There’s been a sense, I think, that AMC struck gold with Mad Men, its advertising-in-the-1960s product of an auteur that arrived very fully formed and confident in itself, and the network has struggled to define its identity since. The Walking Dead is a big, gross, violent popular entertainment that’s struggled to maintain its artistic equilibrium this season. AMC and Veena Sud managed the expectations around The Killing poorly, so a totally solid show left its audience feeling hugely betrayed. And Hell on Wheels felt like a cheap Deadwood ripoff, with the addition of a Wronged Confederate and a poorly-executed stab at racial insight. But Deadline has a list of the pilots AMC is apparently considering, and a lot of them sound pretty fantastic:

I hear the six scripts that made the cut this year are: Chris Mundy‘s Low Winter Sun, an adaptation of the New Zealand Gothic murder mystery series, Craig Silverstein‘s Turn, about George Washington’s spy ring, Richard LaGravenese‘s Philly Lawyer, about a law student, Jake Paltrow & Robbie Kinberg‘s Crystal Pines, about a journalist who gets cloned, Jason Cahill‘s F/V Mean Tide, about a Maine lobster fishing family, and Kerry Williamson‘s Sacred Games, an epic story of crime and punishment in modern Mumbai based on the novel by Vikram Chandra.

Concept-wise, I think Turn, Crystal Pines, F/V Mean Tide, and Sacred Games sound most promising. Turn would be both a new kind of period show and an answer to the dearth of Revolutionary War stories in pop culture, a weird omission I’ve noted before. And Washington’s spies were a fascinating group that included women and Quakers as well as your conventional breed of dudely badass, and they ran operations including my personal favorite, the effort to getting Hessian mercenaries to defect en masse by offering them land and getting them snugly with American women they then felt compelled to marry. Crystal Pines would be an awesome opportunity for a single actor to play two roles. The lobster wars portrayed in F/V Mean Tide are a real thing and would be a rich story engine in a novel setting. And I would love so much for a show set in India that isn’t Outsourced. Mad Men stands out because it’s a highly, highly original concept rather than a riff on an existing one. AMC needs to display that confidence again.

Last year, when Entertainment Weekly asked Mike Fleiss, who created The Bachelor and its spinoff, The Bachelorette, if there would ever be a non-white Bachelor or Bachelorette, he told them “I think Ashley is 1/16th Cherokee Indian, but I cannot confirm. But that is my suspicion! We really tried, but sometimes we feel guilty of tokenism. Oh, we have to wedge African-American chicks in there! We always want to cast for ethnic diversity, it’s just that for whatever reason, they don’t come forward. I wish they would.” Given that sort of flip thinking, it’s not surprising that in 23 seasons of both shows, they’ve never found an African-American man or woman willing to go through a courtship charade on national television and actually make a commitment to get married at the end of it.

And with that track record, I’m not exactly shocked that ABC will get hit with a class-action lawsuit against the franchise tomorrow, alleging that it practices racial discrimination. There’s an extent to which I’m sort of discouraged by the idea that this could be the way we end up getting more people of color on television, that the goal is to crack trashy reality television before prestige drama or comedy. But as I’ve written before, the right to be undignified, even ridiculous, without having your behavior reflect on every group that you’re a member of is perhaps the truest sign of equality. Maybe this is just a way of skipping ahead in the process.

Normally I wouldn’t do this, but Cabin in the Woods relies so much on the element of surprise, that you should not read this post if you haven’t seen it and care about being spoiled on it.

As I wrote after seeing the movie at SXSW, Cabin in the Woods, I wrote that the movie is a fantastic extension of Joss Whedon’s long-running interests in the bureaucracy of evil and the beauty of the monstrous. The work that Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford are given to do as the control room operators of the Apocalypse, the torture pornographers who happen to be humanity’s saviors, is just a delightful, funny, sensitive use of both men. And the gorgeousness of Whedon and Goddard’s monsters is something to behold—I found myself unexpectedly moved by the man with the gears embedded in his skull and the ballerina dentata that Dana and Marty encounter in the elevator.

But I was disappointed by one element of the movie, which felt to me like a bit of a regression from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the treatment of Jules, the blonde sexpot who is the first of the characters to get killed by the murderous hillbillies the friends unwittingly unleashed in the basement. Whedon told Vulture that he sees Jules’ character as an attempt to answer some of the same questions as Buffy was:

Cabin isn’t overtly a feminist work necessarily, but it is built on the same question that built Buffy the Vampire Slayer: If you have a blonde who is perfectly nice and funny, why are you intent on her coming to a bad end? What is the purpose of the final girl, as she’s called? All these people, all the characters behave a certain way, and there is a progression of what they have to do, to allow themselves to be written off as sex fiends or druggies or bullies or complete idiots in the face of true danger, and you just don’t get in the way of that. It’s about being stereotypes versus fleshed-out people. There was never a question — the nudity had to happen, because the movie is about objectification and identification and that’s what horror is about. Drew and I were not unhappy if the hot blonde took off her shirt — hey, we thought it was a good decision! — but mixing titillation and mutilation started to become a very weird confluence. It’s not the same kind of pleasure for us. Those are two separate things. But that’s the foundation of what we knew was part of the film, and we were the most timid filmmakers ever about it.

But Jules’ character is the one that’s least-played with, the least-subverted, and the one we see suffer the longest. We learn that Dana isn’t really a virgin—she’s just the best the people orchestrating the sacrifice have to work with. Curt, the giant jock, turns out to be a pre-med smarty. Stoner Marty’s protected from the malign influences of the people manipulating them because the pot he’s smoking ends up inoculating him to the pheromones they’re pumping into the cabin, and he’s the one who figures out how to get them into the complex. (Holden doesn’t get much of a fair shake either, and it’s too bad that both of the characters of color in the movie are somewhat quiet and detached). But we don’t get a clear debunking of whatever stereotypes we’re supposed to have about Jules. Clearly, she’s being influenced by the chemicals, the heightened moonlight. But we don’t know what her base behavior is like, whether she and Curt were already sleeping together (though I assumed so) before the trip, why her actions here are surprising—when we meet her, after all, she’s bugging Dana to be less of a prude.

I asked Whedon about this at South By Southwest, where he seemed kind of irritated by the question, telling me that “I don’t think Jules comes off as dumb…We did want to be making that movie at the same time that we were talking about that movie and making images that were sexual and sometimes exploitive.” (After that line drew a lot of applause, he noted “I don’t think I’ve ever been applauded for exploitation before.”) I agree with Whedon that those things aren’t incompatible. And a movie is always going to offer less time to develop its characters and debunk simple tropes than a television show us. But I was sorry there wasn’t a little more detail in there, something that would have heightened the sense that even if, in the balance, the world isn’t worth saving, there’s some real pain in the loss. If anything, Cabin in the Woods feels like it’s coming from Willow before Xander talks her down at the end of Buffy season six, rather than Buffy herself.

The bridge is yours.

-Hopefully this will be the show that theater nerds deserve and aren’t getting from Smash.

-Trying to bridge Christian cinema and mainstream movies.

-Reward tiers may bring in Kickstarter donors, but they also chew up a lot of the money projects raise.

-How long are nostalgia cycles?

-What’s weirder? Holographic Tupac or robot Michael Fassbender?

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has figured out an extraordinarily effective formula for pushing back against homophobia in the media: they’re good at isolating everything from stupid Twitter posts to egregious on-air remarks, mobilizing the public, and scoring everything from a suspension for CNN’s Roland Martin to donated time and work from director Brett Ratner after he said in an impressive display of idiocy that “rehearsal is for fags,” comments that cost him a gig directing the Oscars. But the success of that formula also means that GLAAD spends time going after people like Kirk Cameron, the conservative former 80s star who is now essentially a Christian entertainer, and who is, unsurprisingly, not a huge fan of gay people. It’s one thing to call out egregiously hateful, bullying, inaccurate remarks, particularly in contexts where those remarks make gay people less safe or directly affect policy. It’s another to call for total homogeneity in public discourse, even to the extent of silencing people who can only discredit themselves by speaking.

So I’ll be particularly interested to see in which direction Herndon Graddick, the new president of GLAAD, takes the organization. As Deadline points out, he’s worked on campaigns both to defend gay entertainers from boycotts, and to call commentators to account for things they say about gay people. And I wonder if the first half of that equation might actually hold the key to GLAAD’s future.

It’s absolutely true that we’ve got a lot more gay characters, and gay entertainers in pop culture than we did even a decade ago. But there are serious limitations to those portrayals. We can have settled gay couples like Mitch and Cam on Modern Family, but we don’t exactly have a lot in the way of romantic comedies between gay men (though Happy Endings is making some strides in this regard), much less serious sexual chemistry between gay men on network on television. There are very, very few lesbian characters anywhere in popular culture. There are almost no queer people of color—something like Pariah is still rare, and reserved for indie release. And gay love stories get marketed as gay stories first and broadly appealing love stories second, the kind of thing general audiences are supposed to feel good for watching rather than watching primarily because they’ll enjoy it.

This is an area where GLAAD could focus on getting more portrayals of gay people, and gay issues in the media, rather than simply shutting down negative remarks and negative characterizations. If straight writers and directors don’t feel confident in their ability to create credible gay characters and tell credible gay stories, GLAAD could provide a gut and details check. If folks want to work those characters and those issues into their work but don’t know where to start, GLAAD could provide ideas and fact-checks down the road. Shutting down negative portrayals at best gets us to neutral. And it’s much harder to create new things than to protest existing ones, but that’s actually much more essential work.

There have been on-and-off efforts over the year to get a stunts category into the Academy Awards, and apparently those conversations are starting up again. As someone who would like to see more movies like Casino Royale or District 9 to be in Oscar contention, and for action movies to have more incentives to think of themselves as Oscar-worthy and to raise their game correspondingly, I think I’m in favor of such an addition, pending what the final categories look like, of course.

I’m also in favor of this for the same reason that I support some sort of collaborative performance category to recognize performances like Andy Serkis’: such categories would serve as an important reminder that the movies are a craft as much as they’re an art, and that they can’t exist without the people who do things that stars won’t, either because they require a different set of skills, or because they’re dangerous. A lot of what funds the ability of pretty, elegant people to do pretty, elegant things on screen (or, alternatively, to surrender their beauty and poise in ritual artistic acts of self-abnegation) is the work that’s done by these people to make movies that are exciting, and propulsive, and that sometimes are dumb but don’t inherently have to be. Action sequences can be as compelling, and as witty, as good dialogue. Movies like Mission Impossible IV and Casino Royale have been particularly good at using fights to joke about and comment on characters from the first and third worlds. And Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a decidedly more mediocre movie without the fight that destroys the main characters’ soul-sucking suburban facade and resurrects their sexual connection. That’s work, and it draws a lot of people to the movies, and it should be recognized for that, though it might make sense to start the category out small to set a consistently high bar.

I’m recommending this piece for sheer weirdness, because Joe Rhodes’ story of how his awful aunt became estranged from her family, took up with a gay funeral director who was generally considered the nicest man in her Texas town, how he murdered her impulsively, and how the whole mess became the Jack Black movie Bernie is something to behold:

I was living in Los Angeles when Aunt Marge was murdered in 1996 and hadn’t been to Carthage, where I was born, in quite a few years. I went back for the trial in 1998 because, let’s face it, it’s not often that someone in your family becomes the focus of a sensational murder case, on the local news for weeks at a time, the circumstances of her demise so tawdry and bizarre that the story appeared in People magazine, on “Hard Copy” and, eventually, on the guilty-pleasure pinnacle of true-crime cable-TV programs, “City Confidential.” And there was something about Aunt Marge’s ending up in a freezer that seemed appropriate. She’d always been kind of coldhearted. It was not an unfitting end.

Aunt Marge wasn’t on speaking terms with anyone in her immediate family when she died. Not my mother, with whom she’d had an ugly falling out over the terms of my grandfather’s will. Not her only child, Rod Nugent Jr., a successful Amarillo pathologist she hadn’t seen in years, or her grandchildren, who sued her over some trust money she wouldn’t let them have. When informed that Marge died, the first thing my Aunt Sue, her other sister, said was, “What a relief.”

There’s a lot of talk about how reality television enables people to humiliate themselves for money. But we never needed camera crews following us everywhere to voice unacceptable emotions in art. It’s pretty impressively cold to be comfortable saying things this unflattering about your murdered relative, and to work out your emotions about her murder through a black comedy. I’m not sure it’s behavior I would want to engage in myself, but I’m not sure I can quite condemn it either.