It’s been so long I sort of worry that I’ve forgotten how to take time off, but starting tomorrow, I’m going to try to relearn how to take a vacation, including this whole Staying Off the Internet thing. By which I mean I’m going to San Francisco to see a Giants game and to give a Game of Thrones-inspired toast at my best friend’s wedding, and then to Los Angeles for some meetings and set visits. I’ll be back middayish next Wednesday.

In the interim, you’re going to have some deeply awesome guest bloggers. Usual rules apply: be excellent to them and to each other, and think before you post, keeping in mind that these folks are honored visitors. And now, to introductions:

Alli Thresher (who has hung out with us before) is a jill of all trades from Boston, Massachusetts. By day she works on hit video games, by night she’s a performer and activist. She has been trying to curb her twitter addiction and channel that energy into more creative (productive) pursuits. Underneath it all she’s very much a contented geek with a penchant for collecting vintage clothing, retro video games, graphic novels and antique mortuary supplies.

s.e. smith is a writer, agitator, and commentator based in Northern California, with a journalistic focus on social issues, particularly gender, prison reform, disability rights, environmental justice, queerness, class, and the intersections thereof, with a special interest in rural subjects. International publication credits include work for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, and AlterNet, among many other news outlets and magazines. Assisted by cats Loki and Leila, smith lives in Fort Bragg, California.

Scott Meslow is an entertainment writer for TheAtlantic.com and a film and television critic based in Washington, D.C. Scott grew up in Minnesota and holds a B.A. in English literature from Loyola Marymount University. His work has also appeared in Campus Progress, The Good Men Project, and DC Theatre Scene, and been cited in publications including The Hollywood Reporter, The Daily Beast, and the BBC News Magazine.

I quite like Emily Nussbaum’s deconstruction of Scandal in this week’s New Yorker, which is really a way for her to discuss the various uses television shows make of race and colorblindness. But I wanted to highlight a different part of the review which explores something that I think can be a real straightjacket for shows: the need for female characters in general, and Olivia Pope in particular to be either good or evil, to embody an entirely different kind of black-white divide. Scandal is increasingly dull, Emily says, because Olivia Pope’s theoretical flaws all turn out to reinforce her status as a paragon:

Thirty-eight years have passed, but, in certain ways, little has changed. Shonda Rhimes, who created “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice,” is still the sole prominent black female showrunner in television. (The most powerful black male showrunner is Tyler Perry, on TBS.) Although the heroine of “Scandal,” Olivia Pope, would never go in for Christie Love’s salty back talk, the two do share some qualities: they are incorruptible superprofessionals, worshipped and desired by everyone around them. Pope, once the President’s most trusted aide and, for a while, his secret mistress, is now the biggest fixer in Washington. (Her career is based on that of a real person: Judy Smith, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney and deputy press secretary in George H. W. Bush’s White House.) In other political narratives, the fixer might be a cynical alcoholic, or a gleeful player like Gloria Allred. Not Pope. She’s the BlackBerry-wielding flack as avenging angel. Her employees, each of whom she’s rescued from rock bottom, describe themselves as “gladiators in suits”; they say that their boss “wears the white hat.” Despite, or perhaps because of, these dollops of praise, Pope comes off as a bit of a buzzkill, all glares and Sorkinesque lectures, eyes welling with righteousness…Olivia Pope’s greatest character defect is her sexual history with the President, but that just suggests she’s a woman worth risking the White House for.

An even better example of this, I think, was the incident a couple of episodes ago when Olivia asks Huck (Guillermo Díaz), a former CIA operative with what seems like a serious case of PTSD, to torture one of his former employees. It’s a totally horrific thing for her to ask, and the scene that follows is shocking, Huck relapsing like, as he describes himself, an addict, the whir of a drill, a man screaming, bleeding onto sheet plastic. It’s a doubly awful thing she’s done here, not just ordering someone tortured, but asking Huck to do something she knows will damage his already flimsy soul. And there’s no indication that she needed to do it at all to get the information she needs (the show reinforces the misconception that torture produces accurate intelligence)—a reporter for a Washington paper even beats Olivia to the killer’s identity simply by using the tools of his trade. The show just seemed to expect that we’ll trust that Olivia is On the Side of Right rather than wondering how far this woman’s self-righteousness will lead her, how willing she is to crush people to fulfill her aims.

A story about a Washington woman who is an amoral fixer would be pretty interesting, and Scandal has the ingredients to be an interesting anti-heroine show. Scandal’s at its best when it’s a story about people who are channeling their worst tendencies, whether it’s womanizing or a talent for snooping, towards good projects, when Olivia’s firm functions as a form of rehab. And with the other characters in the show, Shonda Rhimes seems relatively comfortable portraying them as broken or fallen in a way that makes them more interesting. Olivia, by contrast, is less a gladiator in a suit than a ruler-wielding Mother Superior whose authority is unimpeachable. She’s not to blame for ordering torture because her cause is just. She’s not doing anything wrong by schtupping the president because he started it, and besides, his wife is the worst.

What makes anti-heroes fascinating when they work is that they make decisions are reprehensible, but that we can understand and even sympathize with given the framework and worldview those characters are operating within. The fact that unlike Walter White or Jimmy McNulty, Olivia’s always in the right actually means that she her and the show she’s operating within are more potentially amoral: her permanent correctness means a moral reckoning isn’t necessary. I can’t help but thinking of Patty Hewes, the lawyer on Damages who makes Olivia’s so-called Gladiator in a Suit look like a fluffy baby duck. She is a wretched mother, a deeply unpredictable mentor, a person who does overwhelming harm to the lives of people she encounters. But unlike Olivia, Patty appears to know who and what she is. It would be nice if Scandal developed the self-confidence to give Olivia the same kind of self-awareness.

This is the week when the television networks announce their fall lineups and try to persuade advertisers that they should spend bunches of money to sell products during their new shows. It’s also the time when those of us who care about the white dudely domination of Hollywood get to see how many—or how few—women and people of color will be creating and headlining new shows. Here are the basic numbers on who’s creating and starring in what you’ll see on your television this fall.

39: Number of new shows ordered by NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC, and the CW.

12: Number of those 39 shows created by women.

2: Number of those 12 shows co-created by a man and a woman.

5*: Shows from creators of color, including Michael Cuesta on Elementary, Ajay Sahgal on Groupon comedy Friend Me, Mindy Kalin’s self-titled The Mindy Project, Alessandro Tanaka’s Animal Practice, and Toni Trucks’ Do No Harm.

3: Number of new shows with African-American leads, Andre Braugher in Last Resort, Meagan Good in Infamous, and Jessica Lucas in Cult.

2: Number of new comedies with people of color as sole leads or parts of core ensembles—Anthony Anderson in Guys with Kids and Mindy Kaling in her sitcom (also per the Deadline item linked above).

*Calculated to the best of my ability given scanty availability of pictures of writers.

The bridge is yours.

-Channing Tatum will save the president.

-Adam Scott and Nick Offerman crashing a Caltech party is basically the best thing of all time.

-Fry and Laurie, back together.

-This may be my new favorite celebrity protest.

-Fox won’t be canceling your favorite science fiction shows anymore.

-Seriously looking forward to this comic:

I agree with Tyler Lewis that what’s most striking about Jay-Z’s endorsement of marriage equality in the wake of Obama’s public statement of support is his nonchalance:

Even more than stirring appeals to the legacy of civil rights, I think this tone, these suggestions that marriage equality is just logical is useful. The Proposition 8 trial was a valuable small-scale expose of the contortions foes of marriage equality put themselves through to try to come up with a scientific or sociological justification for their views. But if on a larger scale, people like Jay-Z can convey the impression that support for equality is a more natural default than support for discriminatory laws, it’ll be easier for people who don’t have deeply thought-out reasons to oppose marriage equality to simply side with the default. And the more folks like Obama and Jay-Z speak up, the greater lie they can give to the unfortunate and divisive perception that black Americans are uniquely homophobic. We need both to convince new allies, and to recognize the ones we may have unfairly dismissed.

Like many critics, I tend to want NBC to succeed if only because it gave me 30 Rock, Community, and the utterly sublime Parks and Recreation, and would like the network to be rewarded for sticking with those shows with improving ratings. But the last five or six months have neither given me faith that America will suddenly and against its basic stated desires recognize the fundamental greatness of watching Leslie Knope run for office, nor that NBC has a plan that will work to provide a subsidy for its weird, brilliant shows. And this analysis from Deadline—which, mind you, is analysis, not fact—kind of confirms my sadness:

While it is an office comedy, It’s Messy has a strong female lead. By last November, before the majority of the pilot scripts commissioned by NBC, including Kaling’s, were in, the network had already given early pilot orders to three pilots with female leads, the Sarah Silverman project, Save Me and Isabel. Save Me‘s order was cast-contingent and it looked touch-and-go for awhile but, after a long search, on January 19 Anne Heche signed on to star. Four days later, NBC made the bulk of its pilot orders, including a fourth female-centered comedy, the Roseanne Barr-starring Downwardly Mobile. It may have been Roseanne vs. Mindy for the fourth and last female-lead comedy slot on NBC’s pilot slate as around the time of the Downwardly Mobile pickup, the network passed on Kaling’s script, which had made it to the final round of consideration at the network.

If this really was a choice between Kaling and Barr, Barr was, to me, the wrong bet. There’s no question that Roseanne is brilliant. But it’s been a long time since it went off the air, and Barr’s most recent project, a cracked reality show about her macadamia nut farm did more to suggest that she was not the person to bring in to be the voice of a recession comedy than to confirm her old bona fides as a working class prophetess. Instead, she’s been running that venture, campaigning for the Green Party nomination and futzing around on Twitter, all worthy pursuits to be sure, but ones that read more as her coasting on her past success than gearing up for new ones.

Kaling, on the other hand, has been doing yeoman work holding up The Office, a comedy NBC should have cancelled years ago but that is worth tuning into occasionally almost solely for her presence on it. How nice would it have been for NBC to recognize that work, as well as her charming social media presence, her successful other enterprises like her blog and book, and to affirm the value there. Kaling may not have been able to speak for working-class women, as Barr did so effectively for so many years, but she could have been part of the explosion of South Asian women on television, one of what are still very few female show creators. It may have been that in between sending off 30 Rock and renewing Whitney, NBC felt like it had made its contribution to the female-comedy boom, and it was set. But picking up Kaling’s show would have moved that boom forward into its next iteration, beyond white women, and beyond a particular kind of hot-but-clumsy-or-awkward white woman. NBC bet on its past, instead, and ended up with neither Barr’s show on its schedule, nor Kaling’s. And Kaling’s, though it needs a name transplant, looks fantastic:

In a conversation with Entertainment Weekly about a sequel to The Avengers, Scarlett Johansson drops some knowledge about why superheroine movies have tended to fail so badly:

I’d have to wear pasties to greenlight any of these movies…They’re always fighting in a bra, so while it might be exciting for a still photo, it’s ridiculous. One of the most exciting thing about [The Avengers,] is that in my opening scene the first thing you see is my character getting punched in the face. Everybody’s like, ‘Damn, it’s nice to see a girl get the shit kicked out of her…Superheroine movies are normally really corny and bad. They’re always like, fighting in four inch heels with their [thrusting out her chest] like a two-gun salute.

If you want audiences to respond to superheroines like they respond to superheroes, you have to treat them the same way. Their bodies can be admirable, but they should be framed so we admire what these heroes are capable of accomplishing with those bodies, not solely as objects of consumption. In The Avengers, we’re introduced to Captain America through a shot that presents his body as a beautiful thing, but we immediately see him using it to wreck a sandbag, and later, to perform remarkable feats. Ditto for their romances: My Super Ex-Girlfriend may have been meant as comedy, but its depiction of an insecure superheroine whipping out her powers solely to take revenge on a man who made her feel awful was sour and disappointing. In the X-Men movies, Dark Phoenix kills one lover and overdoes it with another, Rogue’s in constant danger of killing off any man she wants to touch, while the X-Men: First Class incarnation of Mystique has an implied encounter with Magneto that’s more about solidarity than a real relationship. It’d be nice to see a superheroine have a relationship, whether it’s with a superhero or a normal person, that’s about providing her with affirmation, with a reason to fight, rather than that acting as an illustration of her weakness.

Now, superheroines don’t have to fight the same way as superheroes, or to have the same priorities and motivations. In fact, it would be interesting for them to be different. But whether it’s Black Widow circumventing the need to torture Loki by conducting a skilled interrogation that never gets physical or Mystique grappling with the fact that having a power sometimes makes people more frightened of you than admiring, that difference should be a means of articulating that there are multiple kinds of power that are equally effective, not that being a woman with powers means you can never be equal to a man.