand that the show’s race and gender politics catch up to its positions on class. Occupy CBS.

The bridge is yours.

-Oprah should know the best way to do tequila shots is with oranges and cinnamon.

-I’m reading All-Star Superman, so Scott Eric Kaufman’s observations on the visual forms in the comic are very useful.

-Zombies and superheroes invade highbrow fiction.

-Dress like Lisbeth Salander.

-Martin Sheen is annoyed at his fellow Hollywood liberals:

In preparation for a Bloggingheads episode, I caught up on A Gifted Man yesterday. I want to like the show — as I wrote when it premiered, I really do think there’s a compassion problem in this country when it comes to health care, and I think it’s really worthwhile to illustrate all the little ways that a lack of insurance, an uneven distribution of quality facilities and doctors, and even difficulties like a patient who can’t get to an appropriate treatment on the bus but doesn’t have access to a car or cab fare. But I’m starting to get frustrated by the show’s insistence that these are problems that can be fixed by the miraculous appearance of a dedicated doctor who swoops in just when a patient who has been denied care or can’t afford it desperately needs an intervention. Plainly put, for A Gifted Man to be a genuinely dramatic show and a genuinely compelling explication of health care inequality, Michael, the main character, needs to start losing some patients.

I’m not quite at the place that Katie Welsh is in thinking that the show should divide its time not between Michael’s practice and the clinic he’s drawn to, but between the clinic and a legislative fight. But I do think that the show needs to make Michael start paying some real costs for refusing to really commit to Anna’s clinic, and to demonstrate that his fantasy of swooping in occasionally to make everything all right is unsustainable, even dangerous. The show makes a ridiculous amount of Michael’s talent — when one patient asks if he’s as good as everyone says, one of Michael’s colleagues insists, “No, he’s better.” And he has a House-like ability to diagnose things on the spot, without the leavening of House’s unpleasantness to suggests there are actual costs to that kind of skill, that the emotional energy it takes to be a medical genius trades off with putting time into being decent to other people. And in an era of vaccine denialism and HPV vaccine hysteria, it’s not a bad thing to convince audiences that it’s good to trust doctors.

But what’s important about health care reform is larger structures, not the ability of individual doctors to make diagnoses and perform surgery. It’s not a matter of 10 volunteer hours a week. It’s a matter of billions of dollars. And if the show is committed to that reality, a patient should die or end up with a long-term condition because Michael isn’t giving enough time to him or her (the latter, I know from personal experience, can happen even when you have fantastic health care and relatives in the industry). He should lose a fight with an insurance company. The investors in his private clinic should ask questions about the amount of free care he’s giving away. I say these not because it pleases me to watch people suffer on screen, but because these are the things that happen in our health care system, and they’re a source of terrific narrative drama. Staying away from these kinds of choices isn’t just a sacrifice of a certain kind of truth-telling. It’s sacrificing a commitment to telling the best, most compelling story possible within the setting the show’s picked to work in.

Given Tyler’s post last week arguing that “The conversation we need to have is one in which minorities think about what kinds of economic models will make it possible for them to make cultural products for themselves and about the way we’d have to redefine what success means in order to do that,” and our debates about what Tyler Perry’s done with the power he’s assumed in Hollywood, I’ve been particularly curious about what Queen Latifah’s going to do with her Flavor Union studio. Turns out her first project is going to be a crime drama that involves Cam’ron and Deadwood veteran Omar Gooding committing credit card fraud. As much as that’s not a project that interests me, this sort of conventional-sounding and economically un-risky thing probably makes sense for a fledgling, black-owned studio. The more you prove you’re economically viable, the more leeway you have to do something boundary-pushing or downright weird without pressure to make bank on that, too.

Of course, it would also be nice to demonstrate to white studio heads and white investors that so-called risks on features with black stars will pay off, and handsomely. One of the reasons Red Tails is such a key test movie for black blockbusters is that George Lucas has spent so much money on it. I honestly thought I’d misheard the numbers the first time I heard them, but Lucas has spent $58 million making the movie and $35 million on promotion. That’s not insane in a world where $100 million-plus budgets for movies are no longer shocking, but it’s a lot of cheddar for even a very rich man to splash out on a project. It would be really nice to have a world where black — and minority, period — Hollywood power brokers’ successes weren’t always seen as flukes or the result of extremely rigid formulas. And to have a world where white dudes were interested and invested in backing minority projects for fun and profit.

I really wanted to like this little documentary about Disney movies and masculinity, because it’s absolutely true that Disney movie men (unless they’re lions) are generally as stereotypical as Disney movie ladies:

But I think this documentary’s substantially off in its discussion of the messages male watchers get about female objectification, especially from the second Golden Age on. Beauty and the Beast makes incredibly clear that Gaston’s fixation on Belle is gross, has nothing to do with her inner person, and presents in a way that’s predatory. Beast, by contrast, gives Belle a library, hangs out with her, saves her from wolves, and has snowball fights with her. By the end of the movie, there is precisely zero doubt that Gaston as a person, and Gaston’s way of picking out a wife is disgusting and undesirable, and not to be emulated unless you want to get tossed off a roof.

Mulan is much subtler, but has essentially the same message. The wife-finding methodology of “A Girl Worth Fighting For” is essentially dismissed in favor of a norm where men and women work together, get to like each other as people, and then give the whole romance thing a shot. And, of course, the whole point of the “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” number the documentary cites is that the traits it describes aren’t actually specific to men — and that you can exhibit strength whether you’re rocking armor or a dress:

Now, it’s absolutely true that Disney movie characters tend to have essentially identical body types (again, unless they’re non-human, or aging superhero Bob Parr in The Incredibles) and to end in fights, which is basically a prerequisite for adventure movies. And while there are clever parodies of hypermasculine ideals, like the Toy Story movies, which emphasize collaboration and equal participation by the genders, robots, and adorable rubber aliens, it’s true that Disney movies don’t have an exceptionally wide aperture on masculinity. That’s not an uncommon problem, and at least Disney doesn’t insist that for women to do better, men have to lose out, as Bill Bennett does in a Fox News column this week. But the studio’s done a nice job of broadening the spectrum of emotions they include within their standard adventure stories. They could consider broadening the kinds of stories they tell — and as a result, the kinds of characters, men and women alike, they include in them — too.