By now, it’s not exactly news to anyone that major events in culture bring out the ugly on Twitter in a big way, but it still made me so sad to see Bruins fans react to their team losing to the Capitals in overtime on a goal by Joel Ward, one of not very many black players in the National Hockey League, with ugly racist outbursts. Sports history in Boston are a mixed bag when it comes to racial equality. The Bruins were the team that integrated the National Hockey League, and the Celtics were the first integrated National Basketball Association team. The Red Sox were the last Major League Baseball team to integrate, giving Jackie Robinson a tryout only under pressure from the Boston City Council, and when they did bring on a black player, deliberately choose Pumpsie Green, who didn’t have the chops to be a first-stringer. Their loss in the 1967 World Series may have been in part due to the team’s lingering racism and failure to go after the best players. One of the smartest things the team’s current ownership group ever did was decide to discuss that legacy directly and to take actions to rebuild the Red Sox relationship with Boston’s black community. But it’s easier to clean house on an institution than to move all the people with ties to or affection for that institution forward. This kind of reaction is a disgrace to the Bruins legacy, and it might be nice if Bruins players and management spoke up and said as much.

In a game of TV critic merry-go-round, Time’s James Poniewozik catches something interesting in an interview Huffington Post’s Maureen Ryan did with Parks & Recreation producer Mike Schur:

Another tidbit from the interview that struck me was Schur’s saying—prompted by a question from Ryan—that the show would love to be a kind of comedy version of The Wire. I don’t want to overplay that quote; he doesn’t seem to be inflating the show so much as saying that The Wire is a standard to aspire to, and maybe that Parks would like to create the same kind of broad civic world, within the context of a less realistic network comedy. And Parks, as Ryan says, has a much more optimistic outlook than The Wire.

But it’s interesting to see that in the light of our discussion yesterday of David Simon’s disappointment about The Wire’s reception since it’s gone off the air: that it seems to be remembered more as an entertainment than for its specific view of social institutions and the drug war. It’s pretty plain that The Wire did not change American drug and policing policy, but this is also a little reminder that there’s more than one way for a show to be influential. If a show like The Wire has made a little NBC sitcom slightly more thoughtful about how institutions and communities work—that’s not exactly changing the world, but it’s something to be happy about, anyway.

I agree that would be a legacy that’s both entertaining and constructive, especially if it means that more shows look for the realistic drama in existing institutions. Parks & Recreation is different from most shows in that it draws its comedy from lowering stakes rather than artificially jacking them up. The first major conflict the show dealt with was trying to fill in a hole. One of the biggest collective tragedies the characters have experienced was the death of a mini horse. The show doesn’t make fun of the characters for investing so much in relatively small things. Instead, it respects them, and the show’s signature mix of comedy and kindness comes from that framing. If part of Schur’s goal is to use the show to explore more of Pawnee’s bureaucracy and institutions, that’s also a good argument for Leslie winning the City Council race so we can see more of city government.

It’ll be an interesting question whether other shows start drawing the same realistic drama from existing institutional imperatives. That’s probably an easier thing for comedies to do than dramas, if only because the networks have conditioned us to expect such big stakes in the latter. If the President’s mistress isn’t knocked up a la Scandal, a small child isn’t in horrible danger, or the world isn’t at risk, shows seem to feel they’re not doing their duty. I’ll be curious to see what comes of the show that The Wire’s Ed Burns and Amber Tamblyn are supposed to be working on about a school: it’s not in the pilot cycle this year, so we’ll have to see what happens. But one of the consequences of The Wire having a lot of journalists and novelists writing episodes (in additional to the different perspective they brought) is that it’s not like the show spun off a huge number of TV writers who are now selling shows of their own. Its creative influence might be less clear to trace, but Schur can’t be the only one who’s looking to The Wire as an influence, and interpreting that influence in clever and surprising ways.

One of the most notable things about Obama’s appearance on Late Night to me was the moment when he shouted out Comedy Central’s Key & Peele, specifically their sketches centered around a character called Luther, who is meant to be Obama’s “Anger Translator”:

Obama said his staff had brought it to him, calling it “pretty good stuff.” The original sketch appears here:

When I talked to Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele in February, I asked them about the origins of the Anger Translator sketches. “It was in the height of the second Birther renaissance,” Peele told me. It felt like there were a bunch of things that were not being said that should have been said…We’re all thinking in our heads what we all hope he’s thinking, but he has to maintain his composure. Key added that “I think [the presidency] is a miserable straightjacket for anybody…The president frames things in a much more 18th-century way, “You’re reasonable people and I expect you to look at facts.” He’ll do that through actions as well as words, and that’s threatening to people.”

I think to have Obama acknowledge that desire, what Peele referred to as “a guiltily orgasmic moment” of watching someone speaking for the president express fierce, funny, frothing impatience with the more insane of his critics, is powerful. He’s not satisfying that urge directly, but in a way he’s putting himself on the couch next to us, looking at his public persona from the outside. He can’t give us what we want, and we might not really want it should such an explosion come to pass. But it’s a riff that suggests, despite the birth certificate press conference and the maddening, infinite patience, he is with us in recognizing the ridiculousness.

The bridge is yours.

-A great examination of dystopian fashion.

-How TV networks fall apart.

-Some early pictures from the set of Django Unchained.

-Judge condescendingly declares that documentary filmmaking can’t be a for-profit activity, gets a lesson.

-Having better cameras doesn’t mean everything has to look the same, does it?

For those of you looking for a place to vote with your dollars in favor of more diverse depictions of New York in general and Brooklyn in particular, I’d humbly submit that you should be getting really, really excited for Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer, which was one of my two favorite movies at Sundance this year. It’s a glorious movie, often joyful, sometimes shattering, about the black church, about white gentrifiers who freak out when African-American kids write their initials in her cement, about air pollution and asthma and the high cost of inhalers, about falling in love for the first time when you’re a young teenager. I would be willing to lay money that the horror with which Lee’s Sundance pronouncement that Hollywood doesn’t care much for or about black people was greeted is part of the reason it’s taken so long for Red Hook Summer to find distribution. I’m also willing to bet that the movie will be criticized for its frank politics and for its attention to Lee’s personal areas of interest—Deadline, for some reason, has decided that it’s “controversial,” which says more about Deadline than Lee or Red Hook Summer. If you’re in New York, mark your calendars for August 10 for the movie’s release date. The rest of us will have to wait a little bit longer.

I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I will be spending my White House Correspondents Association Dinner watching punk rock documentaries and drinking wine. But the whole thing is a hilarious spectacle, particularly the rush by news organizations to secure high-profile guests at their tables. And these are the funniest, most revealing guests each of the outlets have scored this year—that we know of so far.

ABC: Christa Miller and Bill Lawrence of Cougar Town. The network keeps the show in limbo forever, but hey, it’ll throw the folks involved some rubber chicken!

AFP: Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of Mythbusters. Oddly appropriate for a newsgathering organization.

Atlantic Media: Sex and the City‘s Darren Starr. Did Carrie ever score a byline in The Atlantic? Her fights with big would fit her in just fine among some of the magazine’s other female regulars.

Bloomberg: Zooey Deschanel. Clear win for odd couple of the evening

CBS: Homeland star Claire Danes. Blatant, but brilliant, Obama-pandering.

Fox: Lindsay Lohan. Not that Fox engages in tabloid journalism or anything.

Huffington Post: True Blood stars and parents-to-be Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer, who will also edit HuffPo’s Vampire Parenting section.

The New Yorker: Portlandia stars and New Yorker profile subjects Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, who presumably will enquire after the welfare of their rubber chicken.

Newsweek/The Daily Beast: Reese Witherspoon, who will totally play Tina Brown in the inevitable biopic.

People: Peeta, we mean, Josh Hutcherson, who will be a mystery to the core WHCA dinner demographic.

POLITICO: MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt who should make for the evening’s most awkward table pairing.

USA Today: Kelli Garner of Pan Am. Well, maybe not anymore. But I guess they could have bet on the Playboy Club?

And though I’m generally loath to yield them pride of place, the Washington Times totally schools the Washington Post. The latter scored Pierce Brosnan. The former, The Artist scene-stealer Uggie.

The New York Times reports that, in the first year that National Endowment for the Arts’ Arts in Media grants were open to gaming and web-based projects, those projects ended up winning funding ahead of established PBS programs:

Among the PBS programs receiving significantly less funding are “Live from Lincoln Center,” which was granted $100,000 last year and nothing this year. The Metropolitan Opera received $50,000 to support its national “Great Performances at the Met” telecasts, $100,000 less than last year. WNET received $50,000 to support other “”Great Performances” productions and the same amount for “American Masters,” compared to $400,000 for each last year.

“The PBS NewsHour” will receive $50,000, half that of 2011, for arts segments; independent documentary series “Independent Lens” will get $50,000, down from $170,000, and documentary series “POV” will receive $100,000, down from $250,000.

WNET, however, did receive $75,000 towards production of a new series, “The Electric Animation Festival,” and its companion Web site, and PBS received $50,000 to support the creation of mobile apps for its arts initiative. A number of other individual documentary films and smaller programs also received funds, as in years past, as did NPR, and numerous public radio productions.

Opening up the grants to more kinds of media projects makes a great deal of strategic sense for the NEA: it lets the organization meet arts consumers where they’re at, makes the organization look forward-thinking in supporting projects that might not garner support or be treated like priorities within their industries but still have important potential, and frankly, it also gives the NEA bases of support in industries that might previously have been indifferent to the organization, or the cause of public funding for the arts. But it does raise a fundamentally tricky question for the NEA in the future. How much of the organization’s work should focus on keeping alive high culture that has wealthy patrons but trouble attracting a new generation of mass-market attendees? And how much should it focus on driving the culture of the future? Obviously these priorities aren’t mutually exclusive, but they are competing for resources, and I do wonder how the mix is going to shake out.