Both Susana Polo and Graeme McMillain raise an interesting question: is Star Trek too tonally inconsistent, and too averse to long-arc plots to make it on television today? As McMillan writes:

All of the Treks – with the possible exception of Enterprise – had a wonderful schizophrenia about their tone that is very rare on television today; you would never really know, tuning in, whether you were going to see a drama or a comedy, or whether the drama was going to be of the “This is an allegory for a real-world situation and we shall all be making a Very Serious Point” variety, or the “We’re trying to make a suspenseful thriller, so expect long looks punctuated with stirring soundtrack strings” one, or even the “Want an action movie in less than an hour? We’ll do our best, but don’t judge us too harshly” attempts. What was weirdly wonderful about Trek was the play-of-the-week nature of the show, even when there were longer-running continuities running through episodes, and television – especially genre television – has lost that variety; normally shows stake out their tone early on and stay there, hoping to ensure loyalty through stability and knowing exactly what you’ll get when you switch on.

I think they’re generally right about tonal consistency, though something like Community does veer from being entirely goofy and surreal to fairly grounded and human, so it’s not entirely impossible. And I think with Star Trek, it’s easy enough to solve: have each season revolve around a long-arc mission and all of the things that happen along the way, some of which will be serious, some of which will be goofy, all of which will offer opportunities for different tones and different points — in other words, make the show like Buffy. But I actually wonder if the Very Serious Point bit, the optimism about a progressive, secular, interconnected vision of the future might actually be the bigger challenge for networks that are either skittish about politics or committed to a gritty, pessimistic take on them. I would love to see a network show (as opposed to a cable network like Showtime or SyFy) have a major character on a show who is a rehabilitated extremist.

I really would like television to integrate abortion into its conversations about sex and reproduction. And I think Dr. George Tiller is a hero and a martyr. But given the way True Blood’s handled hot-button social issues this season, particularly the disgraceful way it’s handled race and the show’s general unsubtlety on gender, I have grave concerns about the prospect of Alan Ball doing an HBO show based on Tiller’s life, which is apparently his next project for HBO.

Ball and his problems aside, I’m trying to decide how I feel about approaching abortion through drama as opposed to comedy, and the idea of a show where it’s the focus as opposed to part of the scenery. It’s relatively easy to think what the plots for a drama might be like: the doctor is stalked, the doctor is attacked, the doctor tries to keep his staff’s morale up as they are harassed going about their business, doctor has all sorts of interactions with patients, patients’ relatives, etc. But I worry about how much a show like that would give credence to anti-abortion arguments in the name of appearing even-handed, or make the doctor a morally ambiguous character like Walter White or Tony Soprano, rather than wholeheartedly embracing the idea the preserving access to abortion under tremendously trying circumstances is a heroic act.

And I think part of the problem is that a show like this keeps abortion separate from the rest of our discourse about sex, from American life. Which of course it’s not. A show like Mindy Kaling’s OB/GYN comedy, if it manages to integrate abortion into a larger ongoing conversation about reproductive health and American sexual life, would push back against that. Abortions are not weird, freakish things that happen only to Fallen Women or in Back Alleys. They are rational, regularly-performed medical procedures. And while I do think it’s important to be honest about the fact that they are a medical procedure women aren’t always happy to have performed, shifting the debate towards normalization is critical. That’s a tremendously complex needle to thread. And I think I trust Mindy Kaling to do it more than I trust Alan Ball.

I still can’t quite believe this thing is real, but I guess it is. And newly-out Sean Maher is talking about the decision Joss Whedon made to cast him as Don John in his Much Ado About Nothing adaptation — and to turn the character into a serious ladies’ man:

It’s so funny because I had talked to Joss about my choice to come out – he was so supportive. He just wanted me for this because he saw me in this role of a villain. A very mean-spirited, mischievous, manipulative villain. What Joss did was write don John’s associate, who is a man in the play, as a woman – and we have some very promiscuous sexually-charged scenes together. So during this whole coming out process, with all the press asking me if I could ever be seen as a heterosexual man on screen again, I so badly wanted to say, “well, Joss Whedon just cast me as the guy in between Riki Lindhome’s legs.” But he asked me to keep it a secret, which I did.

I said, somewhat flippantly yesterday, that Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing remains the gold standard for me, and as much as I love Whedon, I’ll want to see how he approaches the material. And now that we’ve heard about this, I’ll be curious to see what other changes he’s made to the plot — Keanu Reeves didn’t have to have a love interest written into Branagh’s adaptation to evince a strong sense of sexual danger around him.

But all of that aside, it’s nice to see Whedon continuing his commitment not just to writing good, non-stereotypical gay characters, but to making casting decisions that challenge stupid stereotypes about whether good actors can sell good characters no matter who they are in real life. And I hope that his Much Ado About Nothing gets a release wide enough to be seen by people other than the core Whedon fandom, who I think are largely on board with both of the messages I hear about here. One of the reasons I’m sorry to have seen The Playboy Club be so bad and fall apart so fast is because I think it’ll be important not just to see gay actors nailing straight roles, but to see them go back and forth between gay and straight roles. It’d be a good thing for mass audiences to have a chance to see Sean Maher playing a gay political leader and a gay man with an active love life on network television and to see him steam up multiplexes with a woman. And it would be good to see Neil Patrick Harris break up his string of hetero lotharios with a gay character. Bad actors won’t be able to sell much beyond things they’ve experienced themselves. Good ones can inhabit multitudes, no matter who they are or where and what they come from.

Considering Boss, and the electoral subplots on Parks and Recreation, Modern Family, and Glee in the Atlantic this week, I was struck by a question: why does pop culture swing between depicting politicians as grotesques or saints when the reality is so vastly more entertaining? Boss swings between really good subplots and moments that seem funny and scary precisely because they’re plausible, and things that seem more like unchecked impulses:

The show succeeds when those gods and monsters are mired in procedure, as Kane and Miller often are. The site of an incumbent governor lofting an iPad into a marsh in a fit of pique and then ordering an aide after it is both very funny and a nice reference to Primary Colors, the satire of the Clinton administration that increasingly looks like the gold standard for explorations of political darkness. Where Boss goes off the rails, though, is when it mistakes luridness with meaningfulness.

A twist on a political sex scandal that leaves an up-and-comer getting it on with his lover in increasingly public places is one of the more genuinely egregious use of cable’s license to depict sex I’ve seen in quite some time. Kane’s daughter, apparently a priest, a doctor, and an addict, checks so many urban-politics boxes at once that her personality disappears under the weight. While there’s no question that Aldermanic debates can be brutal, it feels showy and crude to have Kane tell the City Council, during a contentious debate, “Let the streets run with shit.”

It would be easy to say that our tendency to lionize or demonize politicians is a product of partisanship, but that doesn’t really explain why political pop culture invents wildly baroque scenarios for politicians on television and in movies who are forever knocking up interns and the teenaged daughters of their friends, or unleashing wild chains of vengeance. The emotions involved in politicians’ indiscretions may be difficult to fathom, especially for people in the public eye, unless they’re explained away as the product of self-destructive impulses. But the means of their downfalls are usually fairly prosaic, a Direct Message gone wrong, a hooker and a hotel room and an assumption of invincibility.

And I think, instead, our pop culture politicians vacillate between poisonous and saintly not necessarily because we hate people in the other party, but because we’re let down by our own side, betrayed by our own unrealistic expectations. We want Andrew Shepherd as he is in The American President and we get Jack Stanton from Primary Colors. In pop culture, if they’re saints or rat bastards, we know from the beginning or close enough to it, and any changes are of degree rather than of nature. There are no redemptions. But there are no shocking disappointments, either.

I’ve always thought that being a member of the First Family must be a pretty stressful, depressing experience. But NBC needs to do something other than what it’s doing, so maybe their forthcoming comedy about the president’s family co-created by former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett will have funny new insights. To help them along, here are five real-life First Family disasters, and their television comedy solutions:

1. Popular radio host of the opposite party insults 13-year-old First Daughter’s looks. Rush Limbaugh famously held up a picture of Chelsea Clinton while cracking, “Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there is also a White House dog?” Solution: Taking the warm but misguided advice from his college buddy, Phil Dunphy, the President stands up for his daughter in a way that seems dorky and embarrassing at the time but that wins him points at home, and ultimately, with the voters.

2. President’s younger sister has a lobotomy gone badly wrong, his family institutionalizes her, everyone keeps mum. It says everything you need to know about how the press coverage of presidential races that the Kennedys basically got away with concealing Rosemary Kennedy’s intellectual disabilities and the lobotomy that left her confined to an institution. Solution: Sue Sylvester yells at the president in memory of her deceased sister with Down syndrome, leading to a Very Special episode family reunion and absolutely no character development for anyone.

3. President uses younger daughter’s beloved family pet as cynical prop during political speech: The Checkers speech. It was a thing:

Solution: Brian Griffin shows up, makes martinis for everyone, and lectures the president firmly on the dignity of humans and alcoholic dogs alike. The president later tells absolutely no one about his hallucinations of a talking dog and trusts that the discretion of the West Wing staff means no one will ask about the smashed cocktail glasses in the Oval Office, but resolves to treat animals that bear his name with more respect.

4. First Lady takes vacation that is criticized in the press as overly lavish and out of touch with the times: Michelle Obama got dinged for taking her daughters to Spain last summer, even though she paid for the trip — including the cost of her government plane travel—herself. Solution: Family Ties-style, the First Lady’s breezy family vacation turns into high state-craft when she’s accidentally entangled in an international spy caper. In the end, with help from FBI Agent Bert Macklin, she recovers the president’s rubies, making the cost of the trip totally worth it. Plus, she makes a courtesy call on whichever monarch said hijinks take place in proximity of.

5. First Daughter marries Speaker of the House, has affair with, and child by, a Senator, is a generally hedonistic, awesome (if probably pretty unpleasant in real life) gossip. Seriously, someone should make one of those goofy First Daughter-style movies about a theoretically fragile daughter of a president who needs protecting when she tries to be her own person and live a normal life, but make it about the spectacularly un-fragile, un-PC Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Solution: None, just a highly profitable spinoff that sells lots of “If you haven’t got anything good to say about anyone, come and sit by me” t-shirts.

The bridge is yours.

-Justin Townes Earle is, in fact, really awesome.

-The best TV children right now.

-Exactly what the women of America need: yet another television show about why we’re not married yet.

-Ideas for an X-Men: First Class sequel.

-Chloe Moretz and an adorable robot? I’m in:

This, from a New York Times piece on the comedy boom, seems somewhat off to me:

And then there’s the economy. Mr. Lee said it was a mistake to tie trends too simply to social developments, but in this case, it was inevitable to think of “things like the 1930s and screwball comedies.”

Indeed, socio-economic conditions are being widely credited. Mr. Lorre, who had hits before and after the economy tanked, said, “Comedy thrives during economic downturns. You know, if you’ve had a bad day, laughter is a better remedy than watching a coroner pick shrapnel out of some poor guy’s private parts.”

Ms. Salke said, “It’s all part of stress level.” She said people might look to comedy because they “don’t want to think too hard.” She added, “You’re probably sitting around the table talking about how you’re going to afford the tuition, or you’re not going to have a vacation, or you can’t afford a divorce. You need an escape from that.”

Lorre’s core comedy, the goofy, escapist Two and a Half Men, has seen its ratings fall from 28 million in this year’s premiere to 15 million for the last episode. And a lot of the comedies that are resonating — or, in an anemic ratings season, at least have gotten pickups — tap directly into contemporary issues if not into anxieties, whether it’s the class politics of 2 Broke Girls, the biggest new comedy of the fall, the post-college roommate scenario of New Girl, or the domestic trials of Up All Night and Whitney. Even Modern Family, cited for its excellence as one of the causes of the comedy resurgence, is nodding to the zeitgeist by having Claire Dunphy run for town council.

I do think it’s true that television has generally become more about providing aspirational models to audiences rather than reflections of their lived experiences. But even though that’s the case, the characters in popular comedies today still have problems that bear some small relation to those faced by their audiences, even if the consequences are cushioned by wealth or the scale is different — Jay’s business having trouble on Modern Family, for example, probably wouldn’t mean that his family gets foreclosed on. These are not the problems of, say, a con woman and a beer heir who meet cute on a cruise ship in The Lady Eve, or a professor and a gang moll in Ball of Fire, challenges that might be fun to watch but none of us could ever possibly have. We are not ignoring our mortgages to chase a leopard through the suburbs. Comedy characters today may be somewhat more secure than comedy watchers, but they’re helping us mediate the challenges of contemporary life, not escape them entirely.

While treating myself to a lazy weekend, I re-read Ellen Raskin’s seminal young adult mystery The Westing Game, and was struck both by how intricate and fun it is (qualities that would be undone by the intrusion of computers into the story, as happens in an unfortunate-looking movie adaptation) and by how complex its politics are for a YA book. Which is not to say that YA novels typically don’t have politics, or that they shouldn’t. But the political messages are often metaphorical, and the lessons are relatively clear and high-level: women can be the equals of men; diversity makes organizations and individuals stronger; benevolence and democratic input are the basis of a strong regime. But both The Westing Game (to which there is, apparently, an unpublished sequel) and The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) have complex and indecisive relationships with politics, particularly liberal ones.

In The Westing Game — in which, for the unfamiliar, Samuel Westing, a millionaire immigrant industrialist, fakes his own death in order to play out a complex game with his friends and family — said millionaire immigrant industrialist disguises himself, for part of the game, as a union organizer fired by Westing. The character is far and away the most congenial persona Westing takes on during the course of his charade: the others are an obsequious property manager and a chilly corporate whiz, and we never get much of a sense of what Westing himself must have been like. As a millionaire, he’s secretive, isolated, and disconnected from everyone but the doctor who helps him pull off the masquerade. We know, from a character who knew him when she was a child, that he can be mercilessly critical but generous to people he believes will succeed if they’re given a proper leg up. But as a working-class doorman, he’s allowed to be accessible, a metaphorical organizer in a way that he couldn’t be as an actual organizer. And of course, that character is a fiction, mooting the entire question of whether we’re supposed to think that Westing was wrong to bust the union, whether Westing regrets busting the union, and whether he was a good head of a company as well as a good man, which several characters later decide he was in the course of the game. The book leaves us with the very adult possibility that Westing was many people to many different people — readers have to decide what the sum of Westing’s parts means.

There’s also the question of diversity and affirmative action. The book is written in 1979, but it prefigures in some kinder, gentler ways, the anxieties that seem to have plagued Clarence Thomas’ tenure on the Supreme Court and his fear as a whole. One of the novel’s characters is a judge named J.J. Ford, who sort of seems like what Anita Hill might have turned out to be if the right-wing hadn’t decided to systematically decide to destroy her life: she’s black, single, and extremely accomplished. In the book, she’s paired up with Westing’s union organizer persona as part of the game that Westing’s set up. And without being aware of it, that pairing lets her work out her sense that Westing only mentored her and financed her education because he wanted a black female judge in his pocket, and her anxiety that she was never able to pay him back, freeing herself of her perceived debt to him. In disguise, Westing finds a way to tell her that he genuinely did like her and think she was deserving. It’s a rebuke to the idea that seems to fuel Thomas, that getting a little help along the way (though in this case, it’s financial aid rather than affirmative action) should be considered demeaning.
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I remain pretty skeptical of the idea that it would be a useful or substantive discussion of the issues to have someone from Occupy Wall Street on the next edition of The Real World. But I should probably give MTV, which is airing an OWS special on Nov. 5, some credit for the way they’re framing their news- and opinion-oriented coverage of the movement. Among the things they’ve done is taken folks like David Banner and Kevin Smith, who have their own constituencies who are not necessarily going to march down to Zuccotti Park, and positioned them as open-minded but curious observers (and in some cases, participants). This seems to be exactly what the movement should want: folks with some influence, who you might not expect as supporters, taking the position that it’s dumb to dismiss the folks in Zuccotti Park as dirty hippies, but important to listen and find an issue or two you can latch on to. Folks may differ on the importance of the actual occupations, but I think everyone agrees that the wider the participation in a conversation about income inequality, the better.