“There are only three ways to end your career as a rock star,” Stephen Colbert tells James Murphy in a clip shown near the beginning of Shut Up and Play the Hits, a good concert movie but not very revealing look at the end of LCD Soundsystem, which I saw at Sundance. “Overdose, overstay your welcome, or write Spider-Man: The Musical.” Clearly, Murphy and LCD Soundsystem did none of those things. And while the footage of their final, sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden is undeniably joyous, the movie doesn’t have much to offer in terms of explaining what it means to Murphy—or the other members of the band—that their grand experiment is over, or in terms of helping us understand Murphy himself.

I should admit that while I like LCD Soundsystem just fine, I’m not particularly bought into the voice-of-a-generation hype. The movie may work better for very, very passionate fans of Murphy and the band, especially since it spends a lot of time validating their greatness. The most direct and irritating form of this is a deeply grating interview with Chuck Klosterman that’s meant to tie together concert segments and scenes of Murphy wandering around New York in a day-after-it-all-ends haze. Klosterman spends about half his time expounding personal theories, like “the Internet was causing people to have a different relationship with history,” or that “bands are sort of remembered for their collected successes, but they’re sort of defined by their singular failures” that might have seemed profound when he was in college, but don’t elicit particularly specific or revealing answers. When he does manage to get something interesting out of Murphy, it’s usually by asking a question that’s fawning in the extreme, like how Murphy thinks the audience (which in the movie, includes a guy who’s weeping uncontrollably and Donald Glover) reacts to him. “I’ve never been to a show I loved where I didn’t believe something about that person,” Murphy tells him, though he never explores the gap between that perception and reality. “Up there, there’s something happening that I’m not a sixteen-year-old and I’m still transported by.”

Age and gender would have been other areas where the movie could have produced some interesting introspection, but instead, it never goes beyond the level of observation. “If you were a writer, you’d still be young. If you were an actor, you’d be right in the sweet spot,” Klosterman tells him. But the movie doesn’t talk at all what it means about the market that Murphy became a rock star at an advanced age, or what his gender’s allowed him to achieve that might not have been possible if he were a woman. “I’m 41, and I don’t have kids, and I want to have kids,” Murphy says at some point. But Shut Up and Play the Hits never tells us if he’s single or taken, and if single, why it hasn’t worked out previously for reasons other than the fact that he spent some time being a rock star. Watching Murphy lie on the floor of his expensive New York apartment, reach up and open the door of his fancy stove revealing a pizza stone within, and then closing it again, is not a substitute for information and insight.

That said, the music sounds dandy, and the up-close look at musicians putting together a show on stage with all the tweaks that implies is a lot of fun to watch. If Shut Up and Play the Hits were just a straight concert movie, it’d be a delight for fans to watch and a terrific introduction to the band for folks who are coming too late to the party. But the interstitial material only really works if you’re not just familiar with LCD Soundsystem but a supplicant at their particular altar.

The band, which has been active about fundraising for breast cancer since keyboardist Jenny Conlee’s bout with the disease, has decided to pull its support from Susan G. Komen For the Cure after that group made a clearly politicized decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood’s breast health work. Now, they’ll send the money they make from selling their Team Jenny t-shirts directly to Planned Parenthood’s Breast Health Emergency Fund. They’re not the only indie band taking action. The Mountain Goats, who are particularly politically active, warned their Twitter followers that “Pro-choice musicians, know that Komen for the Cure is now on the side of the bad guys.”

What’s particularly nice about the Decemberists’ action is that they’re not withdrawing the fight—they’re just giving their money to a direct service provider instead. Susan G. Komen for the Cure has a long list of bipartisan celebrity supporters, some of whom—like Neil Patrick Harris and Cynthia Nixon—have bigger national platforms than an indie band. Let’s hope some of them make the same decision, and help make it so Planned Parenthood is better off after losing Susan G. Komen’s support than they were before.

I appreciate the work that Susan G. Komen has done to make breast cancer a publicly discussable disease. But I also think that charities should have viable competitors to keep them honest. And for those of us who want a comprehensive approach to women’s health, and who want to give to a program that’s more about direct service and less about cancer culture and products, a reexamination of Susan G. Komen for the Cure is a healthy debate to be having and a spur to thoughtful philanthropy. It’s just too bad that Susan G. Komen for a Cure had to cut off aid to the women who need it most to get the conversation started.

It’s not as if characters never leave television shows. Diane and Fraiser both left Cheers, the former for California, the latter for a spinoff. Dr. Addison Montgomery departed Seattle Grace for the bright lights and beaches of Los Angeles. Detective John Munch has transcended franchises, moving from Homicide to Law & Order and popping up everywhere from Arrested Development to the X-Files. But it seems to me we’re entering a period where scripted television feels unusually confident about replacing characters or even entire casts.

The most high-profile case may not have been voluntary or planned: CBS subbed in Ashton Kutcher for Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, ending the latter character’s run on the show with a fast and not particularly deep workaround. But it came at a time when lots of television shows were deciding that setting and concept were more important than individual characters. The Office saw the departure of Michael Scott, and if the show has seemed creatively moribund since his last episode, its problems really began once Jim and Pam got together. The core cast of the show may change further if Mindy Kaling’s show gets a pickup at Fox, ending her run on NBC as Kelly Kapoor. While it may not be totally clear what’s happening with Glee next year, some of the cast seems likely to depart, whether for a spinoff, or for other projects as graduation approaches for some of the kids at McKinley High. American Horror Story was specifically designed, even if we didn’t know it at the beginning, to replace almost the entire cast every season. And while a new show the CW has ordered may end up following its main character over multiple seasons, its combat-in-the-arena storyline sounds like it could accomodate a whole new cast every season, if need be.

I’d imagine that some of this is driven by the success of reality television on two fronts. Audiences have clearly become comfortable with swapping out contestants and Housewives as long as their replacements continue to fill the same tropes as their predecessors, and in shows like Glee where the characters are more schtick than actual people, and where the structure demands turnover, it probably wouldn’t been too wrenching for audiences to see actors phased in and out. Making sure actors on scripted shows know they’re replaceable also serves another function: it makes the actors who really need the work less powerful in contract negotiations if they know the show is comfortable replacing them at any point. And phasing characters in and out makes it easier for big stars to commit to television shows without worrying about waking up fourteen years later and having everyone forget that they used to compete for Academy Awards. It might have seemed inexplicable that Connie Britton would sign up for a three-year run of eating brains and having ghost-sex, but as a season-long reset button that lets her remind people she’s something other than Mrs. Coach, it makes more sense.

What does it mean in terms of storytelling? I think that’s yet to be seen. While rotating casts do make most actors less critical in favor of setting, atmosphere, and the internal rules of the world that will govern all characters’ behavior, a few anchor characters will still be important. What bodes poorly for Glee and well for American Horror Story, to take the two rotating-cast-shows from the same creator, is that Glee’s tentpole is the increasingly unlikable and not particularly rational staff, led by Will Schuster, while Jessica Lange still has scenery to chomp as creepy Murder House neighbor Constance in American Horror Story. And the concepts have to be good: both Glee and American Horror Story, while neither show is my cup of tea, have concepts that provide procedural-like structures. Every week, songs will be sung or people will die horribly, and folks will turn in to hear those songs and watch those killings. All of which probably lends itself to a focus on episodic, rather than serialized, shows. It’s difficult for me to believe that anyone is tuning in to Glee because they’re deeply invested in and attentive to the coherence of Rachel Berry’s journey any more.

Does that mean we’re going to enter a period of sloppy storytelling? I hope not. Episodic doesn’t have to mean inconsistent. And moving characters along can give a show an emotional integrity it might not have otherwise. But if characters are going to move in and out of shows, the main motivation shouldn’t be to break the power of actors, but to tell specific kinds of stories.

Undercover Boss, the CBS show based on a British program of the same name that began airing in the United States in 2010, may have been the programming decision that was most responsive to the recession. By disguising the CEOs and other top executives of major American corporations and sending them out to the front lines of their organizations, Undercover Boss played to the fantasy of showing your employer what your life is really like and how hard your work really is. At a time when executives can seem impossibly distant from the average worker and from viewers at home, Undercover Boss makes CEOs seem accessible—and sometimes, the boss’s experiences end up translating into company-wide changes in policy. Such was the case at Kendall-Jackson Vineyard Estates, where president Rick Tigner went undercover and into the company’s fields and processing facilities in an episode of the show that aired last weekend. I talked to Mr. Tigner at the Television Critics Association press tour about what he learned about immigration reform, sustainable wine production, and being the face of a major company at a time when America doesn’t love CEOs—and why he decided to start a language program for his workers and give them more vacation time. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you decide to go on the show in the first place?

Caroline here, who works for the company, she was actually researching how to, you know, give an award to one of our employees. And so she was going on the CBS site, they have some sort of employee-recognition program, and with that she saw the Undercover Boss program and then connected the two. And really, I think as a company, you know, our culture of helping employees and understanding their story just connected.

You came on the show after going through a rough period, you mentioned through ’08 and ’09. Was there a sense that this was sort of a positive way to show that you were coming back or to show that you were reaching out?

It’s interesting. When you go through a difficult time and you have, you know, lay-offs, or we call right-sizing or downsizing…The reality was is that, you know, we still want to do the right things for our employees…When the show was offered to us, you know, it would have been a great thing for us to help the morale of the company.

Now you said when you went on the show that you found that some of your directives hadn’t made it all the way down the chain of command.

When I did the show, there’s always these concepts of “Do people understand that it’s quality first?” You know, it’s one of our visions and values…But on that one division—our distribution and trucking division— you know, that part had not gotten through. You know, so there was a management issue, I think, or communication issue there…the management is not necessarily overwhelmed, but just they were so busy trying to drive that business, so that some of the level of service at the driver level, they kind of lost sight of it…I worked with an employee who actually, you know, I would argue—maybe not the most stellar employee on that particular day. He also just had a bad day, you know. Didn’t mean he was a bad guy, and doesn’t mean he can’t be a great employee.

One thing I thought was interesting that you mentioned was finding you had some communications issues with your Spanish-speaking workers. You said that wasn’t something that had occurred to you before. How much did you know about the actual sort of ethnic composition of your workforce?

I have a very good understanding of the composition, but I really probably had not enough knowledge that our frontline managers didn’t have the ability to communicate with them. Now, the person I worked with was one, a new employee, and a young employee, so she hasn’t had enough time or experience necessary to learn Spanish. She might have over time. Don’t get me wrong. We have a lot of other people who are frontline managers in production who speak Spanish. But the reality is we have some that don’t…Being someone who I think—I always think I’m a pretty good communicator, who had the inability to communicate on my very first day I did the show. I was like, “Wow, this is a problem.” But it’s a problem that’s addressable…

I can’t make you learn another language. It’s difficult. I can’t force you to do it. You have to want to do it…It’s been six months since the show. And right now we’re just in the process of implementing the whole project because it took time to hire the training manager, to get all of the Rosetta Stone licenses, to work on the tuition payments because we’re doing more than just one type of training… And then also for the Spanish-speaking employees, who actually get paid, you know, throughout the day, we’re doing it during the work hours versus making them stay after work to do it. But the English-speaking management employees, they do their day jobs, and then they stay later because it’s sort of optional for them.
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We’ve talked a lot about what happens when you apply the conventions of superheroine costuming or posing to superheroes, or men in general. So I was glad io9 dug up this spread of The Wasp and She-Hulk getting all Sex and the City in assessing the hunkiness of their male counterparts: in other words, doing to superheroes what male readers often do to superheroines.

As with most of these experiments, it shows how ridiculous the conventions of consumption are when they’re applied to a different product. Of course you’d be well within your rights to complain that She-Hulk’s being awfully reductionist when she complains that “Captain America—Mr. Avenger himself. For a little guy, he certainly has the bod, the looks, and the moves to put everybody but gods like Thor to shame. My only problem with him is he just doesn’t ever hang loose—ever! For me, that knocks him down to an ’8′.” Because of course there’s more to Cap than what he looks like out of those ludicrous boots. There’s the whole punching Hitler thing! And being a civil libertarian in Civil War! And learning his horrifying origin story in Red, White and Black! We assume those things are supposed to be what’s most important about him, not whether She-Hulk thinks he’s worth a wild night at the Avengers mansion. But when it comes to, say, Catwoman, all too often it feels like those priorities are reversed. Who cares if she’s an abused wife, a prostitute, a sneak thief, or a cosmetics company executive? There’s a red bra to exhibit prominently and roof sex to be had!

I’m not saying that superheroes shouldn’t be sex objects, or that people of all genders and sexual orientations don’t have a right to some aesthetic appreciation. Chris Evans’ abs in Captain America are literally and figuratively a work of art. But it’s revealing how weird things we accept as normal sound when we move them to a different context, or when we turn different kinds of people from subjects into objects.

The bridge is yours.

-Kara Walker forever: “I think there are many open-ended questions that artists can pose and we can ask communities to feel empowered enough to reply, respond, rebel, and feel amazed by the relentless spiraling of thought and image and action that is the artist’s profession.”

-I like that the Facebook IPO is going to make at least one artist rich, even if he sounds a bit obnoxious.

-If we’re getting a revival in 90′s black sitcom stars, I demand a Living Single reunion.

-Batmobiles: covered by copyright law.

-S.E.K.’s posts on cinematic claustrophobia are really good.

If any of y’all are interested, I’ll be on Minnesota Public Radio for an hour starting at 12 p.m. EST with some other lovely folks talkin’ Sundance. You can stream along here.

I was looking through Business Insider’s list of female-lead movie franchises, and I noticed some interesting—and not particularly encouraging—numbers.

First, a lot of these franchises tend to trend downward, with subsequent entries making less money than the initial movies. These aren’t necessarily Bond-like franchises, in other words, with story and action potential that can last years. They’re Hollywood wringing diminishing returns out of once-promising ideas. Bridget Jones Diary made $281,929,795 at the box office, but Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason made slightly less, pulling in $262,520,724. Underworld started at $298,376,455; Underworld: Evolution brought in $111,340,801; a Kate Beckinsale-less Underworld: Rise of the Lycans made $91,327,197; and it remains to be seen how the fourth movie, currently in theaters, ends up performing. Jamie Lee Curtis only really starred in the first two Halloween movies: the initial installment made $60 million worldwide while the sequel brought in $25 million. The Scream movies stayed relatively flat, making $173,046,663, $172,363,301, and $161,834,276 for the movies with the original cast. And the Scary Movie films had a more uneven trajectory, making $278,019,771, $141,220,678, $220,673,217, and $178,262,620, respectively.

The Resident Evil movies are an exception to the trend, as is the Alien franchise. The former saw its box office go from $102.4 million, to $129.3 million, to $147.7 million, to $296.2 million. It’s no surprise that a fifth movie is in the works. The Alien franchise started out with $104,931,801 in its first go at the box office, rising to $131,060,248, $159,773,545 and $161,295,658 by Alien: Resurrection. Given the hype around Prometheus, I’d be curious to see if it’s the most successful of the series.

Now, it’s not that all big franchises starring men show consistent growth, but they do tend to have generally upward trajectories. Spider-Man 3, Iron Man 2, Mission Impossible IV, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, to name the most recent entries in some of the biggest current male-centered franchises, have all ended up pulling higher box office than the movies in the franchises that preceded them.

But the real worrying point is how much lower the box office threshhold is for these women-anchored franchises than for ones starring men. The only movie franchise starring women that’s even in the box office leagues of these superhero movies is the Twilight franchise, which has the advantage of being based on an existing property (the same is true for superhero movies, though there are probably not as many hard-core Iron Man readers as there are Stephenie Meyer devotees). Maybe the lesson Hollywood should take is that we need some superheroine movies, or to start dipping into the well of books with large female readerships. Though not if they’re going to be sloppy ways of trying to force Katherine Heigel on us, yet again. Don’t think you snuck One For the Money by us.

When we talk about folks downloading copyrighted material outside of legal channels, much of the debate centers around whether or not the downloaders were ever potential consumers. If they are potential consumers who are just choosing not to pay for content, then the question becomes how to deter people who do have the disposable income to pay for things they want to watch or listen to. If we’re assuming that downloaders are not and will never be potential paying customers under current circumstances, then the question becomes which circumstances could induce them to become paying customers. And the circumstances we talk about changing usually involve bringing prices down.

But I wonder if there’s another subset of piracy (again, I think we’ll never get to piracy zero and it’s not productive to aim for that goal) that’s worth considering: downloading that’s driven by the unavailability of material due to staggered international air dates and failure to consider what prices are viable in international markets. I think it’s quite smart of ABC and the creative folks involved in The River (including one Mr. Steven Spielberg) to make sure that the show will be available to UK audiences via iTunes the same time it’ll be available to American audiences in the same format. It’s not the same thing as having a coordinated domestic and international air date, which I think would be preferable in terms of preventing piracy, though riskier in terms of aggregating ratings, would take a long time to set up, and wouldn’t be possible for all shows. But it does mean that folks in the UK have a legal, timely, fairly priced way to get a show that denies them any and all fig leaves to hide behind about torrenting it instead.

Similarly, it’s probably worth considering differential pricing for content in different international markets. If 68 percent of software in Russia is pirated, along with 82 percent of music in Mexico and 90 percent of movies in India, that may be an indicator of a different cultural attitude towards piracy. But it’s also probably worth trying to determine at which prices people in those countries would buy those content through legal channels. Could that create a reverse-piracy problem where customers in developing markets who were paying for content previously try to take advantage of lower prices available elsewhere, or move to piracy? Maybe, though it might simply be too much hassle relative to the savings and quality. In any case, it’s probably worth trying to figure out a mixed strategy that monetizes the content we make here at home and abroad. If piracy is a customer service problem, it’s not just about the needs of American customers.

We’ll start on Friday, February 10. Let’s read Chapters 1 and 2 and get ready to discuss.