The numbers for The Voice have been big over the past couple of days, even without the boost from the Super Bowl: 17.7 million viewers tuned in last night, and a 6.6 rating among the coveted adults between the ages of 18 to 49. It makes sense that the show is doing well. Two episodes into its second season, The Voice is improving on its strengths, providing a real debate about American popular music.

Because the judges actually have to compete against each other, the candidates are doing something smart: in cases where more than one judge turns their chair around, they’re actually asking questions. They want to know why the judges were compelled by their singing. They’re curious as to whether the judges think they should stick within a genre and build a strong identity there or try to transcend it. Blake Shelton’s been winning candidates over by appealing to the ones who truly want to be country stars, while Adam Levine and Cee Lo Green have been pitching themselves as coaches who don’t want to see their artists get limited. The judges’ answers aren’t as good as the candidates’ questions yet, but I hope that’s something that they’ll improve on over time. And the fact that those conversations are happening at all are an encouraging thing for people like yours truly who have everything from OutKast to Toby Keith in their playlists and who want to see these genres in conversation. Because they already are, whether American Idol acknowledges it or not.

Do we still need more of that stylistic diversity represented on the stage? Of course. But I like that there’s a singer with opera training on Christina’s team, and I’m holding out hope, as Cee Lo promised me at TCA press tour, that we’re going to get an MC, too. If The Voice can walk the line between increasing the stylistic diversity of its singers without tipping over into novelty act territory, it’ll just become a more interesting show. And now that we’re over the initial novelty of seeing superstars woo contestants, the show will only get better as those competitions get more fierce and specific.

I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that we’re seeing a crop of global-warming related pop culture projects. And now, J.J. Abrams and the Weather Channel are getting in the game as well. Abrams just sold a drama to NBC, which seems to be betting big on science fiction, about “a group of characters struggling to survive and reunite with loved ones in a world where all forms of energy have mysteriously ceased to exist.” (Energy, of course, is not the same thing as fossil fuels: if all forms of energy cease to exist, so will life.)And the Weather Channel is getting into the unscripted space with Turbine Cowboys, a show about the workers who maintain wind power turbines in dangerous conditions.

Both of these are intriguing concepts. The Abrams show is the kind of after-the-disaster thinking that I’m always interested in, though I’ll be more compelled by the concept if the characters have some sort of alternative energy source they’re trading or manufacturing. People may get far along on an irreversible decline before trying to find solutions, but unless Abrams is pushing the reset button on society, if energy sources just vanish suddenly, I bet someone, somewhere is keeping the lights on, or at least trying really hard. Americans do love their appliances. And testing the depth of our attachment to them, and to our sense of instantaneous interconnectivity could be a really interesting project. A show that’s as much about what energy lets us do as that as the specific sources that power our desires could personalize the energy crisis beyond gas prices.

Turbine Cowboys is, of course, set in a more familiar future. But I think it’s a smart move to personalize—and glamorize—people who work in the new energy economy. I think the left does a good job of selling outcomes, but given that a lot of the work we’re talking about is hard organizing work that requires a generational timeline, we need to glamorize process, too. I’m not saying that the work of turning over to new sources of energy requires as much epic courage as sitting through being assaulted at a lunch counter. But if we’re going to valorize auto workers, we could valorize the folks at old U.S. Steel plants who are building wind turbines. And if we’re going to make heroes out of Dutch Harbor fishermen, surely we can make heroes out of the folks who are trying to make sure our energy sources are sustainable.

If you’ve ever doubted that popular culture influences public opinion and public policy, it’s worth reading today’s decision by Judge Reinhardt striking down Proposition 8, California’s equal marriage rights ban. In it, Reinhardt looks at popular culture across time to trace the particular meaning that marriage has for us, and to explain why the alternatives states have tried to offer gay couples simply aren’t as resonant or powerful to us:

We are excited to see someone ask, “Will you marry me?”, whether on bended knee in a restaurant or in text splashed across a stadium Jumbotron. Certainly it would not have the same effect to see “Will you enter into a registered domestic partnership with me?”. Groucho Marx’s one-liner, “Marriage is a wonderful institution…but who wants to live in an institution?” would lack its punch if the word ‘marriage’ were replaced with the alternative phrase. So too with Shakespeare’s “A young man married is a man that’s marr’d,” Lincoln’s “Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory,” and Sinatra’s “A man doesn’t know what happiness is until he’s married. By then it’s too late.” We see tropes like “marrying for love” versus “marrying for money” played out again and again in our films and literature because of the recognized importance and permanence of the marriage relationship. Had Marilyn Monroe’s film been called How to Register a Domestic Partnership with a Millionaire, it would not have conveyed the same meaning as did her famous movie, even though the underlying drama for same-sex couples is no different. The name ‘marriage’ signifies the unique recognition that society gives to harmonious, loyal, enduring, and intimate relationships.

The long-established tropes of popular culture, in other words, help shape our special understanding of marriage. And the weight and persistence of those tropes is part of the reason that creating alternatives to marriage doesn’t work: they don’t carry the same legal rights and responsibilities, and they don’t have the same cultural heft, and can’t for a very, very long time. Representation in culture, in other words, affects the way people and institutions are represented and protected in reality.

I also think it’s worth noting that Proposition 8 prompted a vigorous cultural response as well as a legal one. The No H8 campaign acquired such cachet that participation became near-mandatory in Hollywood, posing for it became a plot point on reality shows, and even Cindy McCain hopped on board in 2010, a clear case of cultural cachet trumping party loyalty. Milk, the Academy Award-winning biopic of slain City Supervisor Harvey Milk was released in the Castro to rally support against Proposition 8, a development that likely contributed to Sean Penn’s Best Actor victory in the role, and Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black followed up that movie with 8, a play about the legal challenge to the law that’s become a key tool in celebrity marriage quality fundraisers.

And I think it’s no surprise in the post-Proposition 8 era, we’ve seen an explosion of pop culture depictions of gay California couples, whether it’s Mitch and Cam on Modern Family, to Jules and Nic in The Kids are All Right, to Brady and Cheeks on webseries Husbands. These characters deserve the right to marry because they’re citizens who ought to be entitled to the rights and responsibilities available to their straight counterparts. But these portrayals are also about establishing gay couples as part of a rich comedic and dramatic tradition of flawed people in the process of building more perfect unions.

By David Liss

Last night’s episode of Alcatraz represented a considerable step in the right conceptual direction, and even if the end result was less compelling than I would have liked, it nevertheless bodes well for the direction of the show.

We begin, as regular viewers have now come to expect, with the appearance of the psychopath of the week – though this time there is a twist. The man from 1963 who appears in modern times is not a prisoner but a guard, Guy Hastings. That is pretty much were the differences end, however, as he proceeds immediately to pummel the crap out of a park ranger and launch himself upon a crime spree.

But here is where Alcatraz starts go get things right. Hastings is directly connected to former guard Ray Archer, whom we have been told is Madsen’s “uncle” – which is to say, not really her uncle, but the family friend who raised her after her parents died. Hastings proceeds to abduct Archer because he’s looking for Tommy, Madsen’s grandfather, and the guy who killed her partner in the series opener. See, things are getting all soap-opera-like and inter-connected now. Cool, right?

Yes, but not as cool as I want it to be. Part of the problem is the by-the-numbers feeling of the episode. Another returned psycho, another abduction and ticking clock. The problem with formula is that it begins to feel, well, formulaic, if you don’t distract the audience with enough real drama. Even though Madsen is ostensibly at the center of these events, she still feels generic and uninteresting, and Jorge Garcia’s Soto is little more than an afterthought in this episode. Once again, it is the returned prisoner who is the interesting character in the story, but if this episode had more relevant contemporary drama, its flashback sequences lacked the intensity of previous weeks.
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When Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo came out last year, I was not particularly amused: it’s always seemed to me that treating the welfare of wild animals as all fun and games ignores the safety and needs of everyone involved. And now two stories about a huge private menagerie in Zanesville, Ohio where the owner let the animals lose, killed himself, and left the local authorities to try to contain a hugely dangerous situation (mostly, they had to kill the animals) have made clear precisely how un-cute this situation can be. As y’all know, I’m not particularly in favor of regulating entertainment. But when the thing that entertains you both has physical needs and can pose a danger to you, your neighbors, and itself, I find it stunning that wild animal ownership is unregulated as it is. In Esquire, Chris Jones points out that Terry Thompson’s animal ownership was less regulated than his gun poessession:

Lutz had tried for years to strip Thompson of his personal zoo, but the one animal-cruelty charge the department managed to make stick — concerning the fate of some starved cows and a buffalo — hadn’t had the desired effect. The truth was that Thompson was doing nothing illegal, at least not according to the laws of Ohio. So long as he wasn’t charging admission, he could have all the animals he wanted, virtually unregulated. But Thompson was less fortunate in his handling of another of his hoards, an arsenal of more than one hundred guns. With the assistance of the ATF, Lutz had seen Thompson charged with the possession of illegal firearms after a sting had found some with their serial numbers carefully filed off.

At GQ, Chris Heath goes into more detail on both the regulatory, cultural and ethical issues involved in what I think is a less action-movie-y but more comprehensive piece:

One of the surprising facts about owning animals like these in America right now is that while keeping them may not be cheap, buying them frequently is. Tom Stalf at the Columbus Zoo suggests to me that you can buy a lion for $300—cheaper than many pedigree dogs…Just as “good” private owners explain why they should exist and why “bad” private owners should not, sanctuaries may suggest that they should endure while private owners are phased out, and zoos can loftily assume there are clear reasons that they should be cherished while most kinds of non-zoo ownership should be frowned upon. I can see a logic in some kind of extreme libertarian position (people should be able to do what they want with animals unless they are clearly shown to be doing harm) and, conversely, in a hard-core animal-rights position (no animals should be used for any human purpose whatsoever), but the arguments for everything in between seem murky. Frequently these are based on a confident assessment of the animals’ happiness (a thorny notion), and on the pragmatic need to save animals from a place worse than where they are. (Everyone knows somewhere else worse.)

I’m not a wildlife expert, so I’m not the one to lay out a set of standards here. But I’m not clear what the argument should be for why the requirements for both animals’ and humans’ safety and well-being should be different depending on whether the animals’ owners are zoos or private individuals. In both cases, it seems like we should try to guarantee that the animals have adequate room to move around, a steady, healthy food source, and that the humans in proximity to them who are not their owners are guaranteed a level of safety. Such regulations seem like they’d end up imposing reasonable restrictions on the number of wild animals any one person could own and support. It’s one thing to say that someone has the right to take the risk that an animal who lives with them will rip them to pieces: it’s another entirely to say that their friends and neighbors have to accept being exposed to that risk.

The bridge is yours.

-It makes a lot of sense that in our multi-threat environment, American talent agencies would be going after Bollywood stars.

-The weird rationales foreign countries give for banning American movies.

-Even if La Scala’s gotten better about anorexia treatment, firing someone for blowing the whistle about what the environment used to be like there seems a tad defensive.

-Lifetime takes on the Columbine massacre. I doubt this will be as scary was We Need to Talk About Kevin.

-If Wes Anderson made Batman.

No matter how much I think the Spider-Man reboot is utterly unnecessary, I have to admit it looks like a lot of fun:

A couple of thoughts: I’m relieved that the movie is acknowledging that someone other than the scientific community, riders of random subway cars, and J. Jonah Jameson notice that a dude in a funny suit is messing with the city’s criminals. It makes sense that an escalation of tensions in the underworld that leads to massive property damage and physical fights would pop up on the NYPD’s radar and that they’d have an interest in what’s going down. Dennis Leary is great as a cantankerous, drunk, or otherwise difficult representative of city government (he is the best part of The Thomas Crown Affair remake), and he’s got the perfect mein to pull off a portrayal of a man who is personally and professionally deeply irritated by Spider-Man. If the Powers adaptation ends up not happening, at least we’ll have something.

Second, the Gwen Stacy storyline in the Spider-Man universe is awesome and heartbreaking. And if this iteration of the franchise wants to honestly grapple with superheroic hubris and the limitations of superpowers when the go up against the laws of physics and the odds, it would be wonderful if they followed that original template. Being a teenager—as well as being a depressed middle-aged billionaire—is a dark thing. And I don’t mean in a getting-infected-with-venom-and-going-to-jazz-clubs kind of way. It’d be nice to see a movie franchise that recognizes that not everyone makes it out of that period okay, and that having superpowers may increase the kinds of risks you can take, but it doesn’t mean you’re utterly protected.

I think June Thomas has a provocative argument on her hands, suggesting that Rob, however much it may make with the humping-Grandma jokes, is doing something right in putting Latinos on screen without divorcing them from their heritage, or from Latino comedic traditions:

Rosa’s brother Hector, constantly scheming to line his own pockets, is played by Eugenio Derbez, one of Mexico’s pre-eminent comedians. His clowning doesn’t appeal to me, but Derbez is bringing a Univision-esque, south-of-the-border comedy style to U.S. television. In effect, he’s facilitating another kind of assimilation.

Many of Rob’s themes were first explored in Chico and the Man, which aired between 1974 and 1978 and was the first U.S. series set in a Mexican-American neighborhood. In that show, a charismatic young Chicano (Freddie Prinze) gradually won the affections of a crabby old white guy who didn’t hate Mexicans so much as he objected to the way changing demographics were shaking up his world. It’s a little depressing that nearly 40 years after Chico was first broadcast, we’re still stuck at the “first contact” stage in our depictions of the relationships between different communities, but at least television is once again paying attention to Latinos…On Modern Family and Glee, the Latino characters are cut off from their culture. On the former, there’s a discomfiting sense that the white Pritchett family rescued the Delgados from poverty (if we believe Gloria’s tales of her early life in Colombia) and bad parenting. (When Manny’s biological father, Javier, comes to visit, Jay always has to step in to save his stepson from disappointment.) The one time someone from Santana’s birth family appeared on Glee, it was a total downer: Her abuela broke her heart by kicking her out of the house after she came out. Wizards of Waverly Place sometimes explored Mexican traditions in a bicultural Italian-Mexican family—Alex celebrated her quinceañera, for example—but the kids’ more splashy heritage (as wizards, natch) tended to dominate. At least on Rob, the focus is on Mexican-American culture.

The question, though, is whether Rob is going to be the future of Latino comedy in America, or whether it’s backfill, making up for a dearth of representations that should have been there earlier and issues that should have been worked out on-screen long before this. The numbers are undeniably good overall, though as Joe Adalian points out, they’re not great among the coveted 18-34 year-old-viewers. Among them, the Rob does only slightly better than Parks and Recreation.

It’s probably worth noting that Parks and Recreation also has a half-Latina character in the form of April Ludgate. April’s fascinating precisely because she has an evolving relationship with her heritage. She’s annoyed by the idea that she’s supposed to be so lively and colorful.” But it’s not like she’s running away from her ethnic heritage. She tries on the idea of running away to Venezuela with Eduardo and she speaks Spanish particularly when she’s upset or tipsy. It’s interesting to contrast her to Gloria on Modern Family, who I think June is wrong to say is cut off from her culture—certainly, she’s constantly citing aphorisms, traditions, and superstitions, though most of them are clearly exaggerated and made up. But unlike April, we don’t necessarily see Gloria negotiating her identity now that she and Manny are in a new setting: Gloria and Manny’s heritage is a source of punchlines more than it is a source of plot or character developments. In other words, while on Rob, the identity conflicts are between multiple characters, on Parks and Recreation, that’s a negotiation process that’s going on within a single character. First contact between whites and Latinos is the past: figuring out how Latinos and elements of Latino culture are going to fit into both individuals’ lives and American culture as a whole is the future.

It’s my sense that not enough of you are tuning in to House of Lies and Luck on a regular basis for it to make sense for us to do recaps. I’ll revisit both of those shows at the end of the season, but I’m going to make the executive decision to free up some space for the return of The Walking Dead next week.