I had one of those weekends where you sit down on the couch and get up three days later having watched four seasons of How I Met Your Mother. And while at first there wouldn’t appear to be much that a Friends-like CBS sitcom and a quirky HBO show from Mike White, the show that How I Met Your Mother most reminds me of is Enlightened. They’re both shows about compromise, but while Enlightened‘s Amy Jellicoe rages against a system that makes her dreams futile, How I Met Your Mother is all about anaesthetizing the pain of selling out.

One of my favorite scenes in Enlightened is when Amy, desperate to escape a corporate job that she hates (and is admittedly terrible at and makes no effort to succeed in), interviews for her dream gig at a homeless shelter. It’s something that would use her skills and that she’d find fulfilling. And it pays less on an annual basis than she owes in debt from her stint in the treatment center. Laura Dern does an incredible job of selling how dreadful that revelation is to Amy, and how insanity-inducing it is that the non-profit system is set up so that only a very small number of the people who would like to work there can actually do so under existing conditions.

Beyond that scene, Enlightened makes clear why Amy hates her job, even if we ultimately can’t entirely sympathize with her approach to it. Dougie, her boss, is crude and unprofessional. Amy’s ideas for making her company stronger and more socially responsible are blown off, and when they finally get attention, she’s set up as the entertainment by a vicious group of executives. It’s humiliating, and it’s boring, and we can sympathize with her desire to get away from it.

How I Met Your Mother, on the other hand, kind of blunts Marshall’s ultimate decision to walk away from trying to work in environmental law when he first does it (I know he leaves Goliath National Bank in future episodes, I just haven’t gotten to them yet). The montage of him standing in front of the mirror, psyching himself up with increasingly diminishing returns, as he goes on job interviews is funny, but it doesn’t actually communicate the loss of a life-long dream (never mind that the show doesn’t really communicate that Marshall is a committed environmentalist other than telling us repeatedly that he is). The fact that Lily’s enormous credit card debt basically forces him to take a corporate job after he’s fired from his first firm should be a deep betrayal with long-term consequences and the show basically deals with it in two episodes.

And even though we’re told that Marshall’s given up on the whole reason he went to law school, the show suggests that ultimately it’s no big deal. When he goes to work at his first law firm, the voiceover tells us that he ends up representing a hazardous amusement park. But we never see him handle one of its manifold issues, which both could have been great plot fodder and could have presented actual moral dilemmas that show what it meant for Marshall to sell out. And when Marshall ends up working for Barney at Goliath National Bank, rather than something that makes him miserable, the job actually looks fine. He and Barney hang out on the roof drinking beer, Marshall appears to get along with his coworkers and to feel no particular qualms about the work that he’s doing. The biggest problem he faces is finding a place where he can go to the bathroom in peace.

I think it’s probably true that most folks aren’t working jobs that are perfect reflections of their passions: it’s not like Amy and Marshall are alone in ending up in a place other than the one they hoped to be. But I appreciate Amy’s raging hope. And there’s something rather quietly sad about seeing Marshall surrender. How I Met Your Mother doesn’t have to—and shouldn’t—be Enlightened. But I wish it respected its characters enough to spend some more time with their pain and disappointment.

One of the reasons I’m excited for Veep, HBO’s upcoming show about a female vice president, is that I think it’ll be an interesting intervention in our ongoing debate about awkward ladies in comedy:

A lot of that conversation has centered around Liz Lemon, and the question of whether the embrace of her awkwardness is also an embrace of mediocrity. The addition to 30 Rock of a page who sees Liz as living a dream life after seasons of emphasizing that she’s given up on her professional dreams and dating beneath her has complicated this perspective. But I think Veep adds a new layer to what Sady Doyle has dubbed Lady Loser Comedy.

Selina, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character, is objectively successful: she is the Vice President of the United States. It’s hard to argue that is in any way, shape, or form a compromise or a failure except by the most utterly insane standards. But as y’all will see in the pilot, she keeps screwing up: uttering politically unfortunate malapropisms, making staff mistakes, being generally socially stiff. But Veep walks a very thin line between treating Selina as if she’s dumb and treating her job as if it’s impossible to do well. And therein, I think, lies the revolutionary potential of awkward female characters. It’s one thing to spend time reveling in just being a mess, which I think is the appeal of Liz Lemon for some people, and also why I’m over the character—I’m just not having fun down there any more. But explorations of female awkwardness that reveal how artificial and ridiculous the conventions that govern so-called dignified female behavior are? That I’m pretty excited for.

It’s coincidental that they came out so close together, but two recently-published interviews, one with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, and the other with William Shatner, present an interesting portrait of the odd institutional bias against genre fiction. Chabon, in an interview with Wired, talked about the way he’d been discouraged from writing genre fiction, even though it was one of his first loves, in his MFA program:

I had been taught early on in college and graduate school that I wouldn’t be taken seriously if I wrote genre fiction, and not only would I not be taken seriously, but people just really didn’t want to read it, like, my workshop mates and my workshop leaders. I had workshop leaders who just out-and-out said, “Please do not turn science fiction in to this workshop.” That was discouraging, obviously, and if I had had more courage and more integrity, I might have stood up to it more than I did, but I wanted to be read, and I wanted to receive whatever benefits there were to be received from the people I was in workshop with, and the teachers I was studying from.

And, you know, I wasn’t looking for a fight, and it wasn’t like I don’t love F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov, and Eudora Welty, and all those people. I love their work just as much — if not more in some cases — as Arthur C. Clarke, or Frank Herbert, or whoever it might have been. So I had just sort of allowed myself to fall into this channel as a writer that at some point I realized I didn’t want to be limited to anymore.

And William Shatner, talking with Terry Gross, explains how, though he took his work on Star Trek extremely seriously while he was acting on the show—” I applied every talent I had to making it valid and working on story and fighting management and doing the best I could”—he came to feel ashamed of it afterwards, and was bucked up by Patrick Stewart’s commitment to the work:

When I left “Star Trek,” I left it with pride and went on to other things. And then “Star Trek” started to become popular about six years afterwards, as it went into syndication. And then people started talking about, hey, there’s – beam me up, Scotty. And there’s Captain Kirk. And, you know, and then somebody would say: Do you really go where no man has gone before – in that sort of semi-mocking tone that I thought, well, all right. Maybe it wasn’t as good as I thought it was. And maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. And I held myself up defensively.

It was only watching Patrick Stewart – and I have great respect for Patrick, both as an actor and as man. I love him. And the gravitas that this great Shakespearean actor gave to his role, that I suddenly realized that this guy is taking Captain Picard every bit as seriously as Macbeth. And I used to. And I stopped. And what the hell’s the matter with me? It was a great piece of work. Everybody contributed to three years that has lasted 50. It’s a phenomenon. Why aren’t I proud of it? And that’s when I had that moment.

I’ve never really understood the bias against genre fiction. It’s not as if there’s something inherently more praiseworthy about contemplating the present in an entirely realistic way than about considering the possibilities future or the norms of the past. It’s not actually less self-indulgent to revisit and fetishize, say, the sixties or the eighties than to imagine what it would be like to live under an interplanetary government, to settle Mars, or to fight the War of the Roses with powerful metaphors for uncertainty and danger thrown in the mix. That MFA programs and critics have managed to convince people otherwise is evidence that they’re good at preserving the privilege awarded certain kinds of work, not that they’re correct.

This post contains spoilers through the March 8 episode of Parks and Recreation.

Remember in January when I talked to Nick Offerman and gave y’all the word that he had written his first episode of the show, and that it dealt with the question of whether Ron Swanson is a feminist? Well, this was that episode. And I think it may have been one of my favorites of the season, particularly in the way it kept the stories adjacent to but not involving Leslie moving along.

The A story itself, though, was pretty good. I’m glad the show is finally dealing with the fact that the campaign isn’t just a machine that reinforces for Leslie and Ben how right they are for each other. Because he’s doing his job right, and because he’s deeply invested in it, Ben can’t just be the adorably tense, dorky dude Leslie loves so much: he’s a tense, dorky dude with the power to tell her what to do. And sometimes that stuff isn’t much fun. But when she blows him off, it’s a disaster, resulting in an impromptu, drunk campaign interview that could halt her rise in the polls, of not knock her out of them completely. What made the story so great, though, was not the stretch-limo chase to Indianapolis to get the tape (a development that made me devoutly wish Parks and Recreation could find an actual way for Tom to grow). Instead it was that even in the midst of an epic cock-up, Leslie managed to notice people Pawnee wasn’t serving well-Pawnee’s airport workers-come up with a plan to help them, and win their loyalty such that they’re willing to do her a solid. The story was a perfect mix of acknowledging Leslie’s fallibility while reaffirming her fundamental dedication and talent.

I also just loved watching Ron click with Andy’s women’s studies professor at their celebratory dinner after he passed his first college class. “My father once told my mother that God made Eve from Adam’s rib,” he says, explaining that while he’s not technically a feminist, he stands in solidarity with strong women. “She broke his jaw.” It’s an interesting contrast with Chris, who is almost too deferential, telling the professor, “I didn’t want you to think I was objectifying you with my male gaze.” She goes home with Ron, who isn’t making any effort to be any less masculine-”No need. Porterhouse. Rare. Quickly,” he tells the waitress-but is also fully on board with what she teaches. Masculinity and feminism, in this case, are two great tastes that go great together.

And I found the C story, in which Donna blows off a date to hang out with Jerry, who proved to be unexpectedly dedicated to stuffing envelopes, surprisingly sweet. We see Jerry lose so often that I’ve enjoyed seeing him find himself in his element on Leslie’s campaign, whether he’s running phone banks or stuffing mailers. Even if he screws up, as he did last night, it’s nice to see him as the person in Leslie’s life other than Ben who has best stepped up to help her, and in doing so, has found a bit of hi,s

The bridge is yours.

-Sleigh Bells + Beyonce = delight.

-Britney Spears might be an X-Factor judge.

-This is a reminder that you should watch You Kill Me.

-Johnny Depp: leading Hollywood in a new movement towards costume recycling!

-Amy Poehler and Adam Scott will be in a movie together, making the time between Parks and Recreation seasons less painful.

Earlier in the week, I wrote that we could probably save our time and breath by not wasting time condemning Kirk Cameron for, totally unsurprisingly, telling the world he disapproves of gay people. On a larger scale, the exact same thing is true of Sarah Palin. Once a potentially powerful figure in the Republican party, she’s become an entirely conventional low-level media personality. The only reason there’s any sense that she is a more important figure is because Sarah Palin and the people around her are genius trolls, masters at turning everything into an opportunity for grievance and another shot at inclusion in the news cycle—even if the possibility of dominating it is long past. The latest voluminous fuel for their fire? HBO’s Game Change, an adaptation of and expansion on the sections of the book by the same name that explore John McCain’s late-breaking selection of Palin to be his running mate in the 2008 election, and the unraveling of the campaign that followed. For the past several weeks, complaining about the movie’s taken up almost as much oxygen in the conservative media criticism industry as Rush Limbaugh’s self-destruction, even though the latter act is of far greater import in American politics.

Which is funny, because the movie doesn’t particularly deserve it. This is not to say it’s good. Julianne Moore’s Palin impersonation is dandy, but for most of the movie, Game Change mostly feels like a very high-minded episode of Saturday Night Live: you’re mostly comparing the impressions and the reality in a way that doesn’t let you enter the narrative, a process that’s not aided by the less-than-naturalistic dialogue.

But most importantly, the only way this exhaustingly-trod story could have been genuinely revelatory is if it had any insight into Palin’s personality. But except for a single scene where Palin breaks down while talking to her son Track, who is deployed overseas, Game Change has next to no interest in translating a woman whose motivations and worldview have been infuriatingly indecipherable to large swaths of the American electorate. Instead, it zips through a cycle of emotions dominated, in this retelling of the narrative, by Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace: excitement that they’d found a potential star, dismay that she wasn’t living up to expectations, and then a sense of oracular satisfaction that they saw Palin was awful before most other people did. it’s a weirdly self-satisfied—and self-justifying—narrative.

And that attitude, more than anything else about this oddly overdue project, is what makes Game Change frustrating. Sarah Palin has everything to lose and precisely nothing to gain from depictions that point her, as Game Change does at various point, as an overzealous evangelical Christian; a dummy; defiant of authority; or even as a horror movie monster, raging against her advisers in a claustrophobic stairwell. And those of us who dislike Palin have everything to gain by recognizing that we really, truly won: Palin’s gone from the national stage. And her fiasco of a campaign has guaranteed that if Republicans nomination someone who is ludicrously underinformed, grievance-driven, and prone to wacky policy positions, they’ll do it through a highly-vetted process that likely exposes that person to the American electorate over an extended period of time. We should accept that, be done with the victory dance, and get down to examining the next generation of plausible Republican rising stars. The greatest damage we could do to Sarah Palin—and one of the better things we could do for ourselves—is to move on from her, totally and irrevocably.

There’s been some talk of this for a while, but it sounds like Lee Daniels is moving forward with The Butler, a biopic about Eugene Allen, the butler who served eight American presidents. And Forest Whitaker is in talks to star in it. We talk a fair bit about the isolation of presidents from the real world, whether it’s George H.W. Bush’s supermarket scanner gaffe or the weird conservative attempts to paint President Obama as out of touch because he doesn’t currently own a car.

But we don’t really discuss the fact that the White House is the closest thing in America to Downton Abbey: a great house with a long-term staff dedicated to making the lives of its occupants as effortless as possible. Of course, unlike the occupants of Downton Abbey who, as Lady Mary put it “don’t have a life. We choose clothes and pay calls and work for charity and do the season. But, really, we’re stuck in a waiting room until we marry,” the residents of the White House are actually very busy leading the free world and representing the United States. And also unlike Downton, those residents leave every eight years: they don’t get dynastic possession of or attachment to the house, and some of them downright hate it.

Plus, there’s the added dynamic of having Allen, a black man, serve eight white presidents during years of remarkable racial transition in the country. If no man is a hero to his valet, I’d be curious to know if a white president can be a hero to his African-American butler.

John Carter, Disney’s hugely expensive Mars epic and the live-action directing debut from Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, arrives in theaters today burdened with huge expectations. The movie is overstuffed with everything from gothic inheritance tales, to alien corporate raiders, to scientific breakthroughs, to Civil War PTSD. But it says a great deal about John Carter that the movie’s at its best when most of those elements are off-screen, and when our titular hero’s doing an awkward ballet as he learns to walk in Martian gravity, or as he reckons with the dog-like alien who’s decided to adopt him.

While it isn’t a major part of the movie, a clear symptom of John Carter‘s larger problems is the way in handles the trope, of the sympathetic—and innocent—Confederate. Carter was a Confederate in the original source material, and he’s presented here through a common narrative: a man comes home from a war in which he was a disinterested participant to find his home destroyed and his wife and child dead. It’s true that there were non-slave holding whites who fought for the Confederacy (and on the Union side, the response to the law that allowed wealthy men to pay substitutes to fight for them gave rise to the saying “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.”). But there’s something unattractive about a narrative that paints men who fought to uphold slavery and white supremacy, even if they were only doing it for the paycheck, as victims without any sort of engagement of the cause for which they fought.

On Mars, Carter’s decision to become a different man largely consists of deciding it’s all right for him to love Martian princess Dejah Thoris. His championing of the Tharks, the aliens who first find him and adopt him into their tribe, who aren’t exactly an analogue for American slaves (the humans on Mars seem to ignore them or form loose alliances with them, rather than oppressing them) is less a matter of political awakening than the most convenient way for him to stop Dejah’s wedding the evil Sab Than, who has been attacking her city. Early in his acquaintance with them, Sola, a female Thark, takes the brand that ought to have been meant for Carter. Even in space, white men get off easy. It would be nice if someone could acknowledge that the biggest moral reckoning for a man who fought for the Confederacy ought to be making amends for the cause he served rather than moving on after he was widowed. John Carter has a lot of serious themes on the table, but it can’t prioritize between them, and ends up doing well by almost none of them.

It’s too bad that there’s so much human (and Thern) sturm und drang in John Carter, because the Tharks are far and away the most charming part of the movie. As Tars Tarkas, Willem Defoe is a combination of world-weary and very funny. “Your spirit annoys me,” he tells Carter, who refuses to give up when the two are sent into an arena to fight some nasty beasties. When Carter leads the Tharks on a bold invasion of Sab Than’s capitol city, only to find out his forces are besieging Dejah’s home city of Helium, Tars Tarkas smacks him upside the head. Watching the Tharks try new things as necessity forces them forward, whether it’s flying, adopting an irritating Earthman into their ranks, or slowly embracing more sentimental parent-child ties.

It’s too bad that the originality of the Tharks is undercut by the fact that many of the action sequences involving them are pillaged directly from the Star Wars movies. When Carter’s first imprisoned prior to the arena fight, the shots of his prison are cribbed from Luke Skywalker’s imprisonment in Jabba’s palace. Carter’s fight against a nasty pair of white apes is set in a sand-colored arena much like the one in Attack of the Clones, and the mechanics of his win suggest he’s seen Skywalker successfully fight a Rancor. And a series of fights on hovercrafts are borrowed, both in their dynamics and the way they’re shot, from the Endor chases in Return of the Jedi.

And it’s also too bad that, despite the fact that Thark society’s one of the only things in the movie that feels specifically Martian and as such, is much more interesting to watch than the rather pointless bickering between two human societies, director Andrew Stanton spends so much time on his insufficiently developed human characters. He does best with Dejah Thoris, who is promising is promising in concept—she’s introduced to us first as a scientist, second as a princess, and third, as a competent fighter—but less so in execution. She’s saddled with ponderous lines like “If you have the means to save others, would you not take every action possible to make it so?” that sound more like the starting point for philosophical debates and less actual conversation. If her romance with Carter is meant to be a ring-of-fire transplanetary love, there just isn’t enough time for Stanton to plausibly develop it. And the movie brings up and then drops the fact that Dejah’s supposed to be on the breakthrough of a major scientific discovery. Battle sequences, apparently, are more fun than lab work, even lab work that opens up the universe.

Similarly, Stanton utterly wastes Dominc West’s sly, sexy charm on Sab Than, making him a retread of the evil rapist he played in 300. The Therns—ostensibly representations of Mars’ goddess protector, but actually rapacious devastators of worlds—are constantly talking about how stupid and violent Sab Than is. The only moment he gets to be a person with motivations or a brain is when he shows up to woo Dejah, explaining “I feared you’d been tortured by Tharks and condemened to die in their arena. I couldn’t have that on my conscience. I do have one, Princess.” But there’s no room in this movie for a genuine romantic competition between John Carter and Sab Than, or for any really serious—in a fun way—thinking about Mars’ future. We’ve got a dog in this fight—the excellent Woola—but this marvelous monster’s more entertaining than the contest he’s a part of.