Oh, do I sympathize with Emily Blunt here:

Usually the female parts in a superhero film feel thankless: She’s the pill girlfriend while the guys are whizzing around saving the world. I didn’t do the other ones because the part wasn’t very good or the timing wasn’t right, but I’m open to any kind of genre if the part is great and fun and different and a challenge in some way. I would love to do a comic-book movie or a science-fiction film that would scare the bejesus out of me. Maybe I need to be James Bond! I just did Looper, because it’s so original and breathtakingly cool. The time-travel aspect is just a backdrop to visit this heightened world, where you’re atoning for something and attempting to be more than you’ve been.

I actually thought Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique in X-Men: First Class was a considerable improvement on this score: she got to be angry, and to make choices, and to have messy feelings about her looks and sexuality. And the way the part was written, it had lovely resonances with her character’s abandonment by Magneto in X-Men: The Last Stand. And oh do I have hopes for The Avengers, if Joss Whedon can resist killing off or emotionally torturing Black Widow or Maria Hill. But if your’e an intelligent female actress, most superhero movies—and most action movies, for that matter—have nothing to offer you other than a paycheck. And if you can afford to turn down one paycheck in favor of another, why take work that’s thankless, and that you have little to no hope of elevating?

The whole thing actually reminds me of the insanity of awards-season dresses. If talented and famous actors were more willing to turn down or not read for work that bored them because they can make a living on the interesting stuff, Hollywood might become a more thoughtful, creative place in a jiffy. But it’s far easier for the industry to distract people with large checks and shiny cars than to embrace creative risk-taking, even risks that seem like they’d have a decent shot at paying off.

I quite liked Awake, NBC’s beautifully-shot and subtly-acted new show about a cop, Detective Michael Britten (a wonderful Jason Isaacs) confused about which of two worlds he’s living in is real and which is a dream. But one thing that struck me about the pilot is the way it handles Detective Isaiah ‘Bird’ Freeman (Steve Harris), Michael’s partner in the world where his son is still alive. Harris is good in the role. But as can be the case with black characters in cop shows or movies, he sounds like he’s in an entirely different show than the white characters he works with.

Part of it is that Freeman has some of the best, quippiest lines in the show. Much of the dialogue in Awake is muted, straightforward in keeping with the fact that this is a very strange situation that’s being treated as if it’s normal or sustainable by the person at its center. The fact that Michael and his therapists are trying to work through this situation logically and gently rather than making grand pronouncements about the utter weirdness of this lets us appreciate the power of Michael’s circumstances without constantly being bashed over the head about it. Freeman isn’t an actual exception to that rule, but he does spend a lot of time uttering koans like “This is why I’ve avoided success at all costs. You work your whole life to afford some nice stuff, so someone can come along and kill you for it,” or “Been a cop for 20 years. Only seen hunches on TV,” or “Remember when you used to think that solved and fixed meant the same thing?” It’s an oddly performative role.

And there was also a moment when Freeman and Britten were investigating a brutal murder when Awake‘s writers decided to just straight up have Freeman channel The Wire‘s Bunk Moreland. “You see this coffeemaker? $600. My ex-wife wanted one of these. I told her if she wanted a $600 coffee-maker she shouldn’t have married a police,” Freeman said, pronouncing police with an exaggerated “o.” “Eventually, we agreed on that.” I’m not saying it’s not a good line. But it’s a weird reminder that when it comes to black characters, folks seem to reach for archetypes first and to go through the process of developing original characters second.

TLC has cancelled All-American Muslim, its reality series about an interconnected group of Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan. The show pulled relatively low ratings—even as the show’s buzz reached its height, fewer than a million people were tuning in on Sunday nights. And members of the cast told the Detroit Free Press that TLC explained that the ratings were the reason All-American Muslim wouldn’t be coming back for a second season.

The show was also the subject of a campaign by prominent Islamaphobes. Pamela Geller insisted that the show was offensive because it refused to portray Muslims as extremists, terrorists, and criminals. The Florida Family Association, essentially a one-man front group with a history of running boycotts rather than advancing family values, convinced hardware giant Lowe’s and travel discounter Kayak to drop their advertising on the show. Lowe’s tried to hide behind claims of negative buzz for the show on social media, though there was little evidence of any such chatter that wasn’t inflected by anti-Muslim sentiment, and Kayak’s founder wrote an incoherent attack on the show in response to criticism. Both companies were subject to intense pressure to reinstate their advertising, and music executive Russell Simmons offered to buy up spots on the show, only to find that they were sold out.

That All-American Muslim couldn’t find an audience is disappointing, and not just because the Florida Family Association and Geller will treat the decision as a victory. It was a warm, unsensationalistic show that featured serious debates about religion, obligation, and community norms—in other words, the best that reality television is capable of. This is a loss for quality television, as well as for tolerance.

We’ve discussed what Netflix’s identity might look like if it started packaging its streaming content and original programming into a cable channel. It turns out, that development might come sooner than expected: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is apparently already meeting with cable executives. And for those of you who are dying for a stand-alone HBO option, this might be the most interesting potential development if Netflix gets a cable channel:

A cable deal would increase Netflix’s competition with Time Warner’s HBO, but could allay fears among TV distributors that Netflix will lead to consumers’ cutting the pay TV cord. At least one cable company could end up experimenting with offering Netflix by the end of the year, even though the company would have to modify its content licensing deals, which currently typically don’t allow Netflix to bring programming to cable set-top boxes, according to Reuters…[Tony] Wible also suggested that HBO could react by also offering its HBO Go service directly to consumers. A spokesman for HBO declined to comment. HBO and Time Warner executives have in the past signaled that HBO Go allows for the option to market to consumers directly, but there was no financial benefit for such an approach for now.

I’ve said in the past that HBO is a very careful steward of its business model. And whether Netflix is on cable or not, it still won’t have HBO’s content. The question is whether HBO remains confident that its content is valuable enough that consumers will pick it a their add-on to cable if they’re choosing between HBO and Netflix.

Jane Espenson, in a provocative and I think important essay for the Huffington Post, argues that the key to getting more women in the writers’ rooms of television shows is actually to walk away from the idea that women have something particular to add to the conversation:

Good writers can write across the gender line. We just can. And even those who can’t have undoubtedly convinced themselves that they can. So a male showrunner, confident in his abilities and those of his male writers, is probably not wringing his hands over how he’s going to get his female characters onto the page. By advertising ourselves as female character generators, we’re trying to provide a service that no one is clamoring for. Showrunner-dude is happy creating his own female characters. Making the case that there is a deficiency he’s unaware of is probably not going to resonate with him.

Even if you get such a showrunner to hire a woman, if you suggest that female writers have a specific (and limited) purpose, you are inviting those showrunners to feel they don’t need to hire additional women writers once they have one woman in the room; they have their female character generator, their lens onto the female point of view.

And beyond that, the argument leaves us with no basis to promote the value of women on a show with few or no female characters. In fact, it provides a frighteningly sound argument for not hiring us on such a show.

I actually think, if asked, that most male showrunners would say that they’re in agreement with Jane’s initial argument, that gender is not a legitimate factor in deciding not to ask someone to join their writing staff. But I do think there’s a gap between that theoretical agreement and actually seeking out women to work on a show. Dan Harmon’s said that it took an order from NBC programming head Angela Bromstead to get him to hire more women, an experience that ultimately convinced him that he wants to work with more women in the future. And I know he’s not alone in enjoying working with women.

I believe that Jane is correct that the best, most thoughtful male and female writers can create marvelous male and female characters interchangeably, that argument can as easily bolster the status quo as it can govern a more progressive future. But no one person, male or female, has the full range of experience with their own gender, or with people of the other gender—the more kinds of experience you have in a writer’s room, the more access you’ll have to the range of human life. And I think there are a lot of men who write female characters who are best flat and at worst are ugly distortions—and that there are more men who have the opportunity to write these sorts of depictions of women than there are women who have the chance to write stereotypes of men. Those men shouldn’t get a pass, and they shouldn’t get feedback that suggests that they’re doing just fine on their own. Because they’re not.

And if there’s absolutely no reason why white males need insights from women and people of color, why should they ever bother to hire them, especially if it means giving up job slots that otherwise would go to people who look like them? I wish I trusted more male showrunners to reach out from curiosity and a commitment to pure meritocracy, but the evidence just don’t particularly support that. Every major survey of women writers in television suggests that gains in that space are not durable: a single-year spike in the number of women in writers’ rooms tends to disappear, or even go backwards, in the next.

It might not pay to offend male show-runners sense of their capacity, but abandoning the argument that women and people of color have a definitive value add due to their experiences and perspective also means giving up a positive, substantive case for getting women and people of color—not to mention people of different class backgrounds—on writing staffs. I’d love it if we could peacefully talk our way into substantive gains in employment for women in television writing. But I don’t see the path to doing that without some difficult conversations.

The bridge is yours.

-More music from Stew is always good news.

-Dystopian teen fiction: still the big thing.

-Joss Whedon’s approach to the Hulk.

-The News International hacking scandal has apparently driven two journalists to attempt suicide.

-Woody Allen and John Turturro will play Hasidic gigolos.

So, we’ve got a new trailer for Joss Whedon’s upcoming horror movie The Cabin in the Woods. And is it me, or is there a faint whiff of the Initiative, the research lab and paramilitary team gone somewhat wrong, in all of this:

It may just be the underground lab and the secret conspiracy vibe getting to me. But one of the things I think Whedon does very well is debunk the dangerous pretentions of people who believe they have exclusive access to esoteric knowledge and have built up bureaucratic structures to help them maintain their hold on power. The Watcher’s Council is the first example of this: they’re a group of men who have very little empathy for the young women they’re supposed to be training and helping, and who have turned the existence of the Slayer into a justification for them to accumulate knowledge and authority rather than a cause they’re genuinely dedicated to. When their headquarters is destroyed at the beginning of the seventh season of Buffy, it’s simultaneously tragic and semi-irrelevant. That they couldn’t find a way to modernize, work with Buffy, and move into a model where the goal is to make sure the Slayer lives beyond her early twenties is genuinely sad, both for an institution that broke rather than being willing to bend, and because it denies Buffy and the new Slayers generations of knowledge that could have made their fight more effective and less dangerous.

Then, there’s the Initiative, which is a perfect example of what happens when you have a government operation without effective oversight (side note: I would love to see a dorky spin-off of the Inspector General’s report about the Initiative). Maggie Walsh gives her soldiers drugs that ultimately undermine their long-term efficacy. Her Adam project ends up resulting in a huge number of casualties and no discernible benefit. And the program’s only shut down after it’s incurred an enormous amount of waste, fraud, and abuse. There’s a clear analogue for the creation—and coverup of—the Reavers in Firefly and Serenity.

Now, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on with those cameras, and that force field, and those creepy hydraulics in Cabin in the Woods. But I’m hoping to find out on Friday at SXSW. Either way, being very suspicious of people with a lot of power and unlimited resources is very much a Whedon hallmark.

I’ve been saying repeatedly how excited I am for Political Animals, the USA Network’s six-hour show this summer about a First Lady turned divorced Secretary of State, and the trend of women politicians on screen in general. And now, we’ve learned that Sigourney Weaver is going to be playing the main character in that show, who is clearly based on Hillary Clinton. Given that she’s one of the most commanding women on any screen, large or small, I think Weaver will play the hell out of this part—she can credibly, and interestingly, give hell to just about anyone, be they head of a paramilitary strip-mining operation, insect-like alien, or recalcitrant foreign leader.

It also seems fitting that Weaver, who played a First Lady who had to endure the indignity of being cheated on in Dave, gets to come back and play the hell out of the next chapter in that real-life story.

I appreciate that we’ve gone from stories where the woman gets to be the President’s wife or girlfriend, as in Dave or The American President, to stories where she gets to be one of the most powerful people in the free world entirely in her own right.

This post contains spoilers through the March 6 episode of Justified.

One of the things I like about Justified that makes it somewhat different from a show like Sons of Anarchy is that it acknowledges how hard a good crime is to set up, pull off, and get away clean from. The trap that’s been sprung for Raylan tonight is a sophisticated one, and there’s no question he’s blindsided, failing to see some possible implications and events as early as one might wish he could. But it’s still one that he can pick apart even as it’s closing on him.

Still, as traps go, it’s a decent one. Whether Quarles knew that Gary had a hit out on Raylan and Winona, it was a decent move to pick a victim who could be easily linked to Raylan. There might have been better ways to do it—kill Boyd in a way that makes it look like a fight (which would strengthen the idea that Raylan was on Boyd’s payroll), or kill Winona and make it look like Raylan got jealous or angry at his abandonment. But the hit on Gary is clean, and relatively easy, and besides, they had to use that bullet that Raylan threw at Wynn somehow.

Justified’s always done a nice job of balancing between the competing ideas that Raylan’s a badass and Raylan’s badassery creates a lot of problems for him, and the bullet is a perfect example. “Deputy, that just might be the coolest thing I ever laid ears on,” Garritty gushes. Dempsey’s a bit more skeptical, wanting to know “Did you come up with that on your own?” Raylan’s a hep cat when he explains that he “Heard it on the Johnny Carson show once.” But no matter the coolness of the act itself, Raylan’s temper has handed his enemies a literal and figurative weapon against him. Raylan may be able to see Duffy’s weakness before he does, but when Duffy declares that “Between you and me, Raylan Given is a very angry man,” he’s seeing Raylan more clearly than he sees himself—and he knows how to use Raylan’s anger against him. Raylan’s colleagues, who are willing to play at a cooler temperature—when told not to play stupid, one replies “I’m not playing. I’m an idiot. Ask anybody.”—may be awful stressed a la Art, but they escape with considerably less trouble.

Sammy sees the same short fuse in Quarles, it seems. Quarles may hate Sammy as the son by blood who held onto the place that Quarles believes he should have had, but at least this time around, the goofy runt is proving his mettle. It’s only by the skin of his teeth that Quarles gets out of that house before Dempsey discovers the room he tortured a prostitute in (Duffy hasn’t had time to redecorate), and once he does, it appears Detroit’s had enough. Sammy tells Quarles he’s cut loose, and when Quarles pulls a gun on him, Sammy coolly talks him down. And then, on the way out the door, tells Quarles of his unique little gun, “That’s awesome. It ever jam on you?” Whether it does or it doesn’t, Quarles ends up popping pills and shotgunning sermons instead of pulling the trigger. Awesome, it seems, can be overrated.