I’ve spent a fair piece of the last year mulling over how we can get more Muslim characters on television, and what those characters might look like, as tropes or as individuals. But the real question is what would convince networks that doing so is a good investment. The Hollywood Reporter, in their story about licensed remakes of American shows and retransmissions of American shows in Middle Eastern countries, might have the answer:

In many cases, you actually are watching Western (or at least Western-owned) TV. Fox International, through a deal with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Rotana Media, operates two satellite channels in the region, bringing subtitled and dubbed versions of hundreds of Hollywood films, along with such series as Glee and Modern Family, to homes in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. Turner Broadcasting operates an Arab version of its Cartoon Network from Abu Dhabi. In 2011, Sony Pictures TV opened a sales office in Dubai.

“Recent years have seen a boom in TV channel launches across the Middle East,” says Stuart Baxter, senior executive VP distribution for Sony in the region. “It offers a real growth market that SPT’s business can thrive in.”

For distributors facing saturated or shrinking domestic and European markets, the Middle East is an oasis. It’s big (67 million households representing 300 million-plus viewers) and young (as much as 60 percent of the population of some countries is under 20 years old). The Pan Arab Research Center estimates gross advertising revenue for the region hit $9.2 billion last year, up $700 million from 2010. These figures have to be taken with a grain of salt — there are no agreed-on metrics for measuring ad spends in the Arab world — but everyone agrees the market is only getting bigger.

If I were a studio, I’d want to make sure I was set up to respond to an emerging market in a way that maximized my profit, and my assumption (do correct me if I’m wrong) is that they’d make more for licensing their shows to be broadcast overseas than from licensing remakes. The Middle Eastern market taken as a whole may not be nearly as big as China, where demand and World Trade Organization dispute resolution mean that we’ll get IMAX and 3D-formatted movies for years no matter how irritated American audiences can be by them. But it is growing. And if hoping to tap into growth that gets executives to send word down the wire that they’d like to see a few more characters that will appeal to that opening audience, than commerce and the public interest have the potential to be in alignment. It would be nice for pop culture to play a role in demonstrating how much the joys and aspirations of folks in the U.S. and in Middle Eastern countries are actually in alignment.

I’m still annoyed at Manohla Dargis for thinking that Jennifer Lawrence isn’t starved-enough to play Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, but her conversation with A.O. Scott about where Katniss fits in both the American literary tradition and in the world of female action heroes is excellent. And I want to zero in on her observation here:

By suggesting that Katniss occupied feminine and masculine positions (and is therefore not locked into either), I was inching toward the idea that gender absolutes are less confusing than inapt. I mean, is killing masculine? Is nurturing feminine? Katniss nurtures and she kills, and she does both extremely well. Katniss is a fantasy figure, but partly what makes her powerful — and, I suspect, what makes her so important to a lot of girls and women — is that she’s one of the truest feeling, most complex female characters to hit American movies in a while. She isn’t passive, she isn’t weak, and she isn’t some random girl. She’s active, she’s strong and she’s the girl who motivates the story.

Katniss does evoke the American Adam, and she charts her own course. She’s a rugged individualist who picked herself up by her fashionable bootstraps, but at the same time she’s rooted to her home and to her friend Gale, who gives her companionship, and to her sister, Prim, who gives her love and a reason to live. And while the Hunger Games register as the ultimate social Darwinian nightmare, Katniss triumphs by changing the rules and by forming bonds with other tributes, specifically Rue and Peeta. Last, Rue (who’s played by a biracial actress in the film and is described in the book as having “satiny brown skin”) may narratively function somewhat like Leatherstocking’s Indian companions, yet she is far from the clichéd “noble savage” type.

I found the way the movie handled Rue’s death extremely striking. Rue is speared, Katniss shoots and kills Rue’s attacker, she puts Rue to rest in a striking act of political symbolism—and then she cries, hard, in a way that involves her entire body. The scene was striking because it’s so contrary to the way we’ve tended to frame female action heroines in recent years. They handle acts of violence calmly. The depictions balance out the theoretically masculine skill of competently executing violence is not to make female characters feel the cost of that violence, but by emphasizing that their sexual desirability isn’t compromised by that competence. Black Widow can wear a corset and be tied to a chair and still wreck a bunch of men. The ability to defend themselves or their country doesn’t render men obsolete for these heroines—in fact, it’s violence that heats up the dulled sex lives of the characters in Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

By contrast, the feminine attributes that Katniss is given in addition to her ability to kill, be it animals or people, belong to her. She may be a skilled hunter, but she feels the weight of her murders, which is what they are, no matter how justified. Like Hermione Granger, who does her hair for the Yule Ball and then goes back to her normal routine on the ground that it’s too much trouble afterwards, The Hunger Games is acutely aware of the work that goes into conventional female beauty. Katniss’s appearance is a construction, the work of a stylist and a a prep team, and one she has a complicated and ambivalent relationship with. Unlike many makeover narratives, which are actually about the moral improvement of men who realize they have overlooked women with physical and intellectual value, neither Peeta nor Gale is transformed by the revelation of a stylized Katniss.

And I wonder if that positioning is why, as A.O. Scott puts it, The Hunger Games has upended the accepted wisdom that: “It’s generally assumed that girls can aspire to be like Harry Potter or Spider-Man, or can at least embrace their adventures without undermining their own femininity. But at least within marketing divisions of the culture industry, it is an article of faith that boys won’t pretend to be princesses.” If a character is set up to specifically be not you, and if that character is offered up for your approval and consumption, for the reassurance of your fears and anxieties about what happens when women are empowered, it’s much harder to identify with them than it is to watch a character and wonder what you would do in their situation.

Baseball is back, spring is here, and I couldn’t think of a better day of the year to start catching up on Eastbound & Down. The show, HBO’s lacerating portrait of a former Major League Baseball player who, after alienating the fans of every franchise in America with racist and homophobic tirades and hurting his shoulder, limps back home to South Carolina to teach gym. What’s fascinating about the show is watching a wounded, profoundly un-self-aware man encounter, at an extremely belated age, a situation where he’s required to moderate his behavior and accomodate the needs of other people.

Kenny’s privileged existence means that he behaves inappropriately and treats people terribly. He treats Cassie, his sister-in-law, like she’s his maid, and generally behaves like he’s entitled to permanent residence in his brother’s home. He has so little ability to moderate his behavior around his nephews that one of them begins to see him as a nightmare figure. He frames Stevie, the high school band geek who continues to idolize him, for drunk driving, explaining that he’s got to flee the scene “’cause I got priors.”

But being constantly accommodated has left Kenny with precisely zero sense of how to comport himself in situations that require subtlety or accurate communication. “Fuck time,” he tells Cassie, after they try to sell his memorabilia on eBay with little luck. “I know my past is more valuable than seven bucks.” But it can’t buy him financial security, and it can’t make up for social skills he spent years not developing. After he insults Cassie in a moment of passion, he tells his brother Dustin, “I just have a very hard time expressing my emotions and I can’t stop from yelling.” He can’t stop himself from telling Terrence, the principal who is his boss and engaged to his former girlfriend and fellow teacher April, “You know, I took April’s virginity,” but he does try to walk it back, telling Terrence “I said I don’t want a smoothie,” when Terrence mishears him. Kenny would love to be back in a place where he doesn’t have to feel guilt, or discomfort, or regret. After his attempt at acting as a celebrity spokesman for a local car dealership goes sour, he declares “I’m not an ape. I’m a professional ballplayer. I need to be around people who understand that.” But he recognizes, regretfully, that “I guess Kenny Powers ain’t what it used to be.”

It’s ridiculous that Kenny’s been allowed to get away with being a horrible, inconsiderate person for so wrong. But as a portrait of what privilege denies its recipients, Eastbound & Down is undeniably powerful. Kenny may not be suffering from repeated concussions, or have lost a fortune to gambling. But he’s incapacitated none the less. The people around him may be victimized because their niceness means they can’t respond to Kenny’s ridiculousness in kind—”We bestow our feelings of love towards you by being generous,” Cassie says through gritted teeth. But when Kenny actually wants something from someone who doesn’t need to put up with him, he’s utterly at a loss, pathetic in the same proportion he once was powerful.

I am remiss in not pointing y’all to Saladin Ahmed’s excellent essay on the problematic way George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire handles race and the ways in which HBO’s adaptation has exacerbated those problems. I thought this discussion of the Summer Islanders was particularly interesting:

Unfortunately, some of these depictions partake in some pretty familiar stereotypes about African sexuality. It will be interesting, for example, to see what the show does with Chataya, an associate of Tyrion’s from the Summer Isles, and an upscale brothel madam. Chataya blithely sends her own 16-year-old daughter into prostitution at her “pillow house.”…Again, an entire nonwhite culture is presented as holding skewed values. But this wince-inducing depiction is tempered by some interesting implied questions about sex and commerce and spirituality and culture and power. Here’s hoping there’s a hint of this in the show’s version of things as well.

Part of the challenge of adapting Martin’s novels for television has to do with honoring his skill in constructing jaw-droppingly epic sweeps of plot and setting from beautifully rendered small details. If there’s a saving grace for the racial imagery in A Song of Ice and Fire, it’s in some of these little glimpses and hints that appear throughout – skillful deployment of which on”Game of Thrones” could help make an already good show great.

Race is one of the few areas where I come up short with Game of Thrones—I feel like I can’t construct a good argument from the text for why the Dothraki, for example, are a powerful subversion of fantasy conventions the way I see the novels as a brilliant deconstruction of chivalric myth. And I do think the HBO adaptation has done a disservice to the Dothraki, in particular by giving us no sense of Vaes Dothrak, even as it appears on that map. We get nothing about the idols the Dothraki bring home from raids, and no sense of the matriarchy that rules this nomadic society’s capitol, and only, city. In the novels, part of Dany’s determination to strike out as head of her own khalsar is her determination not to be absorbed into the Dosh Khaleen, the society of widowed former kahleesi who rule in the city—the Dothraki, as it turns out, are somewhat matriarchal, but Dany doesn’t want to be condemned to widow’s purdah without a chance to reclaim the Iron Throne.

I’m moderately optimistic for this season. Without being spoilery, a number of characters of color who we’ll meet in subsequent episodes pop on-screen in a way that prose doesn’t allow for on the page. But nothing really changes the fact that this is a story about the struggle for control in a country that is a stand-in for the nations of the British Isles, and the non-white characters are facilitators or friends of the white protagonists. All of which makes me wish for great high fantasy set in countries that are analogues for African nations. If anyone has suggestions, pass ‘em along.

The bridge is yours.

-Are cable companies about to start dropping Current?

-A sci-fi and fantasy guide for the libertarians in the audience.

-The folks behind The Secret Life of Walter Mitty remake seem determined to make me not hate it.

-Electronic Arts calls the letters it’s been getting from anti-gay groups “political harassment.”

-Funny or Die filmed a West Wing reunion.

Morgan Spurlock, long known for socially conscious documentaries like Super Size Me, his look at the fast food industry, or war on terror exploration Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, is taking on a more personal passion in his latest movie. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope follows aspiring comic book artists taking their portfolios to publishers, costume-builders preparing for the masquerade, comic book vendors facing down an age of digital publishing and declining paper sales, and even a couple heading into an engagement at Kevin Smith’s Hall H panel. And Spurlock talked to geek icons ranging from Stan Lee to Joss Whedon about what it means to come to one of the largest geek gatherings on the planet—or as Whedon put “My tribe! I have found my tribe!”

I spoke to Spurlock about the cultural capital of geekdom, the rise of digital comics publishing, and whether the geek community needs to think harder about sexism and racism. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How long have you been going to Comic Con? How has it changed since you’ve been there?

The very first one I ever went to was in 2009…The comic book conventions when I was a kid, it would be some crusty old guys selling comics, and there would be some collectibles there, and a guy from Star Wars signing autographs in a corner…It’s 180 degress and ten miles away. There’s beocme mainstream success in all of these genres. Video games are now as big as movies. You have comic books that have become number one franchises…It’s become cool to like these things…before, you were the weirdos, the nerd, the freak. Now the weirdos and the freaks are running the franchises. What’s happened is there’s a tremendous cool factor that’s settled in around liking this stuff. It’s cool to wear that out loud.

One thing I noticed about the documentary, which I quite enjoyed, was while you’ve got some women in the mix, there wasn’t a lot of discussion of institutional sexism at Comic Con. You’ve got a guy wrangling slave Leias, but no look at how booth babes are treated or the fact that Comic Con doesn’t have a sexual harassment policy.

There’s tons of things that people would love for this film to talk about. And I’ve made a film that’s what I feel is about the heart and soul of Comic-Con. For me, I made a film that was about the fans. We made a film that has a very strong female character talking about what her passion is, breaking in to this design field. I just wanted to tell a story that got to the heart of fandom.

But given that fans have become so powerful and there’s so much cultural capital you get for being a geek, is it time to stop acting like we’re marginalized and start looking at ourselves as a community internally, particularly at how women and people of color are treated within it?

Sure. I mean, I think that anyone who goes to Comic-Con today will see that there’s a tremendous amount of women at Comic-Con today, as fans, as well as creator. This idea of it being a kind of geeky boy’s club isn’t relevant anymore. I feel like these are things that are kind of transitioning away automatically. I don’t think you need to kind of turn them into a story of their own. For me, as someone who goes there as a fan, I feel like it’s still a place for people with talent to find opportunities. The idea of Comic-Con as geek job fair, we met tons of young comic book artists who were going there to try to pitch their work…male or female, black white or otherwise.
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In what appears to be part of a campaign to help revamp Tucker Max’s image while lessening his tax burden, the misogynist “fratire” writer attempted to donate $500,000 to Planned Parenthood so that the women’s health organization would name a clinic after him. Planned Parenthood rejected the donation last August, apparently while Max was on his way to deliver the check. Max claims that his donation was not a stunt and that he agrees with Planned Parenthood’s mission.

But Max has a funny way of showing that support — what with his offensive tweets about Planned Parenthood and jokes that demean women — and Planned Parenthood made the right move in deciding to not accept his money. Officials should know that a donor has the organization’s best interests at heart. Instead of showing that, Max has joked that he’s paid for so many abortions that Planned Parenthood should name a clinic after him. When Max announced he was retiring from writing about sex and partying, he said he still stood by everything he had said, presumably including the anti-women jokes. So it makes sense that Planned Parenthood would turn him down when Max offers to donate enough money for them to name a clinic after him. It’s not worth it for the organization to then owe something to someone who hasn’t shown that he’s thinking in terms of Planned Parenthood’s best interest.

And as Feminste points out, Planned Parenthood officials would have risked angering other donors or opening themselves up to attack if they had been a part of Max’s publicity stunt. “They decided to avoid the risk that comes from taking money from Tucker Max — because if they took that money, their broader mission could be even more severely impeded,” Feminste’s Jill writes. And yes, Texas Planned Parenthood clinics, where Max tried to donate, could use the funding after Texas Republicans cut off Medicaid funds to the clinics. But the risks that came with naming a clinic after Max were not worth it. Planned Parenthood spokesperson Tait Sye told the Huffington Post that the organization’s donation gift policy spoke for itself. “Like many nonprofits, Planned Parenthood reserves the right to decline offers of gifts and grants that may be discriminatory, are for purposes outside of our mission, or are too difficult to administer,” Sye said.

Months after Max tried to write a check for the group, his press strategist Ryan Holiday took to Forbes yesterday to attack Planned Parenthood for turning down the money and re-frame his client’s public persona. “Planned Parenthood did to Tucker exactly what the Susan G. Komen Foundation had done to Planned Parenthood,” Holiday writes. “Let perception and moral superiority and BS politics get in the way of their real mission of helping people in need.”

But Planned Parenthood is standing by its mission. By refusing to take Max’s money, Planned Parenthood showed it learned an important lesson after the Komen controversy: not to rely on people who may not have its long-term best interests at heart, and who have agendas of their own. The organization still has donors willing to support it, and it will continue to survive the latest attacks by GOP politicians without Max’s $500,000.

Rumors are afoot—though they’ve been quickly denied—that Kristen Wiig, Jason Sudeikis, and Andy Samberg are all leaving Saturday Night Live. Whether it’s true or not, I kind of hope Wiig bounces, not because I care whether the show needs new blood, but because I want to see her go on to do great things as a headliner. I thought she was smart to say she wouldn’t do a Bridesmaids sequel, given how Hollywood gets obsessed with overextending female-led franchises rather than taking successful movies as evidence that the should develop more original ideas starring women. I’d much rather see her go out there and prove that a bunch of different stories about women can be successful than continue to watch her develop franchise characters on SNL. Television had its lady comedy boom. Movies could use her help.