I’ve been holding off on writing about this season of Louie, in part because the first five episodes of the season, which I was fortunate enough to watch in advance, are so good that I’ve had a hard time thinking critically about them. But over at Slate, David Haglund wrote something terrifically perceptive about the show that I think is worth sitting with a little bit. He explained that where Curb Your Enthusiasm “keeps David in the kind of fictional (or semifictional) universe we’re accustomed to on TV, with a cast of regular characters and plotlines that extend through multiple episodes in the manner of a more typical sitcom. Louie has none of those things. While the show’s premise, if it can be called that—single dad with two daughters bumbling through life in New York City—might feel familiar, almost nothing else does.” That’s key to the show’s shambling, improvisational feel. But it also means that Louie can grow and improve faster than almost any other show on television, unmoored by a consistent continuity, timeline, or ensemble cast.

In previous seasons, Louie fell back frequently on a somewhat problematic crutch: he’d encounter a young, very pretty, blonde woman who challenged his worldview, hear her out, and sometimes, win her over. He did this with the anti-masturbation activist he debated on television, who he ended up spending a physically chaste but mentally filthy evening with, and with the cheerleader who was disgusted by his stand-up material but charmed by his tender care for his daughter’s duckling during their USO tour in Afghanistan. I don’t think that at any point Louie was condescending to these characters—he’s spoken about how his desire to have his character try to learn something from these kinds of people is genuine, and how he sincerely believes that his worldview is kind of broken and doesn’t serve him well. But they were never quite people so much as they were stand-in for ideas.

Now, if this was a conventional television show, Louie would have to go through a clear process of character evolution. He’d have to realize that his fascination with winning these women’s approval, much like his crush on Pamela, were a symptom of something, whether chasing unobtainable people after his divorce to avoid risk, or a reversion to his single years. There would be error, reckoning, hurting someone he loved (maybe his daughters), and a recalibration, moving Louie towards the kind of women we see him dating this season. And then, somewhere along the way, there would be will-they-or-won’t-they, and the promise of true love. Louie has precisely none of these things. Instead, it’s just recalibrated. The show suddenly has Louie dealing with his wife in a relatively mature way—even if their interactions are occasioned by relatively immature circumstances, like a midlife crisis motorcycle accident. He’s dating women his own age—even if he can’t handle a breakup appropriately or navigate a blind date (tonight, with Melissa Leo) with grace. Louie is just there, doing these things, jettisoning a schtick that was in danger of getting old without feeling angsty about it.

I’m not sure this kind of freedom is something that would be good for, or workable in, most television shows. Continuity and clear character arcs are a helpful tool for shows with multiple writers, a solution to a too many cooks problem that Louie doesn’t have to grapple with since C.K.’s vision is so clear throughout it. Even Girls, a show which is similar to Louie in its approach to sex and bodiliness, has been well-served by the imposition on Lena Dunham’s of both a sitcom structure and the need for clear in-episode and season-long arcs. But in the very rare case like Louie where the audience is on board for the project and the vision, it’s pretty breathtaking to watch a show both fix its weaknesses and move its main character forward in big leaps and bounds. Louie’s life may be a mess. But Louie is assured and precise in a way that’s truly wonderful.

I’ve been feeling tentative, lately, about how much comic book movies are actually going to be able to innovate going forward. So I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I was to discover what is hands-down my favorite new web comic, and a ridiculously smart exploration of both comic book conventions and progressive politics: Strong Female Protagonist.

The setup is relatively simple, but the motivations behind it are complex: Alison Green is a 20-year-old freshman at the New School in New York City, who started a little late after taking a year off to fight crime. By that, she means that she used to be a superhero, but she’s traded her tights for textbooks for reasons unknown to the Guardians, the people who oversee superhero activities. Instead, she’s spending time working on Occupy Wall Street and trying to figure out how to pass classes taught by professors who think her past means she’s entitled and everything comes easy for her.

The real reason Alison quit, and the reason she’s so involved in social justice work now, is a confrontation with her nemesis. Instead of fighting her, he surrendered, on the condition that he be able to tell her about a secret effort to eliminate superpowered people even more powerful than they are. People who have powers at the level that they do are a sop for the populace, a way of heating up the temperature of existing conflicts and distracting the public through media accounts of their exploits. “I’m not powerful enough to be a villain. And you’re not smart enough to be a hero,” he tells her. “Nobody’s scared of us, or we’d have a little ‘closed’ folder of our own. What are you going to do, Mega Girl? Fling poverty into the sea? Smash all of us into a better tomorrow? Nobody thinks we can change the world, and they’re right.” It’s a direct shot fired both at Alison’s self-confidence, and at the unending conflicts that fuel superhero comics: if Marvel and DC superheroes actually addressed the systemic problems that generate supervillains, they’d lose all rationale for their continued existence.

It’s a great premise, and it’s set in an even smarter world. Since her superpowers manifested when she was fourteen, Alison’s had a doctor and psychologist assigned to her who are responsible for helping her navigate issues like a college sex life with the added complication of super-strength. Superheroes search for legitimacy—and find themselves used in various ways. Alison’s roommate and fellow protestor tries to use Alison’s super-powers as a shield when they’re out protesting: with Alison there, she reasons that the cops won’t act even if the protestors get more aggressive and belligerent. Other supers line up next to the cops, even though any action they took would hurt protestors: they’re less concerned with actually enforcing law and order than looking like they’re on the right team.

We’ve got a lot of comics, Powers among them, that look at what it would like for cops and lawyers to operate in a world with super-powered heroes and villains. Strong Female Protagonist may be one of the first, and most effective, to put a superhero on the side of protestors. And at a time when superhero movies frame threats to the American people solely in terms of security, whether it’s from alien threats or insane and very capable clown figures, there’s something particularly refreshing about a superhero who has a more expansive understanding of truth, justice, and the American way.

The big news about the Writers Guild of America West annual report is that there are fewer overall writing jobs in film and television in Hollywood, and the people who have those jobs are making less money. The number of writers in both industries who reported their earnings to the Guild fell from 4,442 in 2010 to 4,338 in 2011, down 2.3 percent, and their overall reported earnings fell from $969.2 million to $911.7 million, down 5.9 percent. The number of television writers actually rose by 0.4 percent, from 3,306 to 3,320, even as their earnings fell by 1.2 percent, from $566.2 million to $559.2 million. But the number of writing jobs for film shrunk more significantly, from 1,699 people reporting income from writing to 1,562, down 8.1 percent, following a 7.9 percent decline from 2009 to 2010. Reported income in film fell from $399.4 million in 20100 to $349.1 million in 2010.

More than the fact that writers do pretty well for themselves, what these numbers reinforce for me is how small the number of people writing for film and television is. When we talk about getting more women and more people of color in television writers’ rooms, and getting more scripts by them in production, we often discuss the problem in terms of how deeply entrenched it is, what a stranglehold white men have on these spaces and this industry. It’s true that privileged people in Hollywood have a lot of power and will not surrender it easily. But the actual number of people you’d have to hire to get television and film writing looking more like the people who tune in to watch shows and pony up to go to the movies is relatively small. If those 4,338 film and television writers were going to look like America, you’d need 2,204 women, 651 Hispanic and Latino writers, 538 African-American writers, 191 writers of Asian descent, and 100 writers of two or more races. These are findable, achievable numbers. Any studio or network that claims it can’t find, or its showrunners can’t find, enough scripts and specs by women and non-white folks, or enough women and non-white writers to staff its shows and do its rewrites, can’t possibly looking hard enough considering how few each company would have to come up with.

The bridge is yours.

-Demian Bichir on preparing for torture scenes.

-Andy Daglas on whether Aaron Sorkin was ever capable of writing women.

-We spent a billion hours on Netflix in June.

-I think I’d be more excited about HBO’s Roger Ailes biopic if I hadn’t disliked Game Change so much.

-Amy Winehouse and Nas:

Compliance, Craig Zobel’s terrific movie about a real series of events, in which fast-food restaurant employees were convinced by a prank caller posing as a police officer to detain and strip-search their coworkers, on the grounds that they’ve been accused of theft, is rooted in things like the Milgram experiment, which tested the extent to which group morality could drive individuals to do heinous things to other people:

But the movie, which comes out in August, is also subtly and importantly about how that desire to comply with a prevailing sense of what’s right is heightened when the police are involved (or people believe the police to be involved). In Compliance, the man on the phone takes Sandra, a supervisor at a fast food restaurant, someone who doesn’t have very much authority, and asks her to take on some of his. He tells her that Becky (Dreama Walker), one of her employees, has stolen money from a customer’s purse. It’s a small accusation, but it’s a weightier matter than the day-to-day operation of a restaurant. Until that point in the day, the biggest problem Sandra’s faced has been who left a freezer open, spoiling food. Even if she finds the culprit in that case, it’s a no-win situation for her: Sandra’s still going to be held responsible. The call from the man who says he’s a police officer, and his request for her help in detaining Becky, gives Sandra an opportunity to do something for which she’ll earn credit, even acclaim. Helping the police gives Sandra the opportunity, or so she thinks, to be not just a good employee, but a good citizen.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to see the law enforced and for justice to be done. But that’s not actually exactly the same thing as doing what the police ask, all of the time, without question. Compliance is about the danger of giving someone else the ability to validate your goodness and to ask you to collaborate with them without asking them to meet high standards of responsibility and ethics or verifying that they’re following the law and that their requests are in accordance with it. The mere assertion by the man on the phone that he’s a police officer is enough to get Sandra to follow his directions. And even if the man on the phone had been able to verify that he was a police officer, there’s something frightening about the implication that Sandra wouldn’t have questioned his orders even as they get more baroque and invasive. She values the promise of approval too much to verify or consider any of the steps she’s told she has to perform to receive it. There’s a lot of cultural conditioning behind Sandra’s values and her assumptions, whether it’s the way police procedurals regularly treat brutality as a way of communicating the stress of the job rather than a sign of rot, or the idea, presented even in a forthcoming episode of a wannabe-skeptical show like The Newsroom, that the police almost always arrest the right person and prosecutors almost always secure convictions. But trusting that a job title or a badge suddenly removes the possibility of fallibility, weakness, or evil from a person is a dangerous thing. Compliance will probably be read and reviewed as the story of a bizarre one-off incident. But that string of incidents couldn’t have happened outside a larger cultural context.

It can be obscured under a grime of casual homophobia and sexism in their lyrics and music video imagery, but the most radical thing about the music collective Odd Future has always been their matter-of-fact inclusion of their lesbian producer, Syd tha Kid. She’s always been a full member of the group, rather than a sexually-available hanger on, and for all the language and imagery members of Odd Future throw around, in practice, the collective seems entirely comfortable with non-straight people. That perception is even truer today after Odd Future member Frank Ocean posted the story of his first love on his Tumblr, a lyrical, painful reminiscence of falling for another man who didn’t, or couldn’t bring himself to, return Frank’s affections. Tyler the Creator, Odd Future’s flashy frontman, was immediately supportive, tweeting “Proud of that nigga cause I know that shit is difficult or whatever.”

His Twitter bio, of course, still reads “I AM NOT A DYKE.” And it’s not as if his pride in Frank’s personal courage means Tyler recognizes (or wants to acknowledge) the contribution of casual vernacular homophobia to the fact that “that shit is difficult or whatever.” Dream Hampton wrote, in an open letter to Frank, “The 200 times Tyler says ‘faggot’ and the wonderful way he held you up and down on Twitter today, Syd the Kid’s sexy stud profile and her confusing, misogynistic videos speak to the many contradictions and posturing your generation inherited from the hip-hop generation before you.” That evolution, that untangling of contradictions, happens in fits and starts. Earl Sweatshirt, another Odd Future member, came back from an extended stay at a school in Samoa, during which he did volunteer work with rape and assault survivors, sobered about the casualness of rape imagery in his lyrics. Maybe the same thing will happen with Tyler. Maybe it won’t.

But whatever happens, Syd and Frank are here. They are visible. Tyler’s support for them is visible. Jay-Z’s tacit support is visible in letting Hampton publish her letter on his Life and Times site. And visibility is the long-term death of bias. I don’t really think that Odd Future will be the wheel that turns the entire ship of hip-hop (or R&B, the genre which Frank is more rooted in) here. It was never going to be that a major talent in a musical genre came out and the next day we woke up to the bloom of a thousand gay and gay-positive mix tapes. That’s too much freight to place on any one person, and far too much to expect of an entrenched industry with well-established norms, even if those norms do that genre harm. But at the end of Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s main character, Prior Walter, said something that I think gets this kind of event exactly right. “We won’t die secret deaths anymore,” he tells the audience directly. “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens…The Great Work begins.” There are all kinds of countries, and all kinds of citizenship to be claimed.

After Prometheus came out, Film Crit Hulk wrote a terrific critique of Damon Lindelof’s work, specifically his obsession with the unfairness of the knowable. These are fascinating, important questions, but Hulk argues that his preoccupation with the gap between what can be known and can’t is crippling his work:

AND LINDELOF STRIKES HULK AS A WRITER WHO FEELS PARALYZED WHEN ATTEMPTING TO DO JUST THAT. SOME WRITERS ARE SO PREOCCUPIED WITH THE REALITY OF THE DARKNESS THAT THEY ENGAGE ART AND ESSENTIALLY GET SUCKED RIGHT BACK INTO OUR FIRST ESSENTIAL / OBVIOUS QUAGMIRE. LINDELOF LOOKS AT THE UNIVERSE AND ONLY CAN SEEM TO REFLECT THAT LACK OF CONTROL. HE MAKES THE DUALITY AND CONSEQUENCE OF “UNKNOWING” FEEL SO FIXED AND ANGRY. HE ONLY SEEMS TO REPLICATE HIS FRUSTRATION WITH “GOD” IN A REFLECTIVE WAY IN HIS ART. HE STRIKES HULK AS SOMEONE WHO FEELS LIKE THAT HE ONLY REFLECT THAT MOST BASIC, TERRIBLE REALITY AND IS THUS AFRAID TO GO BEYOND THAT AND FIND THE OTHER FORMS OF TRUTH IN THE WORLD (WHICH ARE THE ONES WE ACTUALLY NEED).

The fact that Lindelof’s next project will be an HBO adaptation of Tom Perotta’s The Leftovers, about the people who remain on earth after the Rapture. Vulture spoke to Lindelof, who explains that he’s riding the mystery train again:

One of the main mysteries of The Leftovers is just where all the “disappeared” folks went. Lindelof doesn’t want to spoil how the book tackles (or doesn’t tackle) this question, but he did say the puzzle will be a key part of the show. During their talks, Lindelof and Perrotta agreed the answer to the question “did matter and [viewers] needed to know.” Of course, the fact that Lindelof is working on another show with a mystery center is likely to send portions of the Internet into crisis mode today. “I told Tom to brace himself for people asking [about the rapture mystery] as the first question,” he says. “And then I told him, ‘I don’t know if you know this, but I sort of have a reputation for not answering things.’” Lindelof fully admits he’s walking into another buzzsaw, but he actually seems to relish the possible backlash. “I guess I can’t help myself,” he quips. “I’m sure there’s a certain subset of viewers who watched Lost until the bitter end and will say, ‘I’m just not going to put myself through that again.’ But I’m so incredibly magnetized to this concept and the people in this story. It’s firing all my creative pistons in a way they haven’t been fired since Lost.”

I also wonder if Lindelof might have less of a problem if he was better at writing faith and wonder. The one moment in Prometheus that really achieved that for me was David’s activation of the bridge of Engineers’ ship, which did precisely the opposite of what the movie as a whole did: rendered the entire universe in a comprehensible schema. The wonder came from comprehension and understanding, not from mystery.