Spurred on by Laura Dern’s Golden Globes win for her roles as Amy Jellicoe, I’ve been catching up on Enlightened. It’s a fascinating show, one of the more uncomfortable things I’ve ever watched in its combination of Amy’s intense selfishness and immaturity and New Age preachiness. But I’m also struck by how much it’s a story about what it means to work for a company you think is actively harming the world, and how difficult it is to do socially responsible work.

The company that Amy worked for before her breakdown, and that she finds herself attempting to reform, is literally called Abaddon, after the place of destruction in Jewish religious texts and the king of the Pit in Revelation. Amy hopes to implement a corporate responsibility program when she comes back to work after her stint in rehab, but instead finds herself in the basement, consigned to a program for people the company considers kooks, but who they can’t fire. When she tries to convince HR to give her a task force or let her act as a community liaison by giving the department head a printout of stories about Abaddon’s environmental and labor problems, the woman is actively frightened that talking about those issues will get them both fired. Amy’s former assistant shuts her down when Amy suggests that they could be getting into bed with a company responsible for industrial accidents in India. The inertia and terror are deep.

And when Amy tries to get a job with a non-profit, she’s devastated to learn that the salary on offer at a place where she thinks she’d fit in is $26,000, just $2,000 more than her bill from the rehab center. “I can’t live on $26,000 a year. I’m in debt, I’m living with my mother,” Amy cries to the man interviewing her for a job at a homeless shelter. “There are all these things I want to do. And I can’t. And it’s so frustrating.” Of course it is. And it’s a huge problem that we can’t make socially responsible and socially fulfilling work financially rewarding, much less viable, for people with debt and bills.

This post contains spoilers for the pilot of Alcatraz.

By David Liss

Here’s the premise of J. J. Abrams’s new show, Alcatraz: when the eponymous prison shut down in 1963, the prisoners were not transferred to other facilities, as everyone seems to think. They disappeared off the face of the earth, and now they are reappearing – having not aged since their initial disappearance. Upon returning, they immediately get back to committing crimes, seemingly programmed to do so by whomever orchestrated their disappearance. As I write this, it all sounds much more interesting than it actually is.

Unfortunately, based on the first two hours of the series, Alcatraz has not yet found its stride. It fails for a few reasons, but the most important one is the lack of integration between the plot and the characters. Leading the show is maverick cop (ugh) Rebecca Madsen (played by workmanlike Sarah Jones), a babe with a T. J. Hooker swagger. Yeah, she’s a hot chick, but she’s a food snarfing, whiskey-chugging tough gal who isn’t about to let those pencil-pushers make her do things by the book. Madsen has been off her game since her partner was killed while chasing a bad guy they still haven’t caught or identified. Then Federal Agent Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill) assholishly kicks her off a crime scene when she’s investigating the murder of a former Alcatraz deputy warden. Madsen, of course, isn’t about to let something like jurisdiction get in the way of her doing what is in no way her job, so she recruits Diego Soto (Jorge Garcia) a comic-book-writing, comic-book-store-owning, video-game-playing Alcatraz expert with four books and two Ph.D.s under his belt. I guess a second Ph.D. wouldn’t be that hard after you figure out how to complete the first one, but still. This is overkill, no? But I’ll just take it as nerd honey-trap #1.

Evidence Madsen lifts from the crime scene point them to a former Alcatraz inmate long believed to be dead, but alive and no older than he was in 1963, so they head over to the Rock, start digging around in a secret archive that Soto just happens to know about. Then they’re gassed and abducted, taken to a secret facility under Alcatraz, run dickishly by Hauser and Lucy (Parminder Nagra), his hot and super-smart assistant (nerd honey-trap #2!) — and promptly recruited to catch the Alcatraz inmates returning from somewhere in time. Soto tries to get us excited about this (“Is anyone else’s head exploding?”), but really, they all take the situation in stride. Madison wants to catch bad guys, and the time travel component remains secondary to the characters because it is secondary to the show.

Over the course of the two hours we learn a couple of things — but mostly about what we don’t know or care much about. Hauser has got more info than he is sharing. He is transferring the recaptured prisoners to a new facility, whose seriousness is indicated by its stationary military guards and its excess of florescent light. Then there’s Lucy, who is shot during the apprehension of the second criminal they come across, and who turns out — as we learn a the end of the second hour — was involved with these inmates back in 1963, during the federal government’s concentrated push to bring more South Asian female doctors into the corrections system. Then there is the facility under Alcatraz itself. Someone has invested millions of dollars into infrastructure in preparation for the prisoners returning, which means someone knew they would someday return. That suggests the disappearance and ultimate return are part of a predictable pattern — or maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe it doesn’t go beyond cryptic guys in suits doing things they don’t want you to know about.
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When Mitt Romney Came to Town, the short documentary about Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital being touted by the Newt Gingrich-backing and Sheldon Adelson-funded Winning Our Future Super PAC, has raised questions about everything from the clout of those organizations to the accuracy of the charges of job-cutting against Romney, the Republican frontrunner. But it’s also a good example of the tension between good political ad-making and good documentary-making. And as Super PACs and well-funded candidates increasingly make and release long specials, whether for the web or television, as President Obama and Vice President Biden’s campaign did in 2008, it’s worth examining this odd marriage, to see what works as argument and what works as art.

It’s disappointing how heavily When Mitt Romney Came to Town relies on dog-whistles. The documentary fans flames of elitism, noting of Romney that “he had a Harvard pedigree and he was on a tear,” and closing out with footage of him speaking French as if it’s an indication of something sinister. There are stock images of bearded men gleefully smoking cigars that don’t land nearly as hard as Romney and his Bain colleagues posing jokily with bills. When it comes to its section on the fate of Kay-Bee toys, there are even scenes of sad-eyed children staring mournfully at televisions.

That lack of specificity is a larger problem with the movie. One of the earliest segments is the most interesting, in part because the workers talk in some detail about the changes Bain made to their work processes. “One of the first things that they did when they started, when we became part of the corporation, was to start cheapening the product,” one of the interviewees complained. “You’d have to hurry faster through your work,” Tommy Jones says, explaining that the rushed production times meant that the company sometimes shipped out equipment without parts. Those kinds of details make the case against corporate raiding even more damning. It would be one thing if companies were just finding inefficiencies and improving production with layoffs and reorganizations. But it’s worth making clear that layoffs are part of a larger philosophy of stripping down companies to their constituent parts and extracting the value from them. And it might have helped to identify the people interviewed for the movie more clearly by their job function, providing a sense that they had more expertise than the people who took their companies out from under them.

Slogans are powerful, of course, and the documentary relies heavily on them. But sometimes reaching for rhetorical force means the movie gives up a chance to explain how systems work, as when the movie declares that a tech start-up was “helped by a favorable rating from Bain’s Wall Street friends,” but doesn’t bother exploring those connections and processes. When a worker named Shannon explains that “I was pregnant at the time, and at the meeting they told us we were all fired, that we had to reapply for our jobs,” it’s incidentally powerful, but it might have been more so if the movie could demonstrate a pattern of terminations of people whose insurance was about to get expensive.

When Mitt Romney Came to Town may founder on its factual errors before it truly takes off. There’s no question that there’s a story to be told about Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital, and that story may well damn his presidential ambitions. The only thing at issue is how to tell it in every format from 30 seconds to two hours. Fact-checking and specificity to back up the sound bites seem like they’d be good places to start.

The folks behind Current TV are confident they’ve found an underserved niche in the news market. “We’re going to punch the establishment in the mouth,” Cenk Uygur said at the Television Critics Association press tour on Friday. “They have their plastic, fake, robot anchors on there who do not deliver the news. They give you this he-said, she-said drivel.” “I’ll be able to show you something and listen to these guests and tell our viewers what are talking points and what aren’t talking points,” promised Gov. Jennifer Granholm, whose news show starts on January 30, giving Current a full prime time lineup. “I’ve delivered talking points. I know them when I hear them.” Viewers are “looking for a place that connects the dots in a way that makes sense to them,” Vice President Al Gore told us.

The question is how Current can distinguish itself from its competitors in substance as well as tone—and get viewers to connect the dot from the news they’re watching now on MSNBC or CNN to the different product that is Current. It’s one thing to say, as Uygur did, “If you turn to CNN to find out what’s going on in politics, you’re wasting your time,” or another to point out, as Gore did, that “MSNBC has some liberal-oriented shows in the evening, but they have put on the RNC chairman…They start the day with a conservative show,” and another to get them to switch to another product.

Good journalism and good signings help, of course. Gore touted the fact that the network’s won “won every award in journalism.” And certainly one way Current might distinguish itself from its competitors would be to invest heavily in investigative reporting and documentaries. MSNBC’s been expanding its anchored shows, particularly on weekends with the addition of Chris Hayes and now Melissa Harris-perry, and it’s probably true that Current has to fill out its prime-time lineup to keep up. But breaking stories, providing new reported context on major events, and elevating stories that are flying under the radar would be an even more dramatic break with the existing cable model than simply offering a competing brand of analysis. On MSNBC, Hayes has gotten credit from the tech community for doing a segment on the Stop Online Piracy Act: clearly, there are major communities that feel underserved, and could be up for grabs by a network willing to break out of the standard menu of cable news topics.

It would be particularly interesting to know what’s bringing viewers to Current, particularly since David Bohrman, the network’s president, told us that while the average age of viewers for news coverage on the other cable networks was in the 60s, the average age for Current is 47, and for election coverage, it dipped to 36. “If we can mine this, we’re going to have viewers and customers for many years to come,” Bohrman said. Which is true, but the network needs more of them.

When I asked about how Current intends to boost those numbers, Bohrman said that he didn’t want to reveal too much about the network’s marketing strategy. But he indicated that the rollout of Granholm’s show would be promoted by an advertising blitz similar to the one that launched Keith Olbermann’s show on Current. And he emphasized the importance of having a full primetime lineup of news programming to match the amount of information on other networks. Uygur also suggested that the way Olbermann’s ratings took off when his show took on a more progressive bent was proof of the power of persistence, and that the space he’d opened up already counted as a success: “it allowed all of us to be on television.”

But I’ll be very curious to see what else the network plans to do to fight for market share. Unlike a network like Starz, which is only in 19.5 million households, Current has 63 million subscriber households. It’s less an access problem than getting people to hit the right channel buttons. Mending fences with lynchpin talent like Keith Olbermann, who will be hosting upcoming election coverage for the network, will help. But so could questioning the model of the business Current is in.

NBC’s released the pilot episode of Smash, its new (and quite good) drama about the making of a Broadway musical on iTunes, and while in many ways, it’s handsome without being revolutionary, there’s also something to just having a show based in a setting where the dominant perspectives are those of women and gay men:

Of the main characters, musical writer Julia (Debra Messing), scenery-chomping producer Eileen (Anjelica Huston), ingenues Karen (Katherine McPhee) and Ivy (Megan Hilty) are all women, Julia’s writing partner Tom (Christian Borle) is definitively gay, and his ambitious new assistant Ellis (Jamie Cepero) is potentially gay. The only straight men are high-powered-and-he-knows-it director Derek (Jack Davenport) and Frank (Brian d’Arcy James), Julia’s husband.

They both feel varying resentments towards the dominant paradigms that govern their lives. “All that fawning over the actress,” Jack complains. “Gay men piss me off.” “That’s an unfortunate sentiment to express in the American musical theater,” Eileen deadpans at him. His solution to being a straight man in a gay man’s world seems to be to benefit from it, or at least to try. He calls Karen to his house at 10 p.m. the night before her callback, expecting her to show up to seduce him, and even when she’s visibly upset, talks her into proceeding with a sexy-Marilyn impression, if not all the way in to bed.

Frank joins Chris on Up All Night as the second major stay-at-home father NBC’s put on television this season. He’s upset when Julia dives into the Marilyn musical, breaking her promise to him that she’ll take the year off so they can focus on their adoption. And when it’s clear that she’s determined to move forward, he decides he has to go back to work: waiting for the adoption to come through and tending their domestic life isn’t enough for them. There’s something very interesting going on here in NBC’s decision to put the emotional struggles of stay-at-home mothers in the mouths of men, and I’d be curious to know how much it’s resonating with straight male viewers — if any of them are tuning in.

I’d argue that even if you are a straight dude, Smash is worth a trying if you’ve been looking for some fascinating female characters on television. Julia’s clearly very creatively driven, sometimes to the point of neglecting her home life. She forgets to dress up for a social worker’s visit that’s a condition of their adoption, but charms the woman when it turns out they share a love of her subject matter. Watching her watch Marilyn movies in bed and light up while she’s doing it is wonderful — Messing may tend towards light fare, but there’s no question that she’s a delight to watch. And as a writer (though, of course, one of the representatives of the chattering classes who nearly give Julia a heart attack), the show has a sense if not for the actual process of writing, which we don’t see in the pilot, the itchy compulsion to do it.

Similarly, Huston is tough as nails: her production company’s in bad trouble, tied up in escrow while she and her husband fight out an extremely nasty divorce. It’s a nice illustration of how divorce can really take something away from a person. “I’m not out of the game and I don’t have to prove it,” she snaps at Derek as they walk through Times Square discussing their fledgling production. Sure, the competition is supposed to be between Karen and Ivy (at the moment, I’m Team Ivy, since the show seems to be trying awfully hard to get me to be Team Karen). But watching these big, grown-up women with big lives making things on television is lovely.

The bridge is yours.

-Paula Deen has Type 2 diabetes.

-Because of The Hunger Games, we’re getting Battle Royale on DVD.

-In case you don’t have enough Zooey Deschanel in your life, she’s getting a web series.

-Israel’s conquest of American television continues.

-Jon Stewart is off to the races on spending Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC money, being a pretty princess:

It seems likely that the poem in which Jay-Z, theoretically swore off use of the term “bitch” to describe women to mark the birth of his daughter, apparently writing: “I rapped, I flipped it, I sold it, I lived it now with my daughter in this world I curse those that give it. I never realized while on the fast track that I’d give riddance to the word bitch, to leave her innocence in tact…No man will degrade her, or call her name. I’m so focused on your future, the degradation has passed,” is a fake. But I’m curious about the reaction to the poem for the moment when it seemed like it might be true, which ranged from cautious optimism to intense anger that Jay-Z would profit from the degradation of women and have a late conversion only when he finally had a baby girl to be responsible for.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the question of prior bad acts and conversions lately (more on this to come later this morning), and as much as I understand the frustration that it takes a big change like a birth to get important men to recognize obvious sexism. But when it comes to hip-hop and misogyny, I think it would probably take someone who is not only famous, but has a lot of market influence, having a late and profound conversion to make a difference. It’s very hard to change norms, particularly around the use of language and representation. Given how normalized a word like “bitch” is, whether in hip-hop or comparatively anodyne network television, you’d have to convince people that the term was degrading before you could even start a conversation about moving beyond it.

I’m also not an absolutist about language — “cunt” may not be my favorite term of all time, but Deadwood could back up its use of the word like nobody’s business. And I don’t think that a total ban on any particular terminology makes sense given the demands of artistic license. But if someone like Jay-Z could, through Roc Nation or through personal relationships, begin a conversation about whether terms like “bitch” and misogynistic narratives are the best, most creative things artists can put out, that would be a useful conversation. The depth and repetition of prior bad acts should determine how willing we are to forgive and give folks credit for trying to do the right thing. If Jay-Z or someone else of his stature whose sins against women were essentially limited to terminology, announced an intention to do better, I’d be curious to see what they’d do next, but entirely open to welcoming them to the conversation.

Novelist Jim C. Hines writes, among other things, fantasy interpretations of fairy tale princess stories. And when his readers started asking questions about the way women are posed on the covers of his — and other — novels, he did something rather extraordinary. He didn’t just illustrate men in similar poses. He tried to hold them himself, and found that they didn’t just ludicrous. They were painful. I’m not going to include an image here because you really should click through, look at all of them, and read about the specific discomfort he experienced in each one.

Now, obviously covers are usually pictures of characters in action, rather than posing for formal portraits. So it’s not as if these characters are forced to stay in these positions for long periods of time. But if even getting into them requires the body to move in illogical and uncomfortable ways, that says a handful about the cost, and lack of naturalness of producing images that are supposed to be coded as sexy. If images like these are supposed to be what we find attractive, then maybe what we find attractive isn’t really human.

If last week’s Downton Abbey was all about the initial power war has to upset the social order, this week’s episode was about the lingering power of institutions, whether the idea that a man headed off to war is entitled to a sweetheart; the sororicidal battles between women for position; or the ability of the servant class to conduct intense power struggles entirely beyond the notice of their employers. It’s fitting, given that theme, that it seems we’re locked into some old plots this week, as Thomas returns to cause all sorts of trouble at Downton, but with increased capacity to sow dissension now that he can play Cora and Isobel off against each other; Mr. Bates and Anna seem locked in a stalemate by his iron and the pace of English legal proceedings; and Sybil and Branson have trouble understanding each other.

It was awful to see Daisy trapped this week, forced into accepting William’s proposal by Mrs. Patmore’s theories of troop morale, forced by William into announcing their engagement prematurely, and then told by Mrs. Harris that she should stay downstairs because “No, Daisy. Not you. The war has not changed everything.” There’s no question that Daisy is safer at Downton than she might be under other circumstances, but the very things that keep her safe and provided for also keep her trapped. It never occurs to anyone that Daisy might have a mind of her own — in fact, Thomas and O’Brien’s machinations against Mr. Bates last season depended on the idea that her head could be sown with any idea no matter how ludicrous. There’s a real sadness in that belief that could morph into a ruined life if William survives, and Daisy is railroaded into marrying him against her desires.

She’s not the only woman torn between her heart and norms, enforced by both law and society, that govern the behavior of women. When Anna finds Mr. Bates, she’s relieved to find out he’s found grounds for a divorce, but disconcerted by the revelation that “for her to divorce me, she needs something beyond adultery…for a husband, adultery is enough.” But when she ventures that that seems unjust, the force of Bates’ passion barrels past her bloom of a political opinion. “I don’t care about fairness,” Mr. Bates declares. “I care about you.” And he refuses to sleep with her, even when she points out “it’s not against the law to take a mistress, Mr. Bates.” Meanwhile, back at Downton, Ethel’s willingness to be sexually available gets her on Mrs. Hughes’ watch list, but it also lands her a date with a soldier that may put paid to her saucy talk.

While women are at subtle odds in those situations, they’re at outright war when it comes to the struggle between Isobel and Cora for control over Downton in its role as convalescent home, and Rosalind is trying to make a cold war hot by prodding Mary to slander Lavinia and break her engagement to Matthew. The first debate is exacerbated by Thomas, who’s returned to Downton determined to take Carson down a peg and with new power to manipulate the people upstairs. I have mixed feelings about Thomas’s manuverings here — the pilot this season suggested some real growth, so it’s disconcerting to see both him and O’Brien fall into old patterns. I hope there are longer games here that move both of them forward, or tragedies born of their limitations. But it’s fascinating to watch Isobel and Cora go at least other in conversations that come up to the very edge of civility. And of course it’s the civility that matters: one of Cora’s complaints is that Isobel has usurped her place with her servants. Cora has more social pull than Isobel does, while Isobel has more practical skills. It’s Edith, perhaps, who represents a way forward, combining Cora’s graces with Isobel’s unflinching desire to connect, even when it means confronting wounds like the amputation that took Captain Smiley’s hand (I am, for the record, considering him George’s father). Seeing the General call her out for her good deeds gave me hope that Edith will find her own way, a typically middle-child blending of Mary’s conventionality and Sybil’s rebellions.
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