Director Chris Weitz didn’t just make one of the best movies of 2011 with his tender exploration of the lives of undocumented immigrants, A Better Life. The process of making the film turned him into a dedicated advocate for immigration reform, reconnecting with his Mexican heritage and studying Spanish and economics so he can be a more effective advocate. And now Weitz has taken his experience in fiction and turned it to fact, directing a series of immigration reform ads pegged to Alabama’s insanely restrictive immigration law, for a coalition of groups that includes the Center for American Progress. I think this one is my favorite:

The whole campaign is doing a very good job of showing the harm that restrictive immigration laws cause to non-immigrants, whether they’re older white men who are close friends with undocumented families or black Alabamans who see hatred of immigrants as part of the unfulfilled promise of the Civil Rights movement. So-called special interests have such wider reach than we often acknowledge.

Before he became an MSNBC host, Lawrence O’Donnell spent seven years as a writer and, eventually, executive producer on the West Wing. So it’s surprising that one of the key writers behind a show that’s liberal canon agrees that President Bartlet isn’t a progressive hero. As O’Donnell told ThinkProgress in a phone interview yesterday, “It used to drive me nuts when people would simply and offhandedly refer to him as a liberal president. … It would just be ‘oh he told off the religious right.’ Who gives a fuck? Tell me, what was the bill? What was the law?”

Indeed, O’Donnell was pessimistic about liberalism’s prospects throughout the conversation. He always “kinda assumed” the West Wing’s writers “knew this guy was not a liberal” because he said the show was committed to painting a realistic portrait of what is possible in American politics, and “there was no known equation in which a liberal becomes President of the United States.”

As evidence of this point, that only Democrats tainted by a streak of conservatism can become president, O’Donnell cited presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s decision to fly home to Arkansas to personally oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a death row inmate who self-lobotomized himself in a failed suicide attempt that left him unable to even understand what it meant to be executed. When prison guards arrived to escort him to the death chamber, Rector told them that he was saving the pecan pie from his last meal “for later.”

President Bartlet came from a very different state than President Clinton. As the former governor of New Hampshire, Bartlet would have presided over a state where the death penalty was technically legal, but has not actually been carried out since 1939. As such, the first time Bartlet had to decide whether to offer a last minute reprieve to a condemned man came in the Oval Office, and it ends with Bartlet confessing to his priest that he lacked the political courage to do so:

O’Donnell’s pessimism was at its apex when he discussed his process behind writing this scene. “When I proposed a death penalty episode…the backstory that I wrote in my head for this president is that he pandered on the death penalty, just like every Democrat who doesn’t believe in it, in order to get elected president. And he was from a state where he never had to use the death penalty anyway.”

If anything, however, O’Donnell describes a West Wing writers’ room that was even more pessimistic than the facts on the ground required. We asked why Bartlet did not at least fight to enact a prescription drug plan for seniors or major immigration reform, both of which were realistic enough goals that they were attempted (in the first case, successfully) by President Bush. O’Donnell questioned whether Bush’s rare flirtations with progressivism were really grounds for optimism — Bush’s Medicare expansion, O’Donnell emphasized, was poorly designed. This is certainly true, but if a conservative like President Bush was willing to fight for a Medicare expansion that was not paid for, surely it would not have pushed the bounds of realism for President Bartlet to at least try to enact a similar expansion and also pay for it.

Ultimately, O’Donnell agreed that the West Wing writers’ room was a little too pessimistic about our politics’ potential to reach above the moment and achieve something transformative. When asked if Barack Obama — who actually did fight (and occasionally, win) major battles on health care, immigration, economic policy and the environment — is a better president than Josiah Bartlet, O’Donnell was unequivocal. “Of course. Incomparable. Of course.” And then he went further: “The West Wing writers room would not have come up with the idea of running a presidential campaign in which an African-American gets elected. Because the realism view would have said that’s not possible. And I say that with no disrespect for the creative process, but rather with a greater respect and awe for the real world. … We are lucky enough to live in a country in which our politics in 2008 soared above the creative imagination of its fiction writers.”

Joel McHale’s confirmed that, whenever Community comes back, “someone you’ve seen a lot” will die in the show. This seems like a good decision: I think the show’s done a good job with its younger characters this season in terms of both giving them emotional stakes and moving them towards figuring out what their adult selves will be like. But the older characters feel a little stagnant. Shirley’s relationship with her husband, the impetus for her to go back to school in the first place, has been resolved. Pierce is settled as a static character. And Jeff’s quest to get back to being a lawyer feels like it’s stagnated, but it’s not clear if it’s because he doesn’t actually want to go back to his own life or if he’s stuck. A death, if done right, could shake things up a bit. But who is the show going to kill? I can think of a couple of candidates:

Leonard: This would be the lowest-impact choice. Leonard is the oldest character on the show, and perhaps the most peripheral of the minor characters. It would be relatively easy for him to pass away of natural causes, and for it to be low-impact and touching. Person most likely to be affected by his death: Pierce, for whom Leonard’s been a hook for anxieties about his age before.

Neil: Neil’s suicidal impulses were the basis for perhaps the best episode Community’s ever done based on a peripheral character, “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.” That means we’ve got an emotional hook into his continued survival. And if he died, it would lend a dose of darkness to the college experience—and the show’s been very good when it’s accessed that unexaggerated pain, as it did in “Mixology Certification.” Person most likely to be affected by his death: Jeff, who was the architect of Neil’s inability to get a clean slate at Greendale.

Professor Ian Duncan: He is a rather impressive alcoholic, and his role in the show’s been so reduced that I can see them getting rid of him to shed salary. Person most likely to be affected by his death: Again, Jeff, for whom it would be a reminder that Greendale isn’t an escape: it’s a trap, if he really wants to live the life he says he’s committed to.

Vaughn. Or Rich. Or both: They’re both so annoying. And maybe Community could kill them off in a goofy accident involving City College. Person most likely to be affected by their deaths: Annie. Who maybe would react to the deaths of both of her college boyfriends and flirtations by finally having things happen with Jeff.

There’s something refreshingly honest in two takes by conservative commentators on the behavior of young and youngish people at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Erick Erickson laments the lines of young men queued up to buy condoms, and the trend he sees in men coming to the conference with the goal of having casual sex:

They risk dragging the whole affair down to some bawdy, rowdy distraction. They risk embarrassing themselves and the conservative movement. They risk the perception premised on their own actions that conservative men of a certain age think that good manners and decorum around women of the same age is unneeded or unwanted. This is not to say CPAC cannot and should not be fun. This is not to say that CPAC cannot and should not be a party. But it is to say that I hope the college groups bussing in students next year, the out of college set there to network, and CPAC itself encourage behavior we all too often don’t talk about anymore in our society — the behavior of gentlemen. Eat, drink, smoke, be merry, but be chivalrous too. There really is, regardless of your age, no need to play the cad at CPAC to score points with conservative ladies.

And Melissa Clouthier takes her sisters in the movement to task for how they dressed and presented themselves:

Women will be future leaders, too, and I was dismayed to see how many of them either looked frumpish or like two-bit whores. First, are these young people being taught anything by their parents? I was at another service-oriented gathering of young women where the girls were in tight bandeau-skirts (you know, the kind of tube-top skirts that hookers wear on street corners?). They were sitting with their mothers. What is going on here?…I cannot even tell you how many girls have told me that all they want is to get married and have babies. They do not seem to make the connection that a young man is not interested in getting married and making babies with a girl who is so easy as to have a one-night stand over a CPAC weekend (or any other weekend.)

If there’s one thing I agree with conservatives about, it’s this: conservatism’s survival as a modern family-values movement depends less on passing policies that restrict the sexual and reproductive rights of Americans and more on building an alternative cultural framework and narrative, and convincing people to actually base their lives on its tenets. This is an effort that tends to work well in closed communities. It’s much easier to, for example, choose not to have sex until you’re married if you’re surrounded by people who are making that same choice, and who are providing reinforcement that such a decision is not only moral, but will provide you with the most benefit. The idea that waiting to have sex will make sex better because you’ll have reserves of the hormone oxytocin are part of arguing that making a conservative lifestyle choice will actually yield better results.

Events like CPAC are disconcerting because they suggest that the movement is doing poorly at selling conservative ideals of sexual ethics on a broad scale. Whether the conference has consciously tried to cultivate a party vibe or not, it’s clearly no longer an environment that reinforces values like chastity, conservative self-presentation through family, and dating as a pursuit of marriage. And of course that’s disconcerting to commentators like Erickson and Clouthier. It’s utterly unsustainable for conservatives to govern one way and live another if they truly want a society based on their stated and legislated values. But calling women sluts and exhorting men to be gentleman seems unlikely to bring the two back into alignment.

Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm hadn’t planned to make cable news her next career move after leaving office. But when former Vice President Al Gore called her up and asked Granholm to help fill out the prime time lineup at Current TV, she couldn’t resist. Before her show, The War Room, launched on January 31, Granholm promised to use her experience delivering talking points to call out politicians who try to sell them to the American public. I spoke with her about what her time in public service lets her bring to the cable news environment, why Fox, MSNBC, and CNN called on men rather than women to discuss President Obama’s contraception rule, and which guests she’d love to land. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Before you started your television show, what holes had you identified in the media that you wanted to fill? What really turned you off or dissatisfied you that you wanted to avoid?

Well, I wasn’t planning on doing a show. So I was called by Al Gore at Current here, and they wanted to build out their primetime lineup. So it’s only after that that I began thinking about what could be done in primetime that wasn’t already being done by others. One benefit I bring is that I have served. I was governor of the state with the toughest economy in the country for the last 10 years. The economy is the most important issue in this debate. And I know most of the candidates, Gov. Mitt Romney, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Gov. Mike Huckabee. I’ve served with them, I know what they’re doing in their states, and I can peel back the curtain. On both politics and policy, I can describe wht it’s like to be in the war room, to be preparing for debates.

One of the things you mentioned at the Television Critics Association is that you’d bring to the table the ability to see when politicians are delivering talking points and calling them out on it.

I’ve delivered so many talking point [that] I recognize when it’s happening. Maybe you’re not going to be able to get them to answer honestly, because they’re on a script, but I can identify for people what’s really going on behind the scenes. Having been there, I know exactly what’s going on. Calling them out if you can’t even get them to answer the question is important.

You seem to be part of a new generation of cable journalists who are bringing non-journalism experience to the networks, like Melissa Harris-Perry at MSNBC. Do you think this is a lasting trend? And what impact does it have on coverage?

I hope it’s not a blip. [It lets viewers understand] why is something just happened, not just that it’s happening. If Current wanted an anchor, I’m the last person they would hire. I think that’s interesting to viewers. They want to know what’s behind the curtain. They want to know the inside scoop. And that’s true whether that’s someone bringing the historical perspective, or someone like Lawrence O’Donnell, who worked [in various capacities] inside the Beltway.

Some of your coworkers have suggested that viewers are looking for a channel that’s bluntly progressive, and maybe even a little angry. Do you agree? And how do you fit into that equation?

We’re obviously a brand-new network, so we hope that it will translate into viewership. What Current brings is no need to have this false moral equivalency that other networks require. It’s interesting to have people on both sides of the issue that you want to get to the bottom of things. But to pretend that the president is just as culpable for not getting something done as people who went to Washington for the purpose of obstructionism, that is a false equivalency. Call them out on it. That is something that we have the freedom to be able to do because we don’t have owners who want a “fair and balanced” approach. You need to be fair, but you don’t need to be balanced.
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The bridge is yours.

-This is a pretty plausible explanation for why CBS does so well.

-Louis C.K. starts a movement.

-Jonny Lee Miller is Sherlock Holmes because why not?

-Chernobyl as horror movie.

-And the streak continues:

We talk a lot about the tendency of the entertainment industry to homogenize people, particularly women. If you don’t have the right height-to-weight proportions, your skin doesn’t fall in the approved shade range, or your features aren’t a particular kind of symmetrical, good luck finding work. But what we don’t talk about as often—because it doesn’t happen nearly as often—is what happens when Hollywood has to deal with characters, or with actual people, who are just not conventionally attractive.

In recent days, production stills for HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones have been circulating that include our first look at Brienne of Tarth. For folks not familiar with the franchise at all, or who haven’t read the books but have seen the first season, Brienne is a female knight. And not just any female knight: she’s an exceptionally clever and strong warrior. But she’s also the rare female character in popular culture who is unambiguously plain. I’m not talking about the standard Hollywood construction of the pretty-ugly girl who just needs to lose her glasses a la Rachel Leigh Cook in She’s All That or her unfortunate presentation like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. She’s not a character who is “unconventionally pretty” but who retains a certain core attractiveness that just needs to be recognized by the right, unsnobby people. Brienne isn’t someone who doesn’t know she’s pretty and requires a makeover to see herself clearly. She’s just not attractive. George R.R. Martin leaves essentially no wiggle room in the text for Hollywood to magically transform Brienne into a supermodel, and I appreciate that HBO didn’t try. As Brienne, Gwendoline Christie may not be quite as unattractive as Martin makes her out to be, but she looks powerful and dignified in a way that’s authentic to the book. It’ll be very interesting to see how much HBO’s adaptation includes the constant degradation, including persistent threats of rape, that Brienne faces both because she’s a female knight who is better than men at what she does, and because she’s an unattractive woman who has sexual desires.

It was fascinating to contrast that presentation with how The Voice treated Sarah Golden, a contestant who joined Cee Lo Green’s team in Monday night’s blind auditions. The show made a huge deal of Sarah’s anxieties about her appearance, and the chances she thinks she hasn’t gotten because of how she looks. In fact, the cutting stayed away from her face for so long, something they haven’t done with any other contestant, I was convinced the producers were going to reveal that she had some sort of disfiguring birthmark or major scarring. Instead, Golden turns out not to have any malformation or hideousness: she’s just a plain, non-supermodel, woman, one who might even come across as a cute butch lesbian (the show hasn’t told us anything about her sexual orientation) if that’s the way she’s coding herself. It was a bizarre attempt to gin up some drama that ended up acting as a reminder of an unfortunate truth: that if you’re not pretty, Hollywood and society are not always particularly kind.

There’s an obvious gender differential at work here: there are a lot more conventionally unattractive men who work regularly in Hollywood than conventionally plain women. And while Game of Thrones also has a male character, Tyrion Lannister, whose life is dramatically shaped by the fact that he doesn’t look like everyone thinks he’s supposed to, it’s the rare franchise that deals as much with looks-based discrimination against men and male body anxiety as much as it does women’s experiences of those issues. Perhaps Hollywood would be less fascinated in an anthropological way with the issues faced by women who don’t fit a very narrow mold if they didn’t do so much to form and strengthen that mold in the first place.

I’ve written before about Political Animals, the USA Network that’s a thinly-veiled retelling of Hillary Clinton’s journey from First Lady to Secretary of State. Now, we’ve got some new plot information about the show: while we knew before it would be in part about a First Family, the Secretary of State is going to be divorced from her former-President husband. So for all of those folks who admire Hillary Clinton but can’t understand why she didn’t kick Bill and his cheatin’ heart (among other things) to the curb years and mistresses ago, this show may be the chance for you to live out your fantasy.

Whether Political Animals works at all will hinge on who ends up playing the FLOTUS-turned-Secretary of State. I adore Judith Light, who is a year younger than Hillary and can also rock the hell out of her haircut, and would love to get her back on television, so she’d be my vote. Greg Berlanti, who created Political Animals, hasn’t had a hit in a while, but he at least exhibited some creative thinking in Jack & Bobby, a futuristic reimagining of the childhoods of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. Lots of details remain, but I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.

This post contains spoilers through the February 14 episode of Justified.

Despite the fact that Dewey spent much of this episode running around convinced that he’d lost his kidneys and Raylan shot a woman—”I can’t believe you shot me,” she protested before dying. “I can’t believe so either,” a drug-befuddled Raylan told her—it struck me as a warm and loving episode of the show, as close as Justified will ever get to doing a Valentine’s Day-themed episode.

First, let’s take Raylan and Winona. He’s coming home late to her, but he’s developed, if not a feminist consciousness about how little work he’s doing to get ready for their new life, a conscience about it. “Seriously. You’re seven weeks pregnant. Ready to move. I haven’t done anything to line up a place for us. I’m just out there running and gunning,” he castigates himself. I’m almost sorry Winona lets him off the hook, telling him, “Alright, you’ve convinced me. I’m angry, but I’m still not going to fight with you. I’m done thinking that I could change you. And I’m done trying to convince myself that I could ever feel about anyone the way I feel about you.” But it’s interesting to see Raylan seriously consider changing his life on his own, and not because, as Art suggested, his woman is just telling him that he should. Fatherhood is a serious thing, and I’m glad the show respects Raylan, and us, enough to show him doing some independent thinking on the subject.

Then, there’s Raylan relationship with Dewey, which ends up being critical to finding the man who cut him up. Dewey’s misadventure is as tragicomic an exploration of the changing mechanisms of American commerce as anything I’ve ever seen on television. Who knew the rise of credit cards could put such a hit on small-timers? “I don’t have time for that! I need cash! Where do people use cash?” he wails to the appliance store salesman, before complaining to a stripper that “Don’t tell me guys pay you by credit card? I saw some girl on television who said she could make $3,000 a night on the pole. Given she’s a nine and you’re a six if I’m feeling generous, but I figured you’d be good for a grand or so!” “It’s 10 o’clock in the morning,” one of the girls points out. Dewey reminds me of the characters on Raising Hope, to a certain extent: he’s not very smart, and he does some bad things, but he’s not unworthy of our affection, or Raylan’s. I thought the single line by the cop that “He’s your fugitive. Knock yourself out,” was a lovely summation of the reasons Raylan is both successful and entangled here in Harlan.

And speaking of entanglements, gosh do we have a lot of them coming at us. First, it’s clear that Limehouse kept Mags’ money—and it’s less clear that he can keep his people on lockdown. “The only way I can see him finding out from this end is if someone were to tell him,” he declares of Dickie Bennett. “I’ll stop him. Besides, I heard they fixing to send him back to Trambell.” Then, Quarles first attempt at forging an alliance with Boyd gets him a lecture about Carpetbaggers’ history in Harlan, which is not uniformly positive. But it’s hard to imagine he’ll leave satisfied with a bourbon.