Because I’ve written so much about the unifying approach to politics Louis CK has been taking on Louie this year, I made sure to ask him about it when I got the chance yesterday. His answer was in striking context to the very, very funny pontificating by Russell Brand that followed, sample lines of which included, “I think we are passing the time, as human beings, where we look to these people to lead us”; the observation that Mitt Romney sees other billionaires as “Dickensian street urchins, eating gruel with fingerless gloves”; the declarations that “I like metaphorical systems for understanding mortality. Death is confusion; that “Until there is a fundamental spiritual revolution, I don’t care what color, red or blue or black or white, the pigment on their skin or the color on their flags”; and the insistence “the only legitimate distinction in global politics and society is rich or poor.”

CK said the driving force in his political humor was curiosity rather than expertise:

I don’t have any political opinions, I just am very curious. And it’s very interesting to listen to what people say. What’s the best way to run a country and the world? Those are really profound questions. I don’t have the confidence to say that I know one way or another. Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I’m very suspicious. It doesn’t make sense to me that you’d have the same solution to every issue. I just like listening. I try to take people who are way far away from what I think or understand and put a representative of them on my show. I like to try to learn form them. When we did the show with the Christian anti-masturbating lady, it would have been easy to have a stupid Christian anti-masturbating lady…it was more fun to have her be really eloquent and see if I could learn from someone who never masturbates. There really is a very blissful, beautiful idea behind that. I f I could stop, I would be very happy. When I went to Afghanistan with the USO, I’m a pacifist, and I’m really against any violence, and I think there’s zero reason to ever do it. I learned so much from being around those folks, and I feel like I was enriched by it…This is what I saw, here, you guys can make your own opinions. I think it’s better to illuminate shit and learn about it than to opinionate about it…I’m a little dumb. I sleep too much, and I did a lot of drugs when I was a kid. I can’t handle the responsibility of having a political opinion.

I think, as was often the case, that CK is being a bit self-deprecating here. He obviously has some politicized opinions, even if they’re not partisan ones, or specific policy proposals he backs in his humor. This is, after all, a guy who told me after the session that he tries never to connect his love for his daughters to their physical appearance so they won’t think they’re only loved for their looks, which is kind of remarkable and wonderful. And this might be a point in and of itself—that the best way to get us past the worst of our partisan gridlock is not to hold up bipartisanship as a fetish, but to encourage genuine curiosity and idiosyncrasy in our political thinking again.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

“Bitcoin for Dummies” was one of those episodes of The Good Wife that revolves around everyone manipulating everyone else. Unfortunately, since Will is facing the very real prospect of jail time and Eli isn’t in the episode at all, the machinations are grim, without the undertone of playfulness this show often gives even cases involving serious issues. To make up for that, though, we get double Kalinda, as she plays a central role in both the case of the week and in Will’s legal woes.

A lawyer named Dylan Stack, who has Treasury agents literally following him around, comes to Lockhart/Gardner because of Alicia’s past dealings with Treasury. (This show is one of the best around at remembering to let previous cases affect new ones.) The Treasury department is after Stack’s client for supposedly creating a new online currency called bitcoin, and they’re after Stack because he won’t tell them his client’s identity. At first, Will is understandably reluctant to take on a possibly quixotic and high-profile case against the government in the middle of his own tussle with the State’s Attorney, but the representative of the brave new world of virtual money has arrived with piles of cash, and we know that Lockhart/Gardner needs cash. Judge Sobel quickly rules that Stack doesn’t have to give up his client’s identity, but since we’re still in the first half of the episode, that can’t possibly end things, and it doesn’t: Gordon Higgs, the same Treasury lawyer Alicia dealt with a few episodes ago, promptly arrests Stack for being the creator of bitcoin himself.

Perhaps characteristically, Will wants to go on the offense where Alicia and Diane are inclined to defense. They try to argue that bitcoin isn’t a currency at all, so it doesn’t matter whether Stack created it. But after some back and forth, including a fun cameo by CNBC’s Jim Cramer as an expert witness, Sobel rules that bitcoin is a currency, basically because it’s transferable and you can buy things with it on Amazon. I wasn’t entirely convinced – Cramer made some good points about bitcoin not having many of the characteristics of currency, including a central regulating bank, and another witness’s comparison of bitcoin to frequent flier miles seemed apt – but at least this outcome meant we got to spend the rest of the episode watching Kalinda run around a cryptography conference in pursuit of the real inventor of bitcoin.

Kalinda eventually figures out that bitcoin is three people, not one: Stack and his two partners all accuse each other in hopes of leading both Kalinda and the Treasury agents in circles. The most interesting element of this is that one of the partners is a beautiful young blond woman, and Kalinda astutely points out that the woman could use her gender and looks to deflect suspicion: Everyone assumes that the inventor of a revolutionary tech product must be male, and it’s satisfying to see a woman turn this discrimination on its head and use it to her advantage. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter that Kalinda is being manipulated, because she doesn’t need to have the true answer as long as she can play Higgs the way she wants, and no one on this show – with the possible exception of Eli – can manipulate like Kalinda. She sets up (and “accidentally” records) a meeting with Higgs at which she promises to unmask the real inventor of bitcoin, and this proof that Higgs doesn’t really believe that Stack is the inventor leads the judge to dismiss the case. At their last meeting, Alicia tells Stack that she bought one bitcoin, but that it didn’t feel real. Stack responds with unexpected words of wisdom that could be the tagline for the whole show: “Real’s gonna change. Just watch.”
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When I wrote about Stephen Colbert a couple of weeks ago, I said that the thing I admired most about him was his willingness to disrupt the system, whether he’s nuking the vibe at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner or pushing the limits of what you can do with a Super PAC. All of which makes me wonder how far he’ll be willing and able to go with his run for president, if he actually gets in the game.

It’s one thing to buy ad time and cut spots to run in the slots you’ve bought. That’s a relatively easy task for people whose jobs involve making short, funny segments and airing them on television: the only difference is that you’re paying for the air time rather than being paid to fill it up. And even though I’m generally less fond of him, I think Jon Stewart, who has control of Colbert’s Super PAC now, and his staff will be able to do that just fine. People tolerate a lot of weirdness on most of their airwaves anyway.

But it’s a lot harder to convince people that you should be allowed to participate in the mechanisms of the presidential contest. South Carolina, Colbert’s home state, doesn’t actually allow write-in campaigns for primaries, and because he didn’t meet the registration deadline, there won’t be a way for him to compete in the race there. Presidential debates, no matter how silly they can become, tend to be considered a different kind of space. We can argue over whether Buddy Roemer or Colbert is a less serious candidate, but if Roemer has been excluded from the Republican debates, it’s hard to imagine they’d allot a podium to Colbert.

So Colbert’s going to have to find another way in if he’s truly to be an amusingly disruptive force here, and I’m not entirely sure what it’ll be. At least with the Super PAC, there was a very specific policy target to his clowning. Taking on a whole system or a means of thinking is a much harder task, especially when the barriers to entry are so high.

It was a dull show, though I appreciated Meryl Streep calling out the long list of wonderful roles for women in 2011 (and I bet Pariah, which is on my list to see soon, will get a nice bump from this). But for my money, Peter Dinklage had the most powerful moment of the evening when he suggested people Google the name Martin Henderson. It turns out he meant not the actor, but a British man with dwarfism who may be spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair after he was picked up and tossed. The attack on him came in the wake of a visit by members of England’s Rugby team to a dwarf-tossing competition in New Zealand (in a deeply uncharming proposal, a Florida Republican lawmaker proposed last fall that dwarf-tossing should be legalized as a job creation measure—the practice was banned after someone who was being tossed ended up dead as a result), and Henderson suggests that the team’s visit may have legitimized the practice. I’ve had some folks tell me that dwarf-tossing is an established cultural practice in New Zealand, but there’s no question that it would have been possible to decline without being disrespectful. And given that a lot of people don’t have contact with either people of short stature or people with disabilities in general, I actually think it’s reasonably plausible that if your’e dumb enough, seeing sports heroes be amused by abusing people with dwarfism could legitimate a practice that you could only participate in if you saw the people involved as less than human, an object of your own entertainment.

Dinklage didn’t have to deliver a sermon: he intrigued people into researching a terrible story on their own, one that ought to remind them that while he’s lucky enough to be winning Emmys, aspiring actors like Martin Henderson are at risk of terrible violence and discrimination because of their stature. And that’s a critically important thing to remind the rest of us about. I think people are aware that it’s physically difficult and frustrating to be physically disabled. But I don’t know that most people know the other ways discrimination against disabled people plays out. Just 20.7 percent of people with disabilities participate in the labor force, compared with 69.3 percent of able-bodied people. Disability magnifies the impact and risk of domestic and sexual violence. And students with disabilities drop out of school at twice the rate of their able-bodied peers. These are critically important issues, and ones that I think often go invisible.

For that reason, I’m excited for Sundance Channel’s Push Girls, a reality show about four women in Los Angeles who also happen to be paralyzed. I haven’t seen my screeners for the show yet, but the stars—Angela, Auti, Mia and Tiphany—were the standouts of Saturday’s presentations at the Television Critics Association press tour. In part, it was because they were a striking contrast to the images of disabled people we normally see in popular culture: gorgeous, super-groomed (they all had fantastic shoes), even dancing on stage in their chairs. But the show, in the clips they showed us, also made clear how terrifying it must be to do something you used to love after you lose some of the physical abilities that let you do it. I think seeing Mia get back into the pool and start swimming laps for the first time since she was paralyzed was one of the most emotional moment many of my fellow critics had on tour.

These women, and Peter Dinklage, are important. In their own ways, they’re forcefully asserting that people with dwarfism and with physical disabilities can be competent, can be sexy, can be an awful lot of fun, can be advocates. If moronic behavior in the public eye did, in fact, contribute to the acts that paralyzed Martin Henderson, strong, powerful countervailing images are more necessary than ever.

This post contains spoilers through the January 15 episode of House of Lies.

While I don’t always think it hits its marks, one of the things I find intriguing about House of Lies is the way each case illustrates a different idea about people with extremely large amounts of money. I don’t think this week’s case, clearly based on the incredibly nasty divorce between Frank McCourt and his wife that’s put the fate of the Dodgers in doubt. In this case, it’s the idea that people will do almost anything, even fake their way through an irretrievably broken marriage, to hold on to vast amounts of money. But I also think this case, unlike the last one, revealed one of the central problems of the show as a half-hour comedy: in that amount of time, it’s almost impossible to spend time both developing the backstory of the main characters and really digging into the motivations of their clients.

That was particularly clear since we got our first glimpse of one of Marty’s colleagues’ inner lives tonight (and no, Doug having some Cat Deeley-related airport ejaculation problems doesn’t count as an inner life). I adore Kristen Bell and want only good things for her, and I thought this was nice, if a little slight. Looked up by an old acquaintance, Jeannie decides they’re going on a date. I thought this episode did a nice job of capturing the uncertainty of this kind of scenario, whether it’s Jeannie just not being sure what she’s walking into, or her seeing the earring and the hair flipping and deciding that she’s going to try to be interested anyway. When it turns out he’s paying her a very different kind of compliment, Bell sold the disappointment—sometimes you don’t always want to be loved for your mind. And in her sad report back, where she explains “He was a fucking headhunter,” Clyde’s “That’s funny, because I’m constantly looking for head, also,” encapsulated the ways in which he’s a jerk and the team may not be a great environment for Jeannie.

Speaking of sex, that opening scene between Marty and his wife was convincingly uncomfortable, but I’m not entirely sure to what end. If we’re going to see a lot of them having sex or waking up in the morning afterwards, I’d be interested to hear more about what binds them together, even though Monica is competing with him for work and is pretty awful to Roscoe, who appears to be the emotional center of Marty’s life. That’s much more interesting, or rather, primary question than whether divorced couples have the same rules about consent during sex. And it’s probably one we need answered before we can intuit what it means to Marty to get choked during sex.

The one area where we have clarity, and that not coincidentally works better than anything else in the show, is Walter’s relationship with Roscoe. Early in the episode, we see him run down Roscoe’s Principal Gita, who says things like “A group of the class parent body wanted to put a stop to Roscoe’s unrestrained and joyous disregard for the gender-specific, crossdressing,” and “I wonder if in the future we could speak in less militaristic terms.” But when he’s confronted with Roscoe’s pain directly, he can’t bully anyone, he can’t be belligerent. As they’re playing video games, Roscoe asks him “Hey dad, what’s a fudgepacker?” You can see Marty absorbing the hurt his son doesn’t even know he should be feeling—and Roscoe retreating into silence when he recognizes that he should be hurt. “Did somebody really call you that?” Marty asks. Roscoe’s silence is more eloquent than any of the adults’ dirty talk.

I’m flying all day today, and I think most of you should have the day off? So posting will be a little slower than normal, but House of Lies, The Good Wife and Downton Abbey recaps will go up as promised, along with some Golden Globes thoughts and TCA goodies. Hope you’re all resting up!

So, I haven’t seen absolutely everything that won Golden Globes tonight, but I’ve seen a lot of them. And I am very, very happy for Claire Danes and the lovely folks behind Homeland, and very, very irritated by the victories for The Descendants, though George Clooney could have won a directing award for Ides of March, so things could be worse. But if you want to know why you should—or shouldn’t—check out the winners, or just need some water cooler talking points when you head back into the office on Tuesday, I gotcha:

TV Series, Drama: Homeland
Actor in a TV Series, Drama: Kelsey Grammar, Boss
Actress in a TV Series, Drama: Claire Danes, Homeland
TV Series, Comedy: Modern Family
Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV: Downton Abbey
Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for TV: Idris Elba, Luther
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV: Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones
Motion Picture, Drama: The Descendants
Actor In A Motion Picture, Drama: George Clooney, The Descendants
Supporting Actress In A Motion Picture: Octavia Spencer, The Help
Best Director: Martin Scorcese, Hugo

And seriously, watch Luther everybody.