For its latest issue, GQ commissioned Matt Fraction, Nathan Fox, and Jeremy Cox to do a comic about the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden this spring. As an extremely truncated encapsulation of a moment, I’m not exceptionally compelled by it. The most compelling thing about it is probably the decision to tell some of the story from bin Laden’s perspective.

We’ve got a lot of popular culture that’s about trying to get us to understand the roots of terrorism and the motivations of individual terrorists. Aileen and Brody on Homeland are both motivated by compassion, an openness to the world that makes them hugely vulnerable to trauma and suggestion. The members of the titular collective on Sleeper Cell have been spurred to extremism by everything from war in Bosnia, to alienation from American bourgeois hypocrisy, to parents who are pressuring them to get married despite the fact that they’re gay. We can’t produce a world full of shiny, happy people, but I can see the appeal in trying to find policy paths and to create an environment that will make people less likely to turn to terrorism in the first place, rather than resorting to convincing ourselves that war is the only answer in the aftermath of the attack.

But it’s sort of hard to find the source of Osama bin Laden’s murderous megalomania in personal trauma or policy. And even if we could, I’m not sure most of us really want to. It’s easier to see him as an unsalvageable other after the things he orchestrated and the damage he lured us into doing to ourselves. Of course, it’s those kinds of tensions that have the potential to produce interesting—if painful and revelatory—art. I’d actually like to see a longer version of this story that parallels the team that killed bin Laden and the team that surrounded him, that contrasts the stringent preparation for the raid with the relaxation of security around the world’s most wanted man. Did bin Laden believe he couldn’t be caught or killed, that he never would be? Or had he accepted it as inevitable? And which reaction would make more sense to us? Would we prefer to believe he was defiant and delusional to the end? Or would we like to see him repentant and resigned? I don’t really expect that any of the flood of bin Laden death movies coming over the transom to our theaters will spend time in this space. But I’m suddenly curious to see what it would look like if one did.

Gavin Polone makes a good, but depressing point in the process of analyzing what NBC needs to do to improve its standing among the networks — and concluding that they should go after men very aggressively:

One of NBC’s true assets is the ability to promote its new shows on NFL Sunday, the only programming they have that gets a big male audience. But if they want to get men to watch and stay with their shows, they have to commit to giving men what they want thematically and not water it down in an attempt not to alienate potential female viewers. The Playboy Club might have reached a male audience (as the original club did), but instead of making the show a titillating male fantasy set at a time when Hugh Hefner’s lifestyle was heroic rather than clownish, the network steered the show toward mystery and female empowerment stories. The result felt neither here nor there and didn’t attract either audience. Women are more tolerant in terms of what they’ll watch than men are. If a character is boorish, sexist, and violent but is written with integrity and is in a vehicle for interesting plots, women will watch: The Sopranos was a great example of this. But no matter how well done Drop Dead Diva may be, no straight guy will watch it. When I was first producing Gilmore Girls, I remember testing it and hearing the males in the test audience say that they thought the show was quite good but that they’d never tune in.

I really wish this wasn’t true. It’s incredibly irritating to be told by, say, Marvel Comics, that if women would just pony up some more cash than we already do, they’ll do better by us. We already bend so much. Are we really supposed to believe that if we completely acquiesce to culture made by and for men that they’ll they’ll reward us with products that are oriented towards us and our experiences? It doesn’t seem to have worked out that well for us to just buy in to culture about men, or culture where really terrible things happen to women in the name of grittiness. Watching The Sopranos and The Wire didn’t get us a New Golden Age mob or cop show with women in the center of the frame and men at the periphery.

And I just want to holler at men who insist they’d never tune in to a show aimed at women to consider what they’re missing, to consider what women add to their favorite shows. Does anyone who watches Sons of Anarchy seriously think it would be a better show without the female characters? Even without the men of SAMCRO, or with them on the edge of the frame, Gemma and company would make a killer stand-alone television show, and I hate to think that the men who tune in to Sons of Anarchy wouldn’t tune in to that. Similarly, I think the total dude aversion to Sex and the City is a mistake, though I can see how the show would be discomfiting for men who aren’t used to hear themselves spoken about in the same ways men regularly speak about women in culture. And Buffy the Vampire Slayer may have romantic and emotional subplots, but it’s an unambiguously wonderful cheesy action show with great villains. It’d be pretty depressing to see men not tune in to AKA Jessica Jones when it comes out, or to have it labeled the chick superhero show, the bone that gets thrown to women as a reward for our patience.

I don’t know what’s worse: the idea that women have to constantly submit to guy-defined culture, or that guys, by staying in their own enclaves, miss out.

Experian’s come out with its annual list of the shows whose viewers are most consistently conservative and liberal, and they’re interesting less for what they say about conservative and liberal tastes than what they indicate about the parties.

If you extrapolated back to form a party profile from the shows with the most purely conservative audiences, it would be a pretty easy guess from the top three shows — Barrett Jackson Auction (which I’d never heard of), This Old House, and the 700 Club — that the party is old, and somewhat religious. There’s a Ron Swanson-like streak in the fondness for Top Shot, New Yankee Workshop, and American Pickers. And it’s interesting to see a semi-anthropological streak in the Republican devotion to reality shows about working-class white folks like Swamp Loggers and Swamp People. Conservatives may insist that progressives treat working people with a combination of curiosity and condescension, but there are no reality shows in the list of programs with the most concentrated liberal audiences. And The Bachelor, which has a pretty grotesque perspective on marriage and family values, is in the top 10 for conservative shows.

Looking at the shows with the most concentrated liberal audiences, it’s easy to guess from mock news shows like The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and the Soup that the audiences skew young, and snarky. In fact, six of the 15 shows with the most solidly liberal audiences are talk shows, which one could say suggests a penchant for (not always productive) introspection. Shows about real and alternate families are big among liberal viewers, ranging from Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock to Glee and Modern Family to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The Middle is the only real family show to be in the conservative top 15.

The funniest bit is probably the list of shows favored by moderate voters. I’m sure politicians would love to find some leading indicators in those results. But unless we’re supposed to take a fondness for HGTV as an indicator that housing is the biggest concern most American swing voters face, there isn’t much there to build a platform on. Instead, we like semi-reformed rock stars and heavier public servants, stories about how men found their wives and women going bonkers of their dream dresses. Swing voters will remain mysterious and variable.

This post contains spoilers through the Dec. 8 episode of Community.

I watched last night’s episode of Community with a friend who had never seen the show before, which I feel like makes me both a good friend and a bad one. Good, because who doesn’t want to be introduced to one of the most innovative shows on television. And bad, because this was an episode that epitomized how hard it can be to get into this show casually: it’s in a form that the show doesn’t usually take, it doesn’t have a long-arc plot (except in its continuing exploration of Abed’s alienation), and most of its jokes rely on long-established tropes about the characters. That said, it was a good example of all of those things, and in a small (and sometimes over-signaled way) a good deconstruction of the false cheer of the holidays, which can get overwhelming.

First, since I’m running this conversation with MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd on Tuesday (come! send me questions!), I cannot say how much I appreciated Jeff resorting to his mad law skills to shut down one of the parts of Greendale he hates most, declaring, “Glee club, meet ASCAP,” with vengeful joy. We tend to get grumpy fatherly Jeff a lot more often that we get smart lawyerly Jeff, and sometimes, I think that’s a shame. Jeff doesn’t really want his responsibility for the rest of the group, and the disjunct between his discomfort with that role and his own angst about his relationship with his father can be funny. We all brace for the mistakes that we’re afraid of making. But I prefer the reminder that Jeff was really good at something once, and built that talent and joy for the law on a totally hollow foundation. That’s a much more interesting darkness. And his quest to get back to the law, and this time, be legit, makes for an actual arc. I’m not sure I think Jeff’s daddy issues will ever be meaningfully resolved. And I’m not sure I much care. What I want to know is more about the life Jeff is going to build, not the life he’s trying to avoid.

I also really appreciated Britta in tonight’s episode. This season has hammered home the idea that Britta is just the ultimate killjoy to a point where it’s exhausting, and I think an unfair representation of people who care about social issues. “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking” did a much better job of illustrating her genuine ambivalence between wanting to do something good for the world and wanting to better her own life than constantly hammering at her as a fraud and a hypocrite. So I appreciated that she was the hero tonight, saving the day with a show of actual, genuine enthusiasm that broke the spell of Mr. Rad’s false cheer. Community‘s always been on board with Abed’s brand of “I guess I just like liking things” brand of gawky sincerity. But that’s ultimately kind of inward-looking. And I thought it worked well to both illustrate the limitations of that kind of happiness generation and emphasize that sometimes following your heart and humiliating yourself is the better part of valor.

Honestly, those two paragraphs were sort of an attempt to avoid discussing Annie’s song, which I thought was the worst part of the episode. I get that this is supposed to be a joke on the Alison Brie fanboys, that, as Jeff puts it, “Eventually you hit a point of diminishing returns on the sexiness.” But I thought this played like a less effective spin on the sexy baby thing than Abby Flynn on 30 Rock did. It lacked that sort of core darkness, the idea that there is a deeply compromised safety in attaching yourself to men. The only real darkness here was the idea that Annie is sexually incompetent, something the show’s already poked her for this season when Jeff told her she was saying the wrong thing and wearing the wrong lipgloss in “Remedial Chaos Theory.” It’s one thing for Annie to figure out what she wants from a sexual relationship. It’s another to turn her into the ideal woman for Jeff. You’re not really satirizing the idea that Annie exists for male viewers’ sexual consumption when the parodies of those urges are all about correcting her so she’ll be a more delectable object of that consumption.

I’m running around talking to folks about copyright in preparation for Tuesday’s event, so no link roundup today. But read Anna Holmes on women critics in the Washington Post.

This post contains spoilers through Chapter 35 of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. For next week, let’s finish the novel.

In these chapters, there were two things that stood out to me: the women in Landsman’s life, and the trauma of Reversion, what it means to face the impending loss of a land that may not be the one that was promised, but has turned out to have soil fertile enough to sink roots in anyway.

Michael Chabon’s women have a tendency to assume a sort of mystical quality, an unfathomability. It’s not so much that his men are dumb, but that woman operate by a set of separate laws than men, and that only sometimes do they overlap. There’s the moment of recognition between Sam and his mother over the subject of Tracy Bacon in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, or the observation that unites Landsman and Mrs. Shpilman, her memory that “It has been many years. But as I recall, politeness was not a great strength of that Jewess.” What makes Naomi’s loss so particularly painful to Landsman is, of course, that she’s his sister, but that they lived by a similar set of laws, “close enough for everything Landsman did or said to constitute a mark that must be surpassed or a theory to disprove…She had the Errol Flynn style of keeping a straight face only when she was joking, and grinning like a jackpot winner whenever things got rough. Slap a pencil mustache on the jewess, and you could have sent her swinging form the rigging of a three-master, sword in hand.” And now her brother needs to follow in her path, to summon up that swashbuckling tendency without ending up plastered on the side of a mountain, without creating a hole in someone else’s life.

And these are particularly difficult times to thread that needle. “I respect your keeness,” Landsman tells a doctor who is concerned about his drinking, “but tell me, please, if the country of India were being canceled, and in two months, along with everyone you loved, you were going to be tossed into the jaws of the wolf with nowhere to go and no one to give a fuck, and half the world had just spent the past thousand years trying to kill Hindus, don’t you think you might take up drinking?” Belief is powerful in the best of times, giving rise, in Landsman’s account, to the fata morgana, and in these, to the particular disappointments of Berko’s father. And so it makes a certain amount of demented sense that a school of thought that “Some people say Messiah will tarry until the Temple is rebuilt. Until altar worship gets restored. Blood sacrifices, a priesthood, the whole song and dance.”

But with that clarity of intent comes a narrowness, in everything from language to dinner tables. In Peril Strait, Landsman hears a spoken form of Hebrew that “sounded to him like the Hebrew brought over by the Zionists after 1948. Those hard desert Jews tried fiercely to hold on to it in their exile, but as with the German Jews before them, got overwhelmed by the teeming tumult of Yiddish, and by the painful association of their language with recent failure and disaster.” Failure, of course, that leads to violent determination to erase those associations. And as Reversion approaches, the pluralism of Hertz’s table as fallen away from the time when it was “a lively region, the only table in these divided islands at which Indians and Jews regularly sat down together to eat good food without rancor. There was California wine to drink and be expatiated upon by the old man. Silent types, hard cases, and the odd special agent or lobbyist from Washington mingled with totem carvers, chess bums, and Native fishermen.” If only that could be the dream, rather than a harsh and unobtainable purity.

I was reading through The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment issue, and was struck by how many of the women on the list suggested dealing with sexism — mostly by working through it:

Anne Sweeney
Disney Media Networks Co-Chairman and Disney/ABC Television Group President
Must-Have Qualities of a Power Leader: I think the must have power qualities for a female or male power leader are really the ability to focus, to work hard, to be extremely goal oriented, and to not let the noise and the nonsense interfere with your mission — what you really feel you want to do with your career and your life…

Nancy Grace
HLN Host and Former DWTS Contestant…
Advice: I think the most important thing I took from my mother is her work ethic, which is basically, there may be others who are more powerful, more cunning and more beautiful than you, but you can out work them. You can work harder. Believe in yourself and outwork everybody else and you’ll make it…

Bethenny Frankel
Reality Star, Author and Mogul
Must-Have Qualities: Don’t ever assume anyone is smarter than you. Men, sometimes, in particular. Be able to understand the power of women and that the unimaginable is possible. I built my entire business from not underestimating women and realizing that women make the decisions in the household and have the buying power and not underestimating women and not dumbing it down…

Kathy Griffin
Comedian, Reality Star
Must-Have Qualities: I think you should be fearless, you should be outspoken and you should, stay focused and do your job. Because it’s easy to get bogged down in the fact that men still make 70 cents on the dollar etc. and I’m in a very male driven field obviously but I think when you just sort of stay in your lane, do your job, that’s really how you get beyond that and have fun.

I don’t think this is wrong, exactly. If we got paralyzed by the persistence of sexism in society, we wouldn’t do anything to eradicate it, or indeed, anything at all. And I think some of these responses make clear the effort it takes not to get dragged down or distracted by the knowledge that you might be earning less than your male equivalents, to not let your self-esteem get damaged by the occasional assumption that you’re riding your sex appeal to success. It takes energy to pretend that things are normal when they aren’t, or that they don’t get to you when they do. But ultimately, the success of individual women isn’t actually going to diminish the prevalence of those assumptions or close the pay gap.

I’d be curious to know how much these women benefited from female mentors who both pushed back on those assumptions and closed those gaps, and made it easier for women to succeed generally and specifically. And I’d be curious to know if changing the culture of Hollywood as well as driving the creation of successful content is part of what The Hollywood Reporter considers in making this list. Hit shows and big trends will come and go, and the fortunes of networks and studios rise and fall. Permanently bending the curve on how women are treated on screen and behind it in Hollywood would be a lasting accomplishment.

This post contains spoilers through the Dec. 8 episode of Parks and Recreation.

Episodes of television like “Citizen Knope” are reminders, for me, of the limitations of a weekly review model for criticism. Leslie’s campaign has come together piece by piece, episode by episode, with diversions like Tom’s stretch-limo-with-pool and an Apocalyptic cult, but it’s only taken as a whole that this season can get the credit it deserves for finding a device that moves all the characters together on their ways to their separate destinations. And as someone who actually was a candidate for and held (very minor) local office in an earlier life, I will admit I cried as Leslie’s friends presented themselves to her as her gifts, saving her campaign and culminating the work Parks and Recreation has been doing all season long.

I’ve long said that I thought it would make sense for Tom to rehabilitate himself and find his calling in public service, and despite his misstep earlier in the season, that his contacts with Pawnee’s business community could be critical to Leslie. So there’s something genuinely sweet about him stepping forward to present himself as “Tom Haverford. Image consultant and swagger coach.” But everyone else’s commitments made sense for them, too*. Andy may harbor fantasies of rock stardom or fictional heroism (I hope by Chekov’s rules, he is in fact forced to deploy or parry a javelin at some point during the campaign), but this season has been very much about him edging toward adulthood, whether in his and April’s journey to the Grand Canyon, or the suit he donned for Leslie’s hearing. Ann will forever be Leslie’s loyal number two and source of emotional support, and that’s OK — not everyone has to be the first woman president. April, despite herself, is grasping at both responsibility and her true potential, and I’m excited to see what she’ll do in her capacity as “Youth Outreach and Director of New Media” if she can keep her Janet Snakehole on a leash. Gary (I feel like I have to call Jerry that now that I know his real name) doesn’t have a role, but that’s because he’s not on a journey, and that’s also OK. Some people have already arrived where they’re going to be. And as I’ve written before, Ron and Leslie may have competing views of government in the big picture, but when it comes down to specifics, Ron is completely won over by Leslie’s vision and enthusiasm. When he promises “Ron Swanson. Any other damn thing you might need,” he means it.

But even if the episode hadn’t reached its big emotional reveal and the cost for Leslie’s transgression, cementing this as a truly excellent season of television, “Citizen Knope” was still a phenomenal, joke- and character-dense episode. One of the things I appreciated most about this and about “The Trial of Leslie Knope” was the way it found a role for Chris by really making him Leslie’s boss again, and by focusing on the challenges he’s faced in managing her. She’s a pain when she misleads him because she’s a disappointment. But her dedication and inability to relax can also be irritating, especially when she’s trying to palm him a nasal spray and trying to toss down chairs as obstacles in his way. “Leslie Knope! I am much faster than you!” he declared. “I have Bumbleflex!” And his glee when Leslie presented him with a (typically) perfect gift was wonderful and spontaneous. It’s been a total delight to see Rob Lowe show off his comedic range in this role, and I hope it’s a facet of his career her pursues in his career. There’s a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking.
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