Marlo Thomas has an essay up at the Huffington Post on the evolution of the single woman on television since the days when she was getting That Girl off the ground. And it’s got an incredibly revealing insight into how behind the curve Hollywood is when it comes to recognizing the realities of how women live their lives, and what they want to watch as a result:

Then I read The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and thought, Wouldn’t it be great if we could see a show where the girl was the “someone?” ABC was brave enough to green-light my idea as a new TV series called “That Girl.” My character, Ann Marie, would be an aspiring actress living alone in New York who was independent and ambitious — and had the courage to utter the earth-shattering words (usually to her protective father): “But I don’t want to get married!” Although network researchers didn’t think a single girl had a chance in prime time, “That Girl” found her audience — because there were millions of That Girls in homes across America. We were not our mother’s daughters. We were a whole different breed.

It makes sense that a generation of television executives who couldn’t fathom that there were single women living in cities who would enjoy consuming stories about their lives would give way to a generation of television executives who would have difficulty grasping a new, and more complex set of aspirations and images of women.

Both before and after their founder’s death, Andrew Breitbart’s entertainment site, Big Hollywood, was making hay (and presumably garnering pageviews) by complaining about the presentation of Sarah Palin in HBO’s movie adaptation of Game Change. Now, one of Palin’s strongest Hollywood defenders, filmmaker Stephen Bannon, has been named one of the people who will steward Breitbart’s stable of publications: he’s a founding board member of Breitbart News and now will become executive chairman of the company.

It’s not entirely clear what the change in leadership will mean for the fiscal health of the company or for Big Hollywood’s coverage in particular. It’s had to imagine that any one person, much less any set of people, will be able to neatly replace Breitbart as an enthusiastic fundraiser or as a public face of the brand. The Undefeated made just $100,085 at the box office, and Bannon’s other movies haven’t exactly set the world on fire. Big Hollywood already devotes considerable space to the complaint that Hollywood isn’t responsive to conservative values and is leaving a substantial conservative market untapped. Whether Bannon’s elevated role in the company increases the volume of those complaints or provides new perspective on them remains to be seen.

The Mary Sue jumps up to praise Chris O’Dowd, who you may remember as that adorable cop in Bridesmaids, for defending Megan Fox in her dust-up with director Michael Bay. “I don’t know the ins and outs of it but it’s all down to having a fallout with Michael Bay,” he said in an interview. “But who wouldn’t have a fallout with him? It’s one of the sexist things (sic) I’ve ever seen. She called him an asshole. Well, he is a fucking asshole. She’s not the only one who has said that. Why has she been singled out?” Not exactly verbal genius or an articulate breakdown of sexism in Hollywood, but given what we get most of the time, it’s what passes for praiseworthy.

What my pals at The Mary Sue neglect to mention, however, is that O’Dowd almost immediately took back his remarks, making it clear that he wasn’t calling out one of the most sexist directors in Hollywood for being sexist—he wanted to be clear that it’s the mean ol’ press that’s to blame. O’Dowd wrote on his blog:

What I actually said was; ‘The way the Press gleefully dealt with the firing of a young woman was one of the most sexist things I’ve ever seen. People shouldn’t revel in seeing anyone lose a job. The dismissal of an old male actor would never have been welcomed with the same joy and ridicule.’ It was naive of me to assume a remark aimed at the sexism in the entertainment press would reach its target in the entertainment press. I’m new to all this and that was stupid of me.

As Teju Cole writes, “we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic.” Particularly not when they’re in charge of billion dollar franchises, and might be in a position to kick some of that money in your direction.

The Los Angeles Times has a piece up looking at the panic in Hollywood over the failures of John Carter, Terra Nova, Luck, and Hugo, all projects with extremely well-connected talent attached that none the less failed to find the audiences that would make them successes—and would make them profitable. Writer Patrick Goldstein blames a lack of relatable heroes at the center of each project, and interviews blog favorite Gavin Polone, who suggests that studios just don’t have any idea what audiences like anymore. Here are five ideas for what they might learn from these particular projects:

1. Bland doesn’t mean broadly appealing: I admire Taylor Kitsch’s abs, but if you haven’t seen Friday Night Lights (and many people haven’t), it’s not clear what his hook is other than his extreme handsomeness. Is he self-deprecating-but-not-really like George Clooney? Does he have a gift for physical comedy like the one Channing Tatum surprised people with in 21 Jump Street? Similarly, Jason O’Mara on Terra Nova was perhaps the epitome of the flavorless hunks Hollywood’s tried to peddle us over the last decade. There’s just nothing to him, but they’re convinced we’ll like him anyway. Being inoffensive is not the same time as being appealing to a broad swath of viewers, and it’s time for Hollywood to stop treating leading men that way.

2. Concepts matter: I’ve beat this horse on Terra Nova a lot, but it’s really not enough to throw robot dinosaurs at us and be assured we’ll be entertained and engaged. If anything, John Carter had the opposite problem. There are a ton of good concepts to draw on there, and there simply wasn’t enough time to explore them all. The movie might have been better if it could give us a sense of the nature of the conflict between Mars’ humans, or sharped the relationship between those societies and the Tharks. Instead, it had to rush through everything. So two rules: 1) Make sure your concept is well-developed and good, and 2) Make sure it’s a match for your form.

3. Your private interests are not inherently fascinating: There are horse-racing fans who share David Milch’s intensity for the sport, but there are not many of them—it’s why the sport is in trouble. And while there are more people who care about movie history, they’re still not the majority of the movie-going audience. Hugo‘s $73 million in domestic box office may be worse considering what it cost to make, but it’s not like The Artist has lit the world on fire, either. Even after its Best Picture win, it’s only taken in $42 million. Fascinating things may emerge from creators’ private passions, but just because they feel strongly about something doesn’t mean it’s inherently going to pull in an audience to match.

4. The 3D jig is up: It may jack up ticket costs, but it’s not like we don’t notice. And it’s particularly irritating when 3D doesn’t add a single thing to a movie and gives viewers a headache along with it. 3D may be an attractive way to get your movie to the Chinese market, which is allowing more 3D and Imax American movies into its theaters, but that doesn’t mean it can replace storytelling, characterization or acting here.

5. The hero doesn’t always have to be a dude: I tend to think that Hugo’s hero should remain who it is, though Chloe Moretz’s Isabelle was delightful. But Dejah Thoris is vastly more interesting than John Carter; anyone would have been more interesting than O’Mara in the lead in Terra Nova; and watching a woman try to break into top-flight jockeying might have been more interested than David Milch’s latest foray into Dudeland.

The bridge is yours.

-Is Tumblr ruining musicians?

-Is Uhura, at long last, going to get to wear pants?

-Russell Crowe will save life on earth by building a large boat.

-Kirk Cameron gets yet more time in the spotlight for no discernible reason.

-This is the perfect role for Eddie Izzard.

I ended up quite liking The River, ABC’s delightful piece of horror movie cheese about a reality show crew stuck on a boat in the Amazon searching for a vanished television star, which ended its first, and likely only, season last night. But I think that might be because I finally decided to read it as a show about a bunch of irritating white people (and one endearing gay, black cameraman, who informed his coworkers that his sexual orientation hadn’t come up on their trip because “I don’t go clubbing when I’m running away from ghosts.”) who got what was coming to them because they treated the Amazon as a mysterious place and ignored reasonable knowledge about the place that was available to them.

That’s really the core of the show: the main characters in The River treat the Amazon basin as a dark, mysterious place that can be made comprehensible by Western explorers who will approach it rationally. Rather than a place populated by, you know, actual people, it’s full of mysterious tribesmen, ghost ships, and cures for diseases that have a nasty tendency to zombiefy scientists if proper treatment protocols aren’t observed. Dr. Emmet Cole got himself in trouble in the first place when he strayed from his rational principles and started believing there was something mystical out there. That conviction lead him to take insane risks that endangered the life of his crew and his long-term friends, and also lead Cole into sin. His decision to abandon Jonas to a state in between life and death is reprehensible, the kind of thing that people who don’t happen to be pursuing wacky vision quests are relatively certain they’d never do.

But the truth is, for all the crew of the Magus are convinced that they can use logic and deduction to find Emmet, they’re awfully incurious people, by both the standards of Western rationality and beyond it. Maybe it wouldn’t serve the interests of the show to have them interrogate what in God’s name Emmet is doing in a giant chrysalis. But that seems like it might be a fairly relevant question to try to answer before he and Lincoln get to work on their mess of a relationship or he and Tess get all lovey-dovey again (if it were me, no matter how much I loved my missing husband, I would want to know what’s up there before I let him get near my lady bits).

And it’s deeply frustrating that, despite the fact that Jahel Valenzuela tends to be right about almost all the misfortunes that befall the Magus, and to have the power to summon resurrecting goddesses to boot, no one ever seems to have sat her down and done a comprehensive download on her knowledge of religion, folklore, biology, etc. The show’s getting somewhere in its critique of Western know-it-allism with scenes of scientists dissecting the native people of the region and keeping them in specimen tanks. But it’s not quite getting a central point. Emmet Cole might have had a better sense of a country that’s only Undiscovered to him and his ilk, and the scientists in that creepy lab might have increased the world’s store of knowledge more if they relied a little less on their own sense of their abilities, and tried a bit harder to talk to and learn from the people around them.

This is actually a reasonably clever idea for a movie: Seth Rogen and Kevin Hart are apparently going to star in a movie in which they play the first interracial buddy cops. Now, it’s not like Hollywood is new to being self-aware about the trope. 21 Jump Street has Ice Cube, with the double wink that N.W.A. is on the movie’s soundtrack, and a less subtextual scene where he explains that he’s a cop and sometimes he gets angry:

The Other Guys contrasted a pair of black super-cops with a pair of white schlubs who rose to the occasion:

But treating the anthropology of that particular joke as the basis for an entire movie could work well, and not simply as a one-off joke. We treat this kind of schtick as if it’s immutable, as if it comes from someplace real rather than a commercial urge to appeal to as many demographic groups as possible. We might as well have fake history to go with our fake rules.

Because I was at SXSW last week, this open thread is a twofer, for which I’m sort of glad, if only because it gives me a chance to comprehensively discuss the political acumen of Mr. Boyd Crowder. This post contains spoilers through the March 20 episode of Justified.

Perhaps the biggest question in contemporary liberalism is whether it’s possible to forge a populism that brings together the white working class with people of color and immigrants. Boyd Crowder is probably not the person to answer that question, given the blowing up of churches and the white supremacy, but his behavior in these last two episodes suggests that in a world where we could run him against Rand Paul in Kentucky, we’d have one hell of an entertaining race on our hands.

His confrontation with Sheriff Napier at the debate is epic. After Napier tries to suggest that Boyd should be disregarded because his status as a felon means he can’t vote (a nice example of Justified drawing drama from real laws), Boyd calmly unloads on him. “”I didn’t come here to vote,” he explains. “You think Shelby’s the only man in this room been done by a coal mining company?…You talk down to me because I been in trouble with the law…[Starting with a picket line where] I know that you weren’t there Mr. Napier. There sure were a lot of men there who looked like you. Men standing on the company side. Laughing at all us hillbillies who were just trying to stand up for what we believed in.”

That summation of the balance of power gives way to some hilariously unorthodox electioneering. Ava’s decision to go contrary to Johnny’s wishes and the core of her and Boyd’s business, killing Delroy to save his girls may have been rather thrilling in the moment. But it doesn’t mean she’s exactly a feminist, just that she’s willing to run whores for a somewhat more innovative purpose than the vicious junkie she murdered. “The girls, they’re excited to practice their constitutional right to vote, and to give a free handjob for every vote cast for our friend Shelby,” she explains. “They’ve already given blowjobs to a couple of boys Napier was counting on to haul for him and convinced them to take the day off.” And Boyd is smart enough to realize that if shots, sex and populist appeal aren’t enough to pull off the election, that you can never go wrong knowing your electoral law as well as your voters.

Speaking of prostitution, we get a look inside the deeply troubled mind of Robert Quarles tonight in the wake of his defeat. When Wynn Duffy finds out his partner in crime has been popping Oxy, he asks “How long have you been taking those? Mr. Quarles, maybe it is time you leave Kentucky.” “I got nowhere else to go,” Quarles explains to him. And when a young man barges in on them with a gun, threatening to kill Quarles for torturing Brady Hughes, Quarles talks his way out of the standoff by exposing himself as a raw nerve end.

“My father was a heroin addict. He wasn’t necessarily an evil man. But he couldn’t kick his addiction, couldn’t keep a job either,” Quarles explains.Luckily for my father, he had a very pretty little boy. And plenty of men were willing to pay for my company. What is your name?…That’s what it was like for me, Donovan. For many years. And then one day a man named Theo realized what was happening. You see, Theo believed deeply in family…Theo ushered me in, where inside, on his knees, was my father. I was fourteen years old, and I understood what it meant to honestly be free…Hurt him. No, son, I never hurt him. I did everything I could to help him. And then I set him free.”

I’ve been debating with myself all season long whether I think the decision to make Quarles a sexual sadist adds to or detracts from his character. I tend to think the details, even these ones, are a bit formulaic. But I do think there’s something interesting about sending Raylan, in a moment when he’s a bit of a mess, up against someone who’s crazy. These are, in their own ways, two mythic figures facing each other at a moment when they’ve both been badly hurt. It’s Batman v. the Joker in Kentucky. In this land where hollers replace dark alleys, Raylan’s as close as you get to aristocracy, someone with a sense that peace is owed him and he’s going to take pleasure in wresting it from his rogue’s gallery.