The Family Research Council, an organization plagued by the fear that someone, sometime might be getting away with something fun, has gone after Star Wars: The Old Republic, because the game allows players to choose to have their characters be in same-sex relationships. As Tony Perkins said in his radio broadcast:

In a new Star Wars game, the biggest threat to the empire may be homosexual activists! Hello, I’m Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. In a galaxy not so far far away, Star Wars gamers have already gone to the dark side. The new video game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, has added a special feature: gay relationships. Bioware, the company that developed the game, said it’s launching a same-sex romance component to satisfy some complaints. That surprised a lot of gamers, since Bioware had made it clear in 2009 that “gay” and “lesbian” don’t exist in the Star Wars universe. Since the announcement, homosexuals have been celebrating the news, but parents sure aren’t. On the game’s website, there are more than 300 pages of comments–a lot of them expressing anger that their kids will be exposed to this Star Warped way of thinking. You can join them by logging on and speaking up. It’s time to show companies who the Force is really with!

First, to bring the geek and the sexual orientation history, saying that our same sexual orientation identity categories don’t exist a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away isn’t remotely the same thing as saying that males and females of any of the Star Wars universe species don’t form same-gender relationships. Sexual orientation is a relatively new concept, but dudes and dudes or ladies and ladies? Not so much.

But I really think things like this are useful because of the way they illustrate right-wing fears and the right wing agenda. Folks like the Family Research Council are invested in declaring that sexual orientation is a choice because then they can push back against the idea of legal protections for LGBT people. But they also would prefer for the possibility of same-sex relationships to be eradicated and made illegal on the off chance that someone actually chooses to be in one, that someone might decide that a relationship with someone of their own gender is more satisfying on every level than a heterosexual relationship. That’s the real terror here, that the vision right-wingers are offering of a mother, father, and however many kids you get if you don’t use birth control might not appeal to everyone. Trying to keep gay relationships illegal or unrecognized, in video games or in the real world, is a last-ditch effort you make when you’re afraid your own messaging isn’t working.

The Atomic States of America, the documentary about nuclear power plants based on Kelly McMaster’s memoir Welcome to Shirley, is a timely post-Fukishima look at the risks and opportunities of America’s nuclear energy industry and the capture of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Congress and the monied interests that influence it. It also does something that I think can be hit or miss: using old footage to illustrate where our attitudes towards the issue were, and how much or how little they’ve changed.

The movie starts with a fifties-ish voiceover declaring nuclear energy “the answer to a dream as old as man himself.” The cadences may be different, but the pitch is similar to a recent ad included in the movie, when a cheerful, high-def suburban mom tells viewers “We need to reduce our reliance on foreign energy, and we need clean air.” In old movie footage, a woman with fabulously sequined glasses tells her girlfriends “I declare, with all these atomic plants going up, I wonder if a girl’s safe anymore. I hope they know what they’re doing.” Later, we meet Dr. Helen Caldicott, the life-long Australian anti-nuclear advocate recalling her life as “a medical nun,” then flash back to video her in chic seventies clothing, fighting the cause even back then. It’s hard to believe it’s possible, but it makes Ann Coulter even scarier to see her parrotting the idea that exposure to a little radiation is just dandy when you realize she’s part of an established line of thinking.

The use of those historical warning signs is particularly appropriate given that The Atomic States of America is a horror movie. “I just assumed there was some kind of mysterious curse—breast cancer, lung cancer, thyroid cancer,” McMaster says of her town. “It wasn’t until college when people kept saying ‘why are you going home for all these funerals’ that I realized things were a little different.” She’s not the only one whose trust in authority, be it lodged in industry or government, reaps terrible consequences. “We never really questioned nuclear power,” Eric Epstein, who runs Three Mile Island Alert, tells the audience. “That decision was made for us…I believed my Dad, and my Dad believed the industry.” It’s unfortuante that the movie doesn’t acknowledge that some of Dr. Ernest Sternglass’s research has been repudiated, and he has been accused of exaggerating results in his studies on the impact of radiation exposure. But he does provide a compelling explanation for why so many people in the scientific community and outside of it were so eager to believe in the promise of atomic energy: “We felt guilty, and what did we believe? That the peaceful atom was going to atone for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

It’s not exactly surprising that there’d be a lot of interest in politics in a presidential election year, but even given that, the heavy investment by networks in political shows feels unusual. And it’s even more unusual that all the political or Washington shows coming down the pike sound—or are, given what I’ve seen of them—surprisingly smart and fun.

What’s making this an official trend is USA’s announcement that it’s picked up a series called Political Animals. The network’s other Washington show, Covert Affairs, can be a little silly about Washington geography and what kind of shoes Washington women can afford on civil service salaries, but it had a decent sense of the relationship between the press and the administration and of tension over leaks. So I’m not shocked that USA’s first real political drama is doing something intelligent in focusing on a main character who is a not-so-thinly-veiled version of Hillary Rodham Clinton: a former First Lady who is now Secretary of State. The civil service geek in me is pretty excited about this and Kal Penn’s workplace drama set at the UN, both of which are a welcome expansion beyond the White House and spies for subject matter. And I think it’s smart to get out of the legislative process, which by this point is fairly well-worn dramatic territory, and into diplomacy and the press—the main character’s best friend will be a reporter. I don’t exactly count on this to be an accurate depiction of diplomacy any more than I expect Royal Pains to be a penetrating look at the Hamptons, but the concept is savvy, and should provide a couple of good roles for non-twenty-something women.

As does Veep, HBO’s terrific comedy about a female Vice President dealing with needy staffers, a president who ignores her, and a press corps that picks up on her every misstep. The sitcom, which premieres April 22, certainly is heightened and ridiculous, but the pilot nails the rhythms of speech and attitudes in Washington, along with the obnoxious and prickly gatekeepers and the minor screw-ups that become major catastrophes. “I want it to be right. I want it to be accurate,” creator Armando Iannucci, the force behind In the Thick of It and In the Loop, told me at the Television Critics Association press tour. “I want to know the dull stuff. What time do people get in in the morning? Who do they sit next to? If someone calls from a newspaper or a television show, who takes the call? How do they issue a retraction?” He and star Julia Louis-Dreyfus told me that they continue to consult with advisors on both sides of the aisle in the city, and from what I’ve seen of the show, that care and attention pay off. When a prominent and aged Senator dies, the Vice President muses about the last time she saw him: “He was full of bourbon, and he grabbed my left tit.” Later, when Amy (Anna Chlumsky, who appears to be Iannucci’s current muse), her chief of staff signs her own name to a condolence card for the man instead of the Veep’s, she moans of the screwup “it’s going to look like the Veep couldn’t be bothered to sign a condolence card for one of the most celebrated perverts on the senate.” And the show mines a lot of humor out of the Veep’s lame attempts at humor, a perfect example of official Washington squareness. “I have stepped into the president’s shoes this evening and who knew he wore kitten heels,” the Veep says to kick off a speech. ” Just kidding. He’s more of a stilettos guy.” Sometimes, politics is both small, and small-minded (as is also the case with Hulu’s first original scripted series Battleground, about campaign workers in a Wisconsin Senate race).

And then there’s Scandal, which is essentially Revenge for the Washington set. Based on the experiences of Judy Smith, the Washington crisis manager, the show is soapy as hell. The president is sexy and straying! The cases handled by Kerry Washington’s PR firm are totally over the top. The real estate is improbably gorgeous. But if you can appreciate it for what it is, Scandal is a wonderfully entertaining funhouse look at Washington from Hollywood’s perspective—it’s Hollywood for ugly people with the ugly people subbed out. I imagine it’ll drive real politicos nuts, but if you can suspend disbelief and just enjoy it, Scandal is going to be awfully diverting.

Which is good. Even political junkies need a break from what will undoubtedly be a bruising campaign. And if we can only downshift to political shows, rather than to something entirely off-topic and escapist, it’s nice to know that there will be diverting alternatives to dusting off our West Wing DVDs.

I do think that J. Michael Straczynski is basically correct that, given the nature of storytelling in comics, that “the perception that these characters shouldn’t be touched by anyone other than Alan is both absolutely understandable and deeply flawed…Superman is the greatest comics character ever created. But I don’t hear Alan or anyone else suggesting that no one other than Shuster and Siegel should have been allowed to write Superman.” And given the buzz about a Watchmen prequel movie, some prequel comics were probably inevitable. Given both of those things, and that I’m essentially reconciled to the idea that we’re going to have more of these stories that I see as essentially finished, I think the real problem with this project is that it’s focusing on the earlier lives of the characters we came to know in the initial story arc.

It’s not just that we know them fairly well already, and what the new books would be filling in is psychology and peripheral adventures rather than character details. It’s that I think it would be much more interesting to tell this backstory through structure rather than through characters, looking at a government that first institutionalized superheroes and then banished them to quiet retirements with the Kane Act. This is one of the reasons the Agent Colson moments and continuity in the Avengers movies and peripheral material have been so much fun. These are supposed to be projects that are reasonably thoughtful about what it would be like to have superheroed people in our midst, and folks like Colson, or regular liaisons to the Watchmen are so useful: they’re a way in to the idea not of having powers, but of reconciling yourself to people having powers around you that you don’t have access to and that you hope won’t be turned against you.

Watchmen told us something about ourselves or who we could have been: the forgiveness of Nixon, the decisive victory rather than the slow dissolution in the Cold War, the continuation of a high crime rate, the hypercorporatization of our country and our culture. Fleshing out the Comedian’s role as a sanctioned superhero, and the decisions that lead to his assassination of President Kennedy or his role in Vietnam, would be more interesting than explaining why Nite Owl is depressed because it’s about us, not about them.

If you like seeing Aaron Paul make sad puppy addict eyes and need your fix until the return of Breaking Bad; still haven’t gotten your heart back from Mary Elizabeth Winstead after seeing Scott Pilgrim vs. The World; wish The Help would mainly serve to get Octavia Spencer better parts; or wonder what it would be like to hear Ron Swanson talk dirty to one of the Tammys, Smashed may be the movie for you. This slight addiction drama, which I saw at Sundance, feels unfortunately abbreviated, but it’s anchored by one hell of a performance by Winstead. And it’s honest and explicitly ugly about addiction without being grotesque, striking a difficult and effective balance.

I imagine it’s not news to any of you that the dude who portrays Jesse Pinkman can play an addict. But as Charlie, half of a married couple, both of whom are drunks, Paul tones thing down a bit. His alcoholism means he’s reckless—he’ll ride a bike drunk—and that his relationship to the universe is often blurred and softened. When he wakes up to find that his wife Kate has wet the bed in an alcoholic stupor, he jokes that his real job is to change their sheets. But Charlie is a music blogger, and apparently successful and functional enough in that occupation (plus, his parents helped buy the house he and Kate live in) that his drinking is never going to force a crisis.

That is not the case for Kate, whose alcoholism appears to be somewhat more severe than Charlie’s. She doesn’t just work outside of their house—she teaches elementary school, an environment that’s not particularly friendly to people with hangovers so bad they throw up in class. To avoid confessing that she’s a drunk, Kate lets her class and her coworkers think she’s pregnant, an impression that’s particularly dangerous giving that her principal (Megan Mullally) has never been able to conceive, and gets overinvested in the idea of Kate having a child.

As Kate stumbles towards recovery, stops drinking, and relapses, Winstead gives a remarkably un-vain performance. Bottom for her turns out to be not just the night she drunkenly decides to take a hit of crack and wakes up under a bridge, but relieving herself on the floor of a liquor store that refuses to sell her more wine. And the movie is blunt about exploring the link between Kate’s drinking and her sexual aggressiveness. In one disturbing scene, when Charlie falls asleep while he and Kate are having sex, she hits him while trying to keep him awake, and then continues to have even when he can’t be roused. When Kate relapses, she pushes herself on Charlie even when he’s trying both to get her to stop drinking and rejecting her advances. Stories about women assaulting men tend to be treated as if they’re non-existent or limited to police procedurals, and I appreciate that Smashed has the integrity to treat Kate’s behavior for the disturbing boundary-crossing that it is. Kate may not be a feminist ideal, but presenting her actions with honesty and nuance means the movie is a refreshing break with gender types in these sorts of stories.

I wish the movie had spent a bit more time showing Kate digging her way out of the enormous hole she’s dug for herself. We get to meet Jenny (Octavia Spencer), her sponsor, who tells us that “All I knew about taking care of myself was fucking people over…Maybe I’ve have replaced alcohol with chocolate chip cookies and nacho cheese…From now on I will enjoy my donuts. but I prefer them to hangovers” but it would be nice to see more of her life beyond her role as a mentor to Kate. And while I appreciate James Ponsoldt’s decision not show Kate in the cliche throes of detox, the movie could have spent more time watching her rebuild a sober life. Drinking isn’t like a breakup: leaving alcohol behind has required Kate to rebuild her entire life, and I’d have been curious to see more of her path to professional, emotional, and sexual health.

The bridge is yours.

-Horse-racing fans, rejoice. You get another season of Luck.

-The best review I’ve read of Lana Del Ray’s album.

-The Smithsonian adds the Mexican Museum in San Francisco to its network.

-Great prints of classic pop-culture real estate.

-A first glimpse at Skyfall, the next James Bond movie.

-Sarah Palin accent fans, your fix is here:

There’s part of me that feels like I should get angry that once again, Vanity Fair’s starlet-filled cover for its Hollywood issue is pretty white, and that it confines the women of color who make the spread — Pariah‘s Adepero Oduye and Paula Patton, whom I’m fine with but whose biggest projects in the last year were Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and Jumping the Broom — are confined to the inside folds rather than on the cover. But honestly, this feels like a pretty accurate representation of non-white women’s actual position in Hollywood.

They don’t get the prestige roles in franchises like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or The Hunger Games because god forbid we racebend an established character. They don’t get to be breakout indie queens like Jessica Chastain. Instead, they get praised for work in indies that few people will ever see, they get to be the eye candy in big ensembles dominated by white men, or they get to make commercially successful movies like Jumping the Broom that will be essentially ignored by the white establishment and white audiences. The two black women who are having their biggest years in Hollywood right now, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, are considered too old to fit in this parade of starlets. It might be nice for Vanity Fair to feature more black, Latino, and Asian women in this lineup, and to get one of them on the cover. But if it’s meant to be a reflection of where Hollywood’s at, it would be dishonest, a glossy papering-over of a still-gaping hole.

I’m a deeply committed Peter Dinklage fan, both because he’s a marvelous actor, and because I think his sex appeal and sense of humor and advocacy for folks of short stature offer a way forward for depictions of people in pop culture that go beyond the pathetic. So I was delighted to see The Surrogate, an affectionate sex comedy based on journalist Mark O’Brien’s article about his experience with the sex surrogate who helped him lose his virginity after a life largely spent confined to an iron lung after a childhood bout with polio. There’s a lot to like in the movie: John Hawkes, killing it in a lead role that will get him awards attention beyond his great performances in smaller projects like Deadwood; a lot of compassion and serious thinking about sex by able-bodied and disabled characters alike; William H. Macy as Mark’s friend and confessor Father Brendan. And when all of that comes in a movie that’s dedicated to seeing folks with disabilities as fully human, you’ve got a special and important movie, even if it’s one that hews to general romantic comedy conventions.

Part of what’s fresh about The Surrogate is the movie’s efforts to actually get us inside Mark’s head for the minor irritations as well as the traumas. “Scratch with your mind,” he tells himself during a long night in his iron lung. “Scratch with your mind.” When his iron lung is disabled during a blackout and he drops the stick he needs to call for help, his reaction is muted and practical, rather than panicked, even though he lands in the hospital. When he meets Susan (Deadwood coworker Robin Weigert), who is working as a volunteer in the hospital, she asks him, “Are you religious?” “Yes,” he tells her, with humor rather than bitterness. “I would find it absolutely intolerable not to be able to blame someone for all of this.” Mark’s disability has neither canonized him or crushed him.

When it comes to sex, the movie is quietly resolute on the question of whether people with disabilities can have fulfilling sexual lives or can be sexually desirable. Mark decides to see a sex therapist and then a sex surrogate when his reporting for another piece introduces him to Carmen, a woman in a wheelchair who tells him how good her sex life is (in somewhat hilarious detail). He gets a sign-off from Father Brendan, the new priest at his Catholic church, explaining “this isn’t exactly a confession. I haven’t done the deed. I’m hoping to get a quote in advance.” Once the process is underway, The Surrogate has respect for Mark’s stress, good intentions, and utter lack of experience—even in scenes where he’s experiencing premature ejaculation or behaving awkwardly with Cheryl (Helen Hunt), the surrogate he agrees to work with. Good sex, the movie argues, is a matter of practice for everyone, whether they’re able-bodied or not. When Mark’s caregiver Vera explains to the clerk at the hotel where Mark and Cheryl that the two are working on simultaneous orgasms, the clerk, who has full use of all of his limbs if somewhat attenuated social skills, has no idea what she’s talking about.

There’s no question that The Surrogate follows some predictable arcs. But it’s an illustration of the fact that those dramatic forms can still be powerful if they’re used to frame different kinds of stories about different kinds of people. And with its careful attention to what actually constitutes good lovemaking, The Surrogate is a rebuke to in-heat movie love scenes everywhere. Actually talking about sex is, it seems, still a radical act.

This post contains spoilers through the January 31 episode of Justified.

Has there been a better image of the contempt with which addicts are so often regarded as Glen Fogel’s sick game of Harlan roulette with one of his employees on Justified last night? I think it’s very easy for shows about drugs and crime to focus on criminals, who have more wherewithal to plot and execute, and who are more thrilling, and perhaps more comfortable, to sympathize with than the people who purchase and use their project. There are notable exceptions, of course, like Bubbles on The Wire. But I think there’s something powerful about watching criminals directly exploit the people who produce their profits or in other ways facilitate their crimes. These transactions aren’t just made in money: they’re paid in emotion and blood as well.

“You win, you get a pill. You lose, I’ll put a pill in your casket for you,” Glen says, his contempt only becoming clearer the more he speaks. “With all the oxy you do, you’ll live just a few more years anyway…you thought I was going to let you kill yourself in my office? Maybe it’s just your lucky day. Or maybe not.” Addicts don’t even seem to be people to him, he’s amused by, rather than appalled by or sympathetic to, the level of the dead man’s need. It’s clear why those assumptions about addiction are useful to him, but that contempt can also be a weakness. Fogel clearly relies on Raylan agreeing that an addict’s word isn’t worth much of anything, and he’s surprised when Raylan’s willing to rely on the man who “hung me up in a tree,” though perhaps the fact that “he didn’t hit me with a bat” counts for a little extra.

If that operation is coming to a messy end, Boyd Crowder is hoping for a new beginning to a well-run empire. “My father, he considered himself a Harlan criminal. But he became more than a middle-man,” Boyd monologues. “His association cost him his life. We will not make that mistake. We will work within Harlan. We will control every aspect of crime within its boundaries…We will be meticulous, and we will be clean. No more smash-and-grabs…we’re all sitting together at this table in service of the almighty dollar.” It’s not clear, however, that he has what it takes to be Stringer Bell—or Quarles, for that matter. While the latter man has awfully nice-runnig tracks on his wicked little gun, Boyd’s style is still to bust into establishments with guns and to spell his name out for the title transfer. Boyd’s approach may be right at home in the holler, but Quarles seems more likely to be a transformational figure.

Especially if race comes into play. Travis Bickle may not precisely be a model of racial reconciliation, though it remains to be seen what of his views Quarles absorbed when he was at an age to be watching the children’s programming his father denied him. But at least Quarles doesn’t have tattoos and a racist upbringing, the kinds of things that prompt Limehouse to inquire of Boyd “There are those who wish my people harm, and there are those who wish for the restoration of white supremacy in the land. Do you believe that?” Harlan’s a long way from being any sort of peaceable kingdom. But the players have revealed themselves if the lines have yet to be firmly drawn. Gunfights seem likely. And Raylan might want to swap for some boot that are made for running.