Business Insider has a really depressing slideshow about the sheer number of times folks have tried to remake Charlie’s Angels that’s one of the best illustrations I’ve ever seen of the way Hollywood will glom on to a completely nonsensical idea and milk it for all that it’s worth. Because let’s be clear: Charlie’s Angels, a story about a group of women who work through traumatic pasts by taking jobs as detectives for a man they never meet, is a completely ludicrous premise. I’ve told this story before, but my grandfather mistook the original for a parody back in the day and was devastated when it turned out to be an actual thing. And with the exception of an attempt to spin off the show with Barbara Stanwyck as the head of a squad of dudes, which sounds like literally the best thing of all time, and is available on YouTube:

All of these ideas are really not very good. And that’s what’s so sad. Charlie’s Angels is not the single worst idea ever to make it to network television, but it’s hardly the best. It’s not a concept that lends itself to anything more substantive than underpants dancing and hot girls giggling and running around together. Which I understand is a profitable concept, but an all-female detective agency is not the only way that it’s possible to produce this outcome. It’s just a setup that produced that outcome once in the past, and so we’re stuck with it forever.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m just banging my head against the wall. Because yes, seriously, apparently Hollywood thinks that the way to have a serious conversation about race and sex in America is to remake Indecent Proposal so the rich businessman black, the woman in question of mixed race, and the husband is white. I would say this is the most audaciously absurd pitch I’ve heard, worse than NBC’s claim that The Playboy Club was all about women’s empowerment, but then they’ll insist that it’s a meaningful movie about the recession and I’ll spend the entire day in the corner weeping instead of writing blog posts.

The last time NBC tried to do a show that was primarily about non-white, non-Christian people, it ended up with Outsourced. By which I mean a show rooted in the idea that Indian people have funny names, Indian food is poison, Hinduism is pretty strange, and Indians either over- or under-adapt to American culture. To be fair, Outsourced is also about the fact that Americans have deeply terrible taste in novelties, inclining towards the racist, purile, violent, and drunken. But still. Not a victory for tolerance and mutual understanding.

Which makes the news that the struggling network’s taken the intriguing step developing a comedy based on The Infidel quite heartening. The original movie follows the misadventures of a moderately observant British Muslim, played by Omid Djalili (who has had a deal with the network in 2002 but never seen a project come through) who, on the eve of his son’s engagement to the stepdaughter of a radical imam and shortly after his mother’s death, discovers that he was adopted — and that he was born to observant Jewish parents. And to complicate matters further, his father is alive, but gravely ill, and being taken care of by a rabbi who won’t let the son his charge gave us see his father unless the son makes a serious study of Judaism. So he seeks out the tutelage of a depressed, divorced Jewish cabbie, played brilliantly by Richard Schiff.

A lot of the movie’s power is in its rawness. When Mahmud, the main character, first tells Lenny, the cabbie, that he’s Jewish, Lenny spits back, “I’m the shoe bomber. Pleasure to meet you.” In prepping Mahmud to go to his first bar mitzvah, Lenny goes through a checklist of things Mahmud probably shouldn’t bring up, including “Hitler. Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hitler. The fact that you’re actually a Muslim.” And in a raw showdown between Mahmud’s father’s rabbi and Mahmud, Lenny pits cultural Judaism against Jewish religious knowledge, telling the rabbi, “My friend has drunk my chicken soup. He’s danced like a Cossack in my living room, he told a funny story at a bar mitzvah and got a good laugh. I’m a Jew, and my friend is Jewish enough for me.” Jews aren’t the only ones with intra-faith tensions. “Give me one reason that can calm me down about inviting Arshad Al-fucking Stalin into my family!” Mahmud despairs as he grapples with how to reconcile his son’s happiness and the prospect of ending up permanently connected to a preacher of hatred. The show even has one of the funnier, more effective satire of British hate speech laws I’ve ever seen, complete with Jack Benny jokes.

The movie’s not perfect. It ends in a really profoundly stupid twist ending, which fortunately doesn’t invalidate any of the very funny work that comes before it. In a fall that’s felt divided between not particularly funny comedy and drama that’s excellent but that can be spiritually wearing (I love Homeland, but it does not make me feel very good about humanity), the prospect of a show that is extremely precisely irreverent is bracing. With faith, extremism, and terrorism in particular, when folks have gotten open about their feelings in American culture in recent years, it’s resulted in stuff like Holy Terror, art that’s dialogue-ending rather than continuing the conversation.

There are lots of questions here: whether NBC will be able to execute The Infidel with the same courage as the original; whether Richard Schiff can be peeled away from Criminal Minds to reprise his role; what the long-arc plot will be. But this is a worthy experiment. It shows signs of the genuine daring and ambition Bob Greenblatt demonstrated at Showtime. And while it doesn’t really make up for NBC’s cowardice regarding projects that involved Djalili in the aftermath of Sept. 11, it’s a small step in the right direction towards making good use of his talents, and for the cause of getting us toward a Muslim Cosby show.

In the comments thread in last week’s conversation, I confessed some ambivalence about the position that I’ve staked out here: that it makes more sense to set the standard for conversation about the death penalty that it should be abolished in all circumstances, even in the astonishingly unlikely chance that we achieve a perfectly just criminal justice system that has no clear disparate impact on people of any rage, gender, class, or creed. I say that not because I think we’re more likely to achieve a durable opposition to the death penalty by relaying on pragmatic arguments rather than moral ones — I think it may initially seem easier to bring people in with pragmatic arguments, but that may not achieve the depth of consensus we hope for. But rather, I confess some ambivalence because I have never been the victim of a violent crime, and I’ve had the good fortune that no one in my family has been touched by violent crime either. I’d like to believe that if such a thing were to come to pass, I would resist the urge to take another person’s life, but I’m afraid that I wouldn’t, that the better angels of my nature would be decisively scattered and I would want what I now profess to abhor. Which I suppose is as good an argument for total abolition as any: if we can’t trust ourselves in moments of extremism, perhaps some tools should be taken away from us.

But on to The Green Mile. It’s a fascinating — and very sentimental movie — and to a certain extent, it’s not particularly useful as a basis for a real-world conversation about the death penalty. People who perform executions may have the experience of helping to kill innocent people — we know some of them certainly have. But they’re deeply unlikely to execute people who are not only innocent but honest-to-god saintly miracle workers who absolve them on the way to the electric chair, telling them, as John tells Paul, “You tell God the father it was a kindness you done.” But the movie is an intermittently powerful allegory about responsibility, and the way we distance ourselves from culpability and full understanding of what we’re doing.

That distance is part of the way Paul explains his work to his elderly listener, and to himself. “Death row was usually called the Last Mile. We called ours the Green Mile,” he says. “The floor was the color of faded limes. We had the electric chair. Old Sparky, we called it.” These are cute names for terrible things, the wait for your death at the hands of the state, the instrument of your death, which even when it goes well, is an ugly, traumatic thing — and far worse when your death is sabotaged by a sadistic prison guard. But the characters struggle with the distance that lets them do their day-to-day jobs, and the need to honestly confront what they do when they take a man’s life. We know Percy is disgusting not just because he’s cruel, but because when he deliberately sabotages an execution in a way that makes the man’s death prolonged and hideously painful, he tries not to witness what he’s wrought. By contrast, we feel sympathy with, not disgust for, Paul when he hesitates to give the order to execute John because he’s meditated on the terrible work he’s about to perform. His sense of duty and his sense of right conflict. And when we learn Paul is living out a vastly extended life because “It’s my torment. It’s my punishment for letting John Coffey ride the light,” I can’t help but wonder if he’d be tormented in the same way if he’d executed anyone else.
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Commenter Greg Packnett, himself a legislative aide in the Wisconsin state Assembly, thinks so:

Leslie Knope is no saint. While she’s well-motivated, she’s still pretty corrupt. She regularly uses city resources to campaign, even going so far as to have the Parks & Rec Dept. give her an assistant in her official capacity so she can spend more time campaigning. I’m not conversant in Indiana law, but I’d be very surprised if that were legal.

Leslie Knope is a good representation of what corruption in public office looks like. Public officials using their official powers and resources to maintain office with the full knowledge and tacit approval and assistance of everyone around them because 1. everyone does it and 2. they believe in the causes and abilities of the officials in question.

That’s interesting, because Parks and Recreation has actually handled issues of public corruption before, and handled them with a certain amount of aplomb: when Tom goes overboard promoting Snake Juice, Chris makes him sell his shares in the Snakehole Lounge so he won’t be enriched by the event. Chris is very clear that Tom’s actions count as public corruption, and Tom, however reluctantly goes along, though he eventually chooses the private sector. And the show’s also presented Tom’s cozy relationship with the business community as ultimately kind of sketchy, even if it benefits the Parks Department on occasion.

I don’t really think that Leslie using her record in public service to run for office counts as public corruption. And the decision to hire Leslie an assistant was Ron’s, not Leslie’s — she didn’t even suggest it, the idea was entirely his. The question, I think, will be how she balances her continuing duties as an employee of the Parks Department and her campaign. And that’s a rich source of drama and comedy. Boss will pull out Hatch Act references in the next episode. Parks and Recreation could effectively satirize the tissue-thin walls politicians build between themselves and ethics violations — and it would be really useful to send up that hypocrisy and strive to do better instead of just wallowing in a perception that all politicians and public servants are hopelessly corrupt.

If Leslie Knope slips over into corruption, it would be a genuine tragedy. In her, pop culture’s created a genuinely unique character: a public servant and now a politician who really cares about the rules, for whom they aren’t just an impediment to the revolving door but a safeguard to a system she really loves.

The bridge is yours.

-Wonder Woman day expands, and sets new goals for domestic violence fundraising.

-Are Michael Moore and Jon Stewart essentially the same?

-If there is a whitewashed American remake of My Neighbor Totoro, I will quit popular culture. Or at least seriously contemplate it. Or write really angry blog posts about it.

-Zombie Bob Dylan.

As Homeland unfolds this fall, I’ve been watching Sleeper Cell, the network’s earlier show on the same subject, to keep me sated between episodes. And one thing that’s struck me forcefully about both shows is that even thought they’re portraying practitioners of Islam who are using — or may use, we don’t know on Homeland — their religion to justify terrorism, both shows consistently portray the act of prayer as beautiful, no matter who’s praying, or no matter what they’re getting out of it.

In Sleeper Cell, shots linger over cell members and anti-extremist preachers alike washing their hands and feet in preparation for prayer. When the cell members pray in the desert, they’re beautifully backlit. And when Darwyn takes a young wannabe-jihadist to a moderate mosque, the singing sounds good, and the joy of the worshippers is palpable. It’s hard to capture the sacred, especially because it’s something that mostly happens in people’s heads — we don’t really live in an era of special effects-friendly bushes burning in the desert. But repeating the ritual shows down a show that’s got plenty of sex and violence in it, it’s a tonal break, and it creates a sense that the people repeating that ritual are powerfully elsewhere when they perform it.

Homeland‘s taking a similar approach. In Brody’s memories, when he leaves his cell during his captivity, one of the first things he sees, the first shaft of light, falls on Muslim men at prayer. And when we see him praying for the first time after his return to the United States, the light that seeps under the garage door transforms a mundane suburban space into a house of worship. In Sunday’s episode, the show expands that ritual, showing Brody washing his hands in a beautiful vessel. And later, the show juxtaposes Carrie’s discovery of that silver bowl with shots of Brody at church with his family, the silence of the dish in contrast with the sound of a hymn.

I appreciate those conscious choices. Faith in popular culture is so often reduced to signifying ridiculousness or righteousness that it ignores what faith means to people inwardly in favor of a focus on what other people assume faith signifies externally. Making at least a gesture towards it, and in two charged shows about terrorism and national security, asserting that faith is bigger than its worst outcomes, is important, and all too rare.

I’m quite fond of Fran Kranz, who’s had extraordinarily bad luck in terms of being in projects that are critically acclaimed but canceled or vanish from the box office before anyone notices they’re there, so I was intrigued to hear that he’s part of a new movie project that’s seeking Kickstarter support. But the description of the movie itself, “Lust for Love is the story of an innocent guy (Fran Kranz) who wins the love of his childhood sweetheart (TBA), but since he’s been holding out for her his whole life, he’s so embarrassing that he’s quickly dumped. Convinced he needs more experience with women to win her back, he convinces the sweetheart’s girlfriend (Dichen Lachman) to teach him how to woo women,” has me feeling kind of exhausted. Maybe because Girls With Slingshots recently plumbed similar emotional territory, when Clarice found herself helping Tucker, a creepy guy she met in the library, learn how to talk to women.

What’s tiresome about these premises is that one of two assumptions is behind them. First, that men are too silly to know what to do with women, and need the instruction and hand-holding of a good woman so that another woman will benefit. Growing up isn’t easy, but there’s something odd about the boy-man trope that focuses on protagonists who need extensive instruction in social norms in order to interact properly. I understand that this is the source of drama for makeover comedies for both genders, but there’s a difference between narratives that convince women that they don’t actually need to reject stylish clothes and makeup to retain their inner selves and stories about men who haven’t rejected social conventions — they’re just totally unfamiliar with them.

And if it’s not that, then the assumption is that women, with their feminism and their romantic comedies and the contradictions between the two have made it too damn hard for reasonably intelligent men to figure out how they ought to go about courtship. There’s a resentful streak there, as if trading formal rituals for a bit more honesty and flexibility, and a bit more gender equality in relationships wasn’t actually a good trade. Having to do a bit more work to get to clarity and keep romance alive isn’t oppressive, nor is it a burden that’s unevenly divided. And sexual and romantic relationships aren’t that wildly different from other social interactions — we’re just a bit funny about the stakes.

Adam Carolla, master of subtlety and complexity, is sort of on to something in complaining about celebrities who make an enormous amount of money even while claiming solidarity with the poor, but as usual, misses the point:

“These bigger name guys, they go out and do corporate gigs, they do casinos and theaters, they make 200 grand a pop,” says Carolla, whose own ideology defies simple labels. “Then, they come back to their pulpit and talk about Joe Sixpack and how times are tight.”

“They never talk about the money they make… and you pretend you’re one of them? Bullshit,” he says.
Carolla isn’t shy about telling tales of woe from first class flights or how he feels uncomfortable around his nanny. Nor does he mind being in a cutthroat entertainment business, one that cast him aside in 2009 for failing to live up to Howard Stern’s ratings legacy on the FM dial.

It’s not actually more attractive to complain about your first world problems than it is to reach for solidarity, however clumsily, with people who have fewer resources than you do. But that doesn’t mean it’s not useful for rich people who want to support everyone else to recognize that they aren’t coming from the same place as someone who, say, is losing their home, or experiencing a prolonged period of joblessness. Kathy Bates’ desire to see Obama go after the “rat bastards” on Wall Street does not actually spring from an identical place as someone who is crushed under the weight of student loans, or whose mortgage was part of a complex financial transaction.

And that’s actually a good thing. It’s critically important to illustrate that there are large constituencies for issues like financial system reform, or for student loan forgiveness. And it’s important to draw connections between issues that people will argue are separate to avoid regulation. Bernie Madoff’s fraud was different from the rise of mortgage-backed securities, in terms of both how they were carried out and legal culpability, but they’re both part of a culture that valued profits over accountability. It would be useful to have wealthy victims of Madoff’s fraud, like Larry King and Kevin Bacon, come out in favor of much higher regulatory standards for the financial industry as a whole. You don’t actually have to establish credibility as a member of the working class to be a useful ally to the working class. But it is useful to know which one you are before you start acting as an advocate.