Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched all four seasons of Sons of Anarchy. And while shotgunning the show’s episodes may not be for the faint of heart (so much grotesque violence!), it’s given me a lot to think about with the show. So every day this week, I’ll be considering another aspect of life in Charming, California. The previous posts in this series appear here and here.

While Sons of Anarchy is deeply immersed in a conversation about institutions, one of the things that distinguishes it from a show like The Wire is that it’s not equally interested in all of the interlocking institutions whose friction produces most of the show’s drama. The focus is always on the MC, and U.S. Attorneys, cops, and businessmen are only important when they wander into the frame that Kurt Sutter’s set up. That’s an interesting choice, and it means the show has, thus far, left a central question unaddressed: how do the citizens of Charming feel about the deal Police Chief Wayne Unser struck with SAMCRO? And about the presence of the MC in their midst in general?

We meet a fairly narrow band of Charming residents who have no formal involvement with the MC or their various rivals: in law enforcement, we’ve got Wayne Unser, David Hale, and Eli Roosevelt; in the business community, we’ve got Jacob Hale, Elliot Oswald, and Mrs. Roosevelt; and in the medical establishment, we have Margaret Murphy. In other words, we have no broad-based sense of how much the ordinary citizens of Charming interact with SAMCRO, or what they feel about their town’s entanglement with a deeply criminal enterprise. Do you bring you minivan to the MC’s shop if you’re a mom with engine trouble? Are you angry about crime on the fringes? Do you think the relationship is worth it to keep the drug trade away from your kids? And if it’ll create jobs and increase property values, would you support the development of Charming Heights?

The people whose perspectives we do have tend to to provide more personal insight than institutional narratives. We understand that Chief Unser is personally entangled with Gemma Teller Morrow, and that he benefits personally from his relationship with the Sons of Anarchy. But given the timing of the club’s founding and its formalized relationship with Charming law enforcement, it makes sense that Charming might have accepted SAMCRO’s protection as service cuts took a toll on California in the wake of the passage of Proposition 13, which severely limited California’s ability to raise additional tax revenue, in 1978. If Sutter does make a First Nine spinoff of Sons of Anarchy, it would be fascinating to explore how SAMCRO burrowed in to its position in Charming. It’s not just that decision that’s obscured: killing David Hale deprived the show of a legitimate counterweight to Unser’s understanding with the Sons and the opportunity to see a Charming native, who perhaps represents more mainstream citizens, work out a new relationship with SAMCRO. Eli Roosevelt’s arrival in Charming could have been an opportunity to see how the Sons responded to a law enforcement structure that wasn’t solely concerned with the crime rate in that one town. But Lincoln Potter’s arrival again derails the development of a new dynamic. I understand that having a single representative of a threat makes for more economical storytelling, but it does deny us the opportunity to see a show balanced between SAMCRO and the cops, and to fully explore the implications of that shifting relationship.
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By Tony Palumbi

On Valentine’s Day, in a bid to complicate human relationships everywhere, the eminent video game developer Bioware released the demo for Mass Effect 3. The game doesn’t drop until the first week of March, but the Texas-based company has gone against convention and released an all-out demo a full week in advance. It’s much appreciated—the developer-side and PR concerns with a demo are so huge that hardly anyone bothers—and entirely appropriate, given Bioware’s status as a throwback company. In an age when gaming seems to be roaring towards Angry Birds and other casual fare, they’ve kept their commitment to thoughtful, plot-intensive products.

Through all their success, the Mass Effect series has carried the banner. Released as an Xbox 360 exclusive with little fanfare, the original Mass Effect sold over two million copies on that console (http://www.examiner.com/video-game-in-national/mass-effect-series-sales-total-over-7-million) and benefitted from a great port to the PC. Fantasy settings are everywhere in gaming, but Mass Effect offered something rare: a serious sci-fi setting with the Hollywood-caliber visuals and voice acting to back it up. Commander Shepard, the brave hero, traveled around the galaxy setting wrongs right and learning about the coming existential threat: The Reapers, an unstoppable armada of life-hating robots.

So what about the demo? It’s evolution; the exact kind of evolution you want to see in a sequel. In the modern gaming industry, sequels are everything. A game like Mass Effect costs as much as a low-end Hollywood feature film—tens of millions. If you’re going to be hiring Seth Green and Martin Sheen for voice acting, you need to make it economically feasible. Why not hire Seth Green for three games, keep much of the same development team for three games, and plow your dollars into refining a single product your audience already believes in? Gamers lament the sequel-ization of the industry, but they buy sequels in far greater numbers than original products. To that end, the third Mass Effect game does what the second did: retain the amazing universe, expand upon it, develop characters, and make the action one HELL of a lot better.

In Mass Effect 3, combat is far less wooden and more kinetic than in the second—which improved on the now-tragic mechanics of the first game. The original Mass Effect planted an amazing seed, but it’s almost unplayable now. In the new game, Shepard’s movement is much faster and more fluid. He (or she!) can easily glide from cover to cover, sprinting and vaulting and rolling as needed to evade enemy fire. Melee attacks at close range are more important, and Shepard even has the amazing Omni-Blade for toe-curling close-range brutality. Weapons are more diverse and distinct; powers are more fun and more effective. You’ll get a chance to play through a section at the game’s start and another in its heart—in both cases, the skill trees for Shepard and his allies should get RPGers excited.

Mass Effect 2 allowed players to import their characters from the first title, which was an amazing feature that opened up a whole new level of immersion for series fans. Decisions you make in one game persist into the next; characters remember everything you’ve done. It continues into ME3, meaning that true fanatics will have to go back to the very first game for a truly “fresh” playthrough. Well played, Bioware—though it remains to be seen just how much these things affect the actual game. If there’s an entire Rachni angle for the main story, I’ll raise my glass to the folks in Austin.
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Much will inevitably be made of this study that links teenagers’ viewing of movies to the rate at which they start drinking, and start binge-drinking. It’s worth pointing out, however, that other features are more significant, most importantly, the drinking behavior of a teenager’s peers, which is almost twice as influential as movies on whether a teenager who has tried alcohol moves into binge drinking. But the study still suggests that movie exposure is responsible for 28 percent of teenagers’ decisions to first try alcohol and 20 percent of their transitions from alcohol sampling to binge drinking, which is not insignificant. And if this gains traction, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see calls to treat alcohol like tobacco, getting it increasingly off-screen or consigned to period pieces, or for a crackdown on alcohol advertising or both.

Part of the problem, I think, is that it’s much harder to portray the fun you can have while you’re drinking than the non-fatal consequences you can suffer from over-drinking. Raccoon-eyed makeup like Claire Dunphy’s in the most recent episode of Modern Family doesn’t actually convey what it’s like to feel like your head is going to explode from within, or the arid sense of extreme post-drinking dehydration. Showing someone throwing up tends to be momentary, while partying takes up more extended space on screen because it’s narrative. It’s easier to fetishize and make jokes out of the objects of alcohol consumption, like the Big Joe and Big Carl wine glasses on Cougar Town, than it is to celebrate their absence. Movies about alcoholism can absolutely be an effective prevention tactic, but that’s the kind of material you generally have to seek out rather than encountering it randomly in the course of a romantic comedy or an action movie. Sober or straight-edge characters aren’t regularly incorporated into pop culture friend groups or social scenes. Bars are convenient meeting social spaces, and they haven’t entirely been replaced by alcohol-free settings.

And it’s really hard to get at the nuances that make drinking both enjoyable and manageable. It’s hard to dramatize that process where you realize that National Light tastes terrible and you can afford Knob Creek and it tastes better, or where you have a divine meal and realize that the wine and the lamb are working together and you want to learn more about that. In the real world, drinking isn’t a matter of abstinence or addiction. But it’s a lot easier to show ecstasy and despair than this kind of aesthetic experience:

It was depressing, for a number of reasons, to hear about a comedy that ABC is putting into production called The Smart One. I love Portia di Rossi, whose wonderful comedic talent has languished since Arrested Development and Better Off Ted went off the air. But this is not an enlightening premise: “The show follows two sisters: de Rossi’s smart one and [Malin] Akerman’s dumb one. De Rossi’s character goes to work for her dimmer, but more popular sister who is a former beauty queen currently serving as the mayor of a city.” It’s especially irritating to see ABC doubling down on dumb-but-pretty stereotypes because television is actually doing a nice job with female politicians—nicer, perhaps, than our politics at large, where women remain underrepresented.

I feel like I don’t even have to spend time discussing the foremost example of this trend, Leslie Knope, the civil servant who’s running for Pawnee, Indiana City Council on Parks and Recreation. But I will say this, anyway: whatever long-time fans of the show think of Parks and Recreation’s tonal and plot problems this season, the fact that they’ve got a woman on television running for office, and are taking her anxieties about that process seriously and generally respectfully, is kind of remarkable. Leslie may make hilarious miscalculations, and things may go wrong in her campaign, but the show’s never questioned the idea that Leslie’s desire to serve is deep and genuine, and that she’d make an absolutely fantastic member of City Council. Parks and Recreation‘s contempt for the laziness, entitlement and incompetence of Bobby Newport, the vastly wealthy heir to a destructive company who is trying to buy the seat Leslie’s running for, is particularly bracing given the role that billionaires are playing in supporting the various Republican candidates in this year’s primary campaign.

By contrast, Mel Burke, the city councilwoman Melissa Joan Heart plays on ABC Family’s Melissa & Joey, is essentially Leslie Knope for the non-hipster comedy set. Like Leslie, she’s blonde, fiercely devoted to her small city, somewhat awkward with the press, and prone to lingering sexual tension, though in this case with Joey, the manny she’s hired to take care of her niece and nephew, who are living with her after her brother went to jail for a massive Ponzi scheme. A multi-camera sitcom, Melissa & Joey spends much more time in Mel’s house than in her office, and the wacky antics have more to do with the fact that she has a hunky former banker living in her basement rather than her overwhelming devotion to public service. But that doesn’t mean the show doesn’t have at least some of Parks and Recreation‘s zany sense of politics: in the first-season episode “Seoul Man,” an illegal-domestic-help scandal hit Toledo’s public servants, and it turned out Joey was born in Korea and was having trouble locating the papers establishing his citizenship. It’s nothing revolutionary, but Parks and Recreation and Melissa & Joey share a nice commitment to celebrating women in public life, and to portraying them as more competent and dedicated than the people around them even though they have more burdens and obligations to balance.

There’s no question that the new crop of political shows will have a more varied take on women in politics, and that’s a good thing. Female politicians do misspeak and get themselves int turf wars, as Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character on Veep does. Inconvenient romances happen in Washington in real life as they do—though perhaps not to the same extent—as they will on ABC’s other political show debuting this spring, Scandal. But it’s one thing to give women in politics complexity and texture. And quite another to have it be hilarious that they’re only there because they’re hot, and voters are too dumb to care that they have no other qualifications.

The bridge is yours.

-It’s quite odd that Sarah Palin’s team thinks media ethics dictate they’d get script approval of Game Change.

-From the WWE to VOD in China.

-Hollywood gets behind Elizabeth Warren.

-How Eminem’s lawsuit could change our understanding of digital purchases—and artists’ takes.

-Footage from Pixar’s newest short, La Luna, which will debut in front of Brave:

Last weekend, after a comedown in Knicks guard Jeremy Lin’s performance after a spectacular series of breakout games, Anthony Federico, an editor for ESPN’s mobile site, working a late shift, published a headline about the game that included the phrase “chink in the armor.” Shortly thereafter, ESPN pulled the headline, and Federico was dismissed. He’s since issued a pained apology. A week earlier, in reference to Lin’s strong performance, Fox Sports commentator Jason Whitlock (who is African-American), tweeted “Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple of inches of pain tonight,” a crude joke that played on stereotypes about Asians and penis size. He’s since apologized, saying:

I’ve cried watching Tiger Woods win a major golf championship. Jeremy Lin, for now, is the Tiger Woods of the NBA. I suspect Lin makes Asian Americans feel the way I feel when I watch Tiger play golf. I should’ve realized that Friday night when I watched Lin torch the Lakers. For Asian Americans and a lot of sports fans, his nationally televised 38-point outburst was the equivalent of Tiger’s first victory in The Masters. I got caught up in the excitement. I tweeted about what a great story Lin is and how he could rival Tim Tebow. I then gave in to another part of my personality — my immature, sophomoric, comedic nature.

But Fox hasn’t suspended or censured him.

To an extent, the difference between Federico’s punishment and Whitlock’s lack thereof makes sense. Federico was an editor writing headlines that spoke for the entire ESPN team, while Whitlock is an analyst who was speaking only for himself. Federico’s error called into question both ESPN procedures and his own ability to follow them, and it was in contravention of a memo ESPN had sent out earlier asking staff to be considerate of how Lin was portrayed. Fox may have internal Twitter policies, but staff feeds are outside of the Fox editorial process.

But I tend to think Whitlock’s sin is worse. Federico was using a common phrase that would have been appropriate, if cliche, in other circumstances, but happens, when applied to Lin, to be racist. It’s bewildering to me that in this day and age that anyone wouldn’t know that “chink” is a racist epithet for Asian people, but if the term is really so uncommon that it’s new to folks, that’s a good thing. Whitlock, on the other hand, reached for one of the stupider, more immature things he could possibly say in the course of providing analysis, the thing he is theoretically paid to do. If we’re going to condemn people for being cliche as well as racist, Whitlock’s sins on both counts seem graver. But brand name commentators will always be harder to remove than editors working the late shift.

When Chris Brown, who in 2009 beat his then-girlfriend Rihanna on the way to a Grammys pre-party, got two performing slots at this year’s awards show, objecting to his presence there was relatively uncomplicated. His crime was relatively recent, and Brown seemed to have little sense that he’d done something wrong, throwing temper tantrums when asked about his assault in interviews and acting as if his Grammy win was a rebuke to the people who were unfairly judging him. And suggesting that he shouldn’t be given a high-profile spot, much less two, at the Grammys was a way of rooting for, or siding with, Rihanna. But in the time since, events have guaranteed that the state of their relationship will be a continued story—and suggested how complicated it’s going to be to find a way to talk about it productively.

First, the news broke that Rihanna had asked Brown to her birthday party. Then, she released a remix of her latest song, “Birthday Cake,” featuring Brown. If the pair aren’t dating again, it’s clear that Brown is back in Rihanna’s life. Which puts those of us who would rather not see folks in his industry bestowing their most advantageous opportunities on Brown rather than someone who didn’t beat a fellow artist so badly she couldn’t perform when she was allotted one of those slots, in a position of not being on the same page as the woman we’d really like to be supporting.

This is not an uncommon dynamic, of course. As Jaclyn Friedman points out, women who are trying to leave their abusers tend to go back, a lot, before they finally decide to either stay or leave for good. The dilemma between wanting to respect a woman as an independent agent while also being worried for her is not one that’s unique to celebrities. And it’s not a problem that anyone’s come up with a fool-proof solution for, or we’d be a lot better at helping women leave the men who abuse them, be they famous or simply our friends.

One sure way not to move the conversation in anything like a productive direction, though, is to challenge Chris Brown to a fight. Which is what C.M. Punk, a professional wrestler, decided it would be a productive thing to do. There’s really no circumstance in which a white man talking about curb stomping a black man is an elevating threat. And whatever Chris Brown needs, it’s emphatically not a beating. Punk could take a note from retired pro wrestler Mick Foley, who’s become an amazing advocate for victims of sexual assault. This isn’t about completing a cycle of retribution. And it’s not about teaching people about who it is or isn’t honorable to fight.

Mos Def, performing under his Yasiin Bey stage name, took a shot at turning “Ni**as in Paris,” the most recent single off Kanye West and Jay-Z’s joint album Watch the Throne, into a piece of biting social commentary:

I don’t necessarily think that “Ni**as in Paris,” which is pretty obviously about the distorting influence of wealth, needed a socially conscious-remix as an antidote. That said, the riffs on the original are pretty funny, turning a bathroom hook up into a parody of Cosby-like concern with how young black men present themselves; a joke about lesbians into a commentary on fast food and diabetes; and I pretty much lost it at “Prince Williams ain’t do it right if you ask me / If I was him I’d put some black up in my family.” I’m less compelled by the slightly apocalyptic stuff towards the end, but it’s a pretty comprehensive and clever inversion of the song.

And it’s also part of a noble semi-tradition of other rappers poking Kanye and Jay-Z about their politics. Kanye may have gone socially-conscious on his remix of his own song, “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” but the line that everyone remembers from that song is Jay-Z declaring that “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” It took Lupe Fiasco to drop actual knowledge about the history of the contemporary diamond trade and talk jewelry depreciation: