You know, I just can’t get myself that excited to root for a bunch of uber-violent, rogue cops and an extralegal approach to law enforcement, no matter how many handsome men you have doing it, as in Gangster Squad:

This isn’t cool or admirable. And it’s a kind of approach that ends with innocent people brutalized and dead. Give me American Gangster any day, which glorified a straight-up approach to law enforcement and cast police corruption for the ugly thuggery it is.

Looking back, superhero movies and a boom in Middle Eastern terrorists on television and film were probably the inevitable pop culture responses the September 11 attacks, the former a fantasy of stopping the worst before it happens without loss of life and treasure, the latter an attempt to personify an enemy most Americans hadn’t even considered. But while most of these cultural references have been more allusion than direct reference, the Joker’s demented drag as a substitute for Osama bin Laden, Oded Fehr in Sleeper Cell instead of Mohammad Atta, The Avengers and The Dictator both seem to me to be addressing September 11 and its aftermath with unusual directness, if to very different effect.

The Avengers is hardly the first post-9/11 movie to have superheroes rampage through New York, causing property damage and loss of life along the way. But I was struck, in the moment when Thor, doing battle with his brother Loki atop Stark Tower, forces him to look out at the city Loki’s forces were laying waste to, trying to force him to recognize the stupid, destructive futility of his attack. The crash of alien invaders into skyscrapers was one of the most striking visual allusions to the September 11 attacks I’ve seen in an action movie, flowers of fire blooming from pillars of steel in an eruption of violence hugely more widespread than the terror accomplished by 19 angry men in three hijacked planes.

The buildings didn’t fall. We didn’t have to go to war, because we could shut the border between our world and the one from which our enemies came. We didn’t even have to conduct a mop-up operation or interrogate detainees because when that portal closed, the invaders collapsed like toys (interestingly, while in Avengers captivity, Loki assumes he’ll be tortured and Nick Fury certainly seems prepared to do so, but it’s Black Widow who talks information out of the mad god without touching him). This isn’t just a fantasy of an easy dynamic, of revenge on the bad guys as Adam Serwer has written at Mother Jones. It’s a dream of resilience and clean war, where we can suffer greater losses and survive; where we can solve our problem without putting as many men and women at risk of death, deformity, or traumatic brain injury; where we can end the war in a day; where we can avoid doing grievous harm to ourselves and our values in the process.

The Dictator doesn’t perform alchemy on our post-9/11 fears, it mocks them. Sacha Baron Cohen’s upcoming comedy about a Middle Eastern dictator adrift in New York City takes on issues ranging from anti-Arab sentiment. But it also features an extended joke, which appears at the end of this red band trailer, that derives its humor from the idea that a pair of tourists in a helicopter are stupid to think that they might be the victims of a 9/11 style attack again:

It’s a poor choice of target. Publications like The Onion and Modern Humorist dived in immediately after 9/11 to start making fun of the hijackers themselves, and the Taliban and al Qaeda more broadly, turning them into small, delusional, murderous, isolated men rather than giving them the deference of treating them like an existential threat to the United States. It’s that kind of thinking that leads to raids to take out Osama bin Laden directly, rather than grinding wars that have accomplished little more than giving the sense that the country responding with force equal to the trauma we felt on September 11 itself. If you want to make fun of that trauma, it makes more sense to mock the things that it’s made us do to ourselves, be it the threat level system, invasive TSA searches, or watch lists. For all the movie’s other fantasies, Bruce Banner’s indignant request to know why “Captain America’s on a threat list?” in The Avengers says a lot more about the idiocies of post-9/11 vigilance than mocking the terror of two middle-aged tourists who think they’re about to die.

In tonight’s finale of Parks & Recreation, we’ll find out if Leslie Knope won or lost the City Council seat she’s been campaigning for all season, but it’s still not clear if we’ll return to Pawnee next season to see Leslie take her place alongside Councilman Hauser in victory or revitalize the Parks Department in defeat. The same is true for Greendale Community College and the TGS writers’ room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The speculation is that 30 Rock will be back for a short season, and that if Parks & Rec and Community get pickups, they’ll be shorter orders as well. That might mean fewer episodes of shows we love. But creatively, it strikes me as a good thing.

I’m a long-time advocate of shorter seasons, and I think we’ve seen a lot of illustrations of the foibles of trying to fit 22-episode orders into a 40-week period this year. Revenge‘s long hiatus slowed the momentum of the ABC Hamptons-set thriller down to a crawl, and the show’s gotten baroque and full of moody shots in its attempt to fill up episode space since its return. Community‘s disappearance from NBC’s airwaves for an agonizing and indefinite period left fans waiting, and while NBC tossed out and then yanked sitcoms like Best Friends Forever and Bent in quick succession. Now I understand that shows fail, networks need to replace things that aren’t working at all, and fans don’t want to wait a long time for their favorite shows to come back. But I’d much rather see short, excellent seasons of shows that are suited to it, and to see them run continuously rather than spaced out in seemingly random ways.

NBC’s Thursday night comedies seem uniquely suited to shorter, smarter seasons. 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation‘s shortened seasons were their best for entirely different reasons. 30 Rock‘s second season was shortened by the writers’ strike, but it was a hilarious, joke-dense season. “SeinfeldVision” and “MILF Island” were fantastic riffs on the industry that preceded the “Queen of Jordan” running gag the show is using now. “Greenzo” featured two of the show’s best-ever cameos in David Schwimmer and Al Gore. And “Sandwich Day” turned Liz’s love of food into a sign of something other than middle-aged singleton schlubbiness. No one has ever made scarfing a sub look so poignant before or since.

Parks and Recreation‘s shortened third season had tons of great comedic beats as well, but it also illustrated how sitcoms can pull off strong serialization without dropping plotlines for a long stretch of episodes or producing episodes that don’t work as standalones. The stated major arc of the season was the question of whether Ben and Leslie would get together, a will-they-or-won’t-they that fit neatly into a wide variety of settings. And it turned out that Leslie’s victories in restoring the Harvest Festival, over her rivals in Eagleton, and in organizing Lil’ Sebastian’s funeral were actually setting up Leslie being asked to run for office. The show didn’t always hit the same beats, and in fact in episodes like “April and Andy’s Fancy Party” and “The Fight,” we got to see a number of the vulnerabilities that would plague Leslie in her campaign this season, namely her desire for control.

The 22-odd episode season may be an industry convention, but that doesn’t mean it’s a creative imperative. If the 2012-2013 season is going to be the last year we have 30 Rock, Parks & Recreation and Community, I’d rather have one of those shows on every night for 36 to 45 straight weeks (with exceptions for holidays), and to have those episodes be uniformly excellent, no filler. And if television’s really just about selling soap, I’ve got to believe it might sell better with new programming rather than reruns and schedule gaps.

The bridge is yours.

-I’m enjoying Neil Drumming’s diary of making his movie.

-Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright are starting work on the final movie in their trilogy.

-DirectTV is ordering an original series starring Thandie Newton as a cop.

-Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler are going to star in a romantic comedy parody. I could not be more excited.

-This Grimes video is not entirely safe for work if your workplace is conservative, but it’s pretty darn gorgeous:

Three weeks ago, The L.A. Complex debuted on the CW to the lowest ratings for a broadcast drama, ever. It’s too bad, because this spiky little Canadian show about a group of actors, comics, producers and dancers who live in the same run-down Los Angeles apartment complex is great fun, an improvement both on standard aspiring-starlet stories like Smash, and on theoretically sophisticated takes on modern romance.

Smash‘s biggest problem all season has been that the competition between Ivy and Karen hasn’t felt realistically heated. With Ivy’s experience and her resemblance to Marilyn, it seems obvious that she’d be cast in the lead and Karen was the understudy. The show’s had to spend a lot of time giving Karen chances to sing and showing audiences reacting to her like she’s the Best Thing Ever and giving Ivy the silliest drug problem on television since Saved By The Bell to gin up any sort of drama.

The L.A. Complex, on the other hand, has conflicts that are actually rooted in Hollywood double standards. Abby Vargas, a young aspiring actress who’s been living in her car and making a lot of other bad life decisions, ends up competing with Raquel Westbrook, an older actress on the downswing played with a beautiful bitterness by Jewel Staite. When Abby beats out Raquel for a part, it turns out to be not much of a prize at all: her big break turns out to be playing a dead hooker on a crime show where her lines and her pay cut get cut correspondingly. The fights are so big because the stakes are so small, as when Nick Wagner, an aspiring stand-up comic whose material is flopping finally gets applause by viciously insulting a more successful female comic with whom he had an embarrassing one-night stand.

The relationships have the same kind of heft that Smash, which has recycled through tired affairs, starlets sleeping with directors, and the standard idiot pop-culture move of someone proposing after cheating, lacks. Sure, when Abby sleeps with Connor, the most successful actor of the bunch who’s beginning to shoot his new pilot, we’re not surprised when she catches him sleeping with someone else. But L.A. Complex, rather than making the arc solely about her naivete and vulnerability, has focused on Connor’s self-hatred and destructive tendencies. Other than Rescue Me, there’s not another show that’s dared to depict a male character self-harming, a practice typically reserved in pop culture to signify female teenaged angst (Jess’s cutting joke on the season finale of New Girl was an uncomfortably off moment, I thought).

The show’s subverted our expectations in other ways, too. When Alicia, a talented young dancer, clicks with a former child star who covers for her at her job at a strip club so she can make auditions, we expect to see them date. In a subsequent episode, he sets up for what seems like it might be an entirely-too-soon proposal. Instead, he asks her to make a sex tape with him to jump-start both their careers. And once they’re shooting, he’s shy, and awkward, obsessed with lighting and unable to actually get started. It’s Alicia who takes the lead in a moment that’s neither do-me feminism nor slut shaming: this is the best of the bad options, and she’s making the most of it.

And perhaps the best part of L.A. Complex has been that it’s put a gay couple with actual sexual chemistry on television. Brian Stelter wrote at the New York Times yesterday that pop culture appears to have accepted gay couples completely. But the truth is that’s more narrow that it seems: television loves married, settled gay couples, but it doesn’t actually treat gay people like straight people, giving them heated romances, sex scenes, and love interests with whom they have actual sexual chemistry. On Modern Family, established couple Mitch and Cam have essentially no physical sparks whatsoever—the show even had an episode that attempted to explain that the couple isn’t fond of public displays of affection as a way to explain away their lack of heat. I love Happy Endings, which gave schlumphy Max a hot love interest in the form of James Wolk, but the show still stopped far short of their bedroom door. Even Game of Thrones, which gave its gay king and loyal knight and lover hot makeouts wouldn’t go where it’s gone with almost everyone else on the show, and let them have on-screen sex.

But on The L.A. Complex, gay men get treated like everyone else. When Tariq Muhammad, an up-and-coming hip-hop producer gets assigned to work with superstar rapper Kaldrick King, the older man spends a day testing Tariq as they meander through Los Angeles. And at the end of that day, Kaldrick makes a veiled invitation to Tariq. The staredown between them before they kiss and fall into bed is one of the more sexually charged moments to appear on television this season. As commercial as it is, that moment does something that almost no pop culture does: treats gay people as if watching them fall in love and have sex is as interesting and as natural as seeing them as sexless, domesticated marrieds.

I hadn’t seen the covers for the Game of Thrones comics adaptation until Latoya Peterson tweeted this one out in horror:

It’s amazing how even an original, powerful franchise with its own following can get squished into comic book conventions even when they don’t fit very well. Here, Dany’s a standard comic-book babe with an impossibly tiny waist and significant-sized breasts, even though her character has just hit puberty in the scene from the novel depicted here. Even if she’s been aged up, as she was in the show to make the depiction of her marriage to a Ghengis Khan-like barbarian less problematic, the way she’s portrayed here is about serving her up as a delectable object, not to explain how frightening what’s about to happen to her is.

Even worse may be this cover:

The scene that’s depicted here? The one where Dany looks like she’s having an orgasm? It’s the moment after she, in extreme grief at the loss of her husband and the fact she’s been abandoned by her people, does something that everyone around her thinks is suicidal, but that turns out to be an act of vision that makes her a critically important and sought-after leader. Also, all her hair burns off. But no, that couldn’t possibly be what’s important here. What’s important is that she look devourable, whether by dragons or by men.

I always enjoy reading Clive Thompson’s columns at Wired, so it was fun to see him defend fan fiction in those pages this week:

Why would worldplay make you more creative in your career? Probably because, as the Root-Bernsteins point out, it requires practical creativity. Fleshing out a universe demands not just imagination but an attention to detail, consistency, rule sets, and logic. You have to grapple with constraints — just as when you’re problem-solving at work.

This is why I’m so bullish about our teeming world of participatory fan culture. We live in a golden age of paracosmic play. As fandom scholars like blogger and USC professor Henry Jenkins have documented, today’s young people routinely build off their favorite cultural universes — writing new stories, creating game mods, shooting fan videos. It’s not sui generis creativity — they’re working with preexisting worlds — but it exercises the same creative muscles. I suspect society will reap the benefits in decades to come.

I’m of several minds about this. There’s no question that fan fiction’s been a valuable platform for authors like Cassandra Clare, whose Mortal Instruments fantasy series is about to be a big-budget movie, or E.L. James, whose Fifty Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fan fiction and has become a smash that’s headed for a film adaptation of its own, to cut their teeth before putting their work up for sale. Like most of us, I get a lot of joy out of mashups and supercuts and remakes, which can be acts of analysis and criticism as much as they’re works of art. And I’ve read After the End, a novel-length sequel to the Harry Potter franchise more times than I am actually willing to admit publicly.

But I’m genuinely curious about the effects of creating a world as opposed to playing in a world created and governed by someone else. Does the impact of the kind of creative work Thompson is talking about come from playing with the characters, or creating the boundaries and rules and keeping track of them yourself? Is there a difference between the maintenance of a private universe that you have to sell other people on, and participating in an established fandom where everyone is on board with not just the rules of the world but the broad riffs on it that most people participate in? I think it’s silly to denigrate people who write fan fiction or read it, but I’m also curious about it as a specific phenomenon, how it intersects with the rise of self-publishing and the decline of book editors, and what it means that we want to spend so much time in these fictional worlds not of our own creations.