This consideration of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy contains mild spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises.

Halfway through Batman Begins, Alfred (Michael Caine), the Wayne family’s loyal butler, points out to Bruce (Christian Bale) that his anti-social behavior and strange injuries will invite comment, and suggests that he find a way to live a public life to minimize prying. “What does someone like me do?” Bruce asks him. “Drive sports cars. Date movie stars. Buy things that are not for sale. Who knows, Master Wayne?” Alfred tells him. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, complete this weekend with the release of The Dark Knight Rises, has been an extended meditation on the power of symbols, the juxtaposition between fascism and anarchy, and recovery from trauma. But it’s also intermittently a story about what billionaires are for and what they do, a question The Dark Knight Rises seems to want some credit for posing, but not responsibility for actually answering.

Nolan’s vision of Gotham has always been sharply divided: we see billionaires and the very poor, but with the exception of the prisoners on the Joker’s barges or the ticketholders to the football game that Bane bombs, and the police themselves, there is no visible middle class in the city. The poor and the criminals who prey on them are often literally an underclass. In Batman Begins, district attorney Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) drives Bruce below an underpass to confront crime boss Carmine Falcone, telling him “They talk about the depression as if it’s over, and it’s not.” Poverty goes unseen because it is physically subterranean. In The Dark Knight Rises, an orphan who lives at the same boys home where Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a young police officer who maintains his faith in Batman even as Gotham has reviled the vigilante as a criminal, grew up tells Blake that the boys who age out of the program, which has cut back on services because the Wayne Foundation’s funding has dried up, are disappearing into the sewers because “they say there’s work down there.”

While the trilogy is clear that threats to Gotham rise from that underworld, Nolan also appears significantly pessimistic about the ability of charity to permanently ameliorate the conditions that contribute to crime. “Gotham’s been good to our family. But people less fortunate than us are suffering,” Bruce’s father tells him as the family rides the monorail to their fateful night at the opera. “So we built a new, cheap public transportation system to unite the city.” That same monorail becomes the delivery weapon for Ra’s al Ghul’s weapons later in Batman Begins. In that same movie, Alfred reflects on the elder Wayne’s strategy after Bruce decides to return to Gotham, noting that “In the depression, your father nearly bankrupted Wayne Enterprises combatting poverty. He believed that his example could inspire the wealthy of Gotham to save their city.” When Bruce wants to know if the strategy worked, Alfred tells him “In a way. Their murder shocked the wealthy and the powerful into action.” When Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent have dinner during The Dark Knight, Bruce promises Dent that “you’ll never need another cent,” after Wayne throws Dent a fundraiser. But it’s not enough to secure the fortunes of a promising politician if he goes bad. Reform is a process, not a dinner party. In The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce is bitterly critical of the approaches of those who emulated his father, complaining that the proceeds of a charity function sponsored by the investor Miranda Tate will only go to pay for a lavish spread, rather than reaching their intended recipients. “It’s about feeding the ego of whatever society hag put it on,” he tells her.
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I like Tanner Colby’s piece in Slate suggesting a HBO show about the failures of integration in the 1970s, focusing on housing policy. I think he’s probably overestimating the extent to which such a show would find an audience—for all the influence it exerts over popular culture, the ratings for The Wire were not good, and the show was always in danger of cancellation, and that was with a cops-and-robbers framework. But I think he’s right that we could use more shows about the seventies and early eighties, and about black communities. Here are five ideas for people and battles that could make for fantastic shows about these decades, and that would be amazing showcases for talented black actors:

1. Harold Washington: The first black mayor of Chicago, Washington was also an early gay rights advocate during his time in the Illinois Senate. He championed the Human Rights Act of 1980, which would have extended protections including those based on sexual orientation—and would have had the effect of blowing up Chicago’s patronage jobs system. Washington’s fights with the Democratic machine in Chicago during his first term in office were so bitter that the city was dubbed “Beirut on the Lake.” Boss has made all sorts of stuff up to tell story about the Daleys. A show about Washington could plunder history for everything it needs.

2. The Boston Busing Crisis: Forget the Dillon Panthers and the East Dillon Lions. A show set at South Boston High School and Roxbury High, the first schools integrated under Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr.’s school desegregation would be an amazing—and terrifying way to tell the story of the Boston busing crisis. In between students who walked out, parents who protested, teachers who tried to keep schools going, the cancellation of the football season, the stabbing of black lawyer Theodore Landsmark by white Joseph Rakes with the American flag and other acts of racial violence, there’s more than enough to sustain seasons of drama, and to bring school shows, currently out of vogue, back to television.

3. Marion Barry: Marion Barry may be a national joke thanks to his arrest in a 1990 sting, and his continual reelection to the DC City Council a mystery to some observers. But the story of his tenure in the eighties, and of Washington’s struggle for home rule, is a rich and tragic one, and it’s still ongoing. Much like The Wire, each season could be set in a different department, from the police, which were devastated by layoffs, to his efforts to rebuild public housing, to the recalculations that revealed the real extent of Washington’s debt. Barry may seem like a ridiculous figure to a lot of people, but he was once an important one, and it’s worth explaining what, other than the cocaine, contributed to it going wrong. And it would be incredible to see Kasi Lemmons, who made one of the best Washington movies in Talk to Me, about talk show host Petey Greene, direct a pilot for this.

4. Operation Move-In: I know, we have enough television shows set in New York City. But one about Operation Move-In, which saw poor families taking over vacant buildings owned by Columbia University, the People’s Court Housing Crimes trials, and the fight to keep some form of rent stabilization would be a fascinating look at a New York not remotely portrayed in either the glittering Manhattan lofts or the gentrifying Brooklyn housing stock that’s so popular on television.

5. Overtown: For all my transit nerds, the story of how interstate highway construction devastated one of the country’s richest historically black neighborhoods in Miami, and an early site of civil rights protests, is amazing, and over a period of decades goes from failure to revitalization thanks to the return of mass transportation. Overtown is a minor character in Magic City, but it could stand on its own as a setting.

Given how obsessed a segment of the American viewing public has become with the process of making television, and the people behind the camera who make it, it’s been interesting to watch the reception to a recent slew of behind-the-scenes stories about show business. The CW’s aired the strong Canadian drama The L.A. Complex, about a group of aspiring actors, dancers, comedians and producers who live in a run-down apartment building, to ratings so low they’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad to see a good show with intelligent things to say about the entertainment industry get overlooked. By contrast, Jennifer Weiner’s The Next Best Thing, about a woman who sells her dream television show only to face down the compromises that it takes to make a version of it the network will air, debuted at 2 on the New York Times Bestseller list.

That’s an encouraging thing, in part because the novel is a sly and accurate education in the workings of the television industry, based on Weiner’s own experience making the ABC Family show State of Georgia. And those workings, and the conversations people have about them in The Next Best Thing are inevitably inflected by gender, race, and the mechanisms the industry has in place to deal with both.

In the novel, Ruth Saunders was badly injured in a childhood accident that’s left her with facial scars and that killed her parents. Her grandmother, who raised her, moves with Ruth to Los Angeles after Ruth graduates from college and hopes to pursue a career as a television writer. While Ruth begins work as an assistant and moves up the writing ladder, her grandmother scores work as an extra.

Ruth faces her first initial setback when she falls for her boss on a show where she’s working, and he rejects her. When her agent suggests that Ruth look for a job on a show run by a woman “I laughed, knowing as Shelly surely did, that women-run shows, especially comedies, were still a distinct minority. After all these years of feminism and presumed equality, there still wasn’t a woman hosting a late-night network show, and only a handful of ladies were writing for those male hosts. Sticoms weren’t much better. Male writers and showrunners were the rule, women writers and showrunners were still the exception, and while every writers’ room had a few females and at least one person of color, comedy was still very much a white man’s world.” That may be the kind of thing people who read me, or Maureen Ryan know. But I don’t know that the average Jennifer Weiner reader—or really, the average television watcher—does, and it’s incredibly valuable for the book not just to present that information to them, but to present it as if it’s settled knowledge.
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Forbes’ list of the highest-earning television actresses is out. It’s nice to see two women of color, Sofia Vergara and Eva Longoria, in the top five. And there are a number of other revealing elements to the numbers.

One of the things that’s important to note about the list is the number of women on it who are clustered into a few franchises. Four of them were on Desperate Housewives, two are Kardashian sisters, two are on Grey’s Anatomy, or its spinoff, Private Practice. The same tends to be true of women television writers and directors: rather than being evenly distributed, they’re clustered on woman-friendly shows and franchises. When one of those shows goes off the air, the number of women making bank, or getting a chance to write television episodes, goes down dramatically in a way it wouldn’t if women were making consistent financial gains or getting entrenched as writers across a broad swath of shows.

The number of women who are serious franchises are also concentrated heavily on two of the four networks, ABC with eight and CBS with five. Some of these stars are doing well because of outside endorsements, like Eva Longoria, or because of reputations—and profits—they brought in other projects, as with Melissa McCarthy and Bridesmaids. But Sofia Vergara and Kaley Cuoco really grew into major stars as a result of their tenures on Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory. Some of these numbers are simply due to the fact that CBS is a much more profitable network than, say, NBC. But it’s nice to see at least some of the profits CBS’s big, broad shows go to women, and to see CBS make money by focusing on women, even if the end result is broad rather than revolutionary.

Jeff Parker, who writes Hulk for Marvel, reports that the book will switch focus and tell the story of Red She-Hulk, the super-powered version of Betty Ross-Banner, Bruce’s love interest. And his take on it, and on the book as an opportunity to bring in new female audiences for comics, sounds phenomenal:

I thought why not dive in with a woman lead, AND tap the very roots of Hulk? Originally he always walked the line between menace and hero. Even if Hulk liked you, that still didn’t guarantee you were safe around him once he started raging, it was like being friends with a category 4 hurricane. As the newest of the Hulks, Betty is still formative and unknown- in a perfect position to be that kind of Hulk to the world.

Though you may only know my superhero stories, I am far from someone who thinks that genre IS comics, and I know that others may fit female readers more naturally. But I don’t think we should abandon trying, because despite conventional wisdom, many do want stories about powerful women in big action- did Buffy the Vampire Slayer teach us nothing? This gender does have daydreams about throwing cars around and flattening fools with a backhand swat. The superhero model appeals to something fundamental in us- that we feel, despite appearances, we have untapped power that could break out in the right circumstances.

The HULK myth goes further- and somewhat scarier- because it acknowledges our rage. The feeling that deep inside, whether from personal history or even wilder remnants still left from our ancestors, we harbor something devastating. Feelings we have to work at constantly because in the real world, letting that out doesn’t end well. But to be Hulk is to let that wave roll right out and wash away everything in your way. If you don’t think the ladies can relate to that, you haven’t talked to any lately.

Y’all know that I absolutely adore Jennifer Walters, and have long banged the drum for a She-Hulk television show as a companion to the Marvel movies. But if I can’t have that, a feminist take on Red She-Hulk—perhaps in less fetish-wear-y costumes than in the past, folks?—makes me very, very happy indeed.

It seems obvious to me that fantasies about physical power, and fear about our rage and anger (I mean, seriously, have folks read Little Women) are not exclusive to men. But we don’t get a lot of mass culture that addresses that. Characters like Black Widow and Catwoman are often confronted with the limitations of their physical power, rather than the idea that we could go too far and do damage verbal or physical damage to both someone else and ourselves. As I wrote last week, I absolutely adore the feminism of early She-Hulk comics, and the way they demolished the idea that anger about gender discrimination makes people incoherent or overly personal, putting She-Hulk up against institutions and even powerful superheroes like Tony Stark who fundamentally misjudged her. Parker’s said on Twitter that “I think of it as a Clint Eastwood western starring her. It’s one woman against the world.” A Red She-Hulk With No Name is a pretty amazing place to start from.