Lots of folks have joked, on seeing the trailer for Zack Snyder’s newest movie, that they’re excited to see Terrence Malick’s Man of Steel:

The thing that actually strikes me as most powerful about this trailer, though, is that Pa Kent’s speech is one a mortal man could easily give his human son. Our superhero movies have gotten kind of disconnected from masculinity in general. Bruce Wayne has a particular violent experience in childhood that spurs him to superheroism, and even more particular resources with which to finance his ambitions. Peter Parker may be the only person to be bitten by a radioactive spider, but great responsibility doesn’t come only with great power—sometimes that relationship is crushingly inverse. The X-Men are valuable precisely because they’re a metaphor for otherness. But the truth is that white men are more likely to possess money and privilege, the currency that can purchase or convey the closest things we have to superpowers, and how they use it matters.

It’s easy to treat Superman as an alien, or even as a kind of bodhisattva. But he’s potentially even more interesting as a man, a kind of sober Ron Swanson, a vision of masculinity divorced from contempt for women or concerns about heterosexual credibility. I don’t know that there’s anything in Snyder’s ouvre that suggests he’s up for that. And after The Dark Knight Rises, I have significant concerns about David Goyer’s ability to handle big ideas with much in the way of deftness or commitment. But it’s a thought, and I’ll be curious to see if either of them rise to the occasion.

Downton Abbey‘s been a tremendous hit for Masterpiece on PBS, and the public broadcaster is responding by importing another period British drama. Call the Midwife, which follows the adventures of a group of young midwives working with Anglican nuns in the exceedingly poor Poplar neighborhood in London’s East End, has been a giant hit in the UK, where its ratings beat out Downton Abbey. It’s a show about what it means for young women who aren’t yet having their own families, and who received their training in modernized hospitals, to deliver the babies of women who have much more experience in the ways of childbirth than their midwives do, and to do so in environments of extreme poverty because their patients mistrusted hospital care.

But it’s also a story about what it meant to be able to provide serious, personalized care for the first time in the immediate aftermath of the implementation of the National Health Service. Midwives made house calls, returned multiple times a day to check on the condition of frail infants, and would keep coming back as long as they were needed. Jessica Raine, who stars in Call the Midwife as a young nurse named Jenny Lee, told me:

The program really champions the NHS because it was very new. It had only just come about. And it’s difficult to imagine England without the NHS, but they didn’t have one. It was a really exciting new thing that the pooor in East London were really benefitting from, and they had not experienced it before. It champioins nurses, it champions people going out in the streetts, which I personally am really proud of becasue I don’t think people in that industry, they’re not celebrated. I love that midwifery has come to the forefront because it’s such an undocumented profession. You get to go into family’s houses, you get home visits, and every sitaution is different.

Call the Midwife is one of the rare cases of fifties or sixties nostalgia where it makes actual sense to want to bring back some elements of that period. There’s no reason to wish for the days of requiring women to have enemas and shave their pubic hair before going into labor, of course, but with serious cuts to National Health staffing underway, there’s something powerful about the dream of extremely personalized care and home support for new parents. The changes to American health care under the Affordable Care Act are just getting started, of course. But Call the Midwife is a reminder both that expanding access to care dramatically changes the lives of people who benefit from it, and requires both the medical professionals who treat them and the patients themselves to make cultural adjustments. It’s the stuff of both great drama, and of better health.

The NCAA must certainly feel good about itself after it leveled the Penn State football program this morning, fining the university $60 million, banning it from post-season play for four years, reducing its scholarship allotment, and vacating 14 years of wins, punishments that will ultimately decimate the program for years to come. The Jerry Sandusky child rape scandal that led to the sanctions brought down Penn State’s president, athletic director, legendary football coach and other officials, and letting the Nittany Lions return to the gridiron as if it never happened would have seemed like an abdication of duties. Penn State, most assuredly, deserved to be punished.

Just not by the NCAA.

In laying out the sanctions this morning in Indianapolis, NCAA president Mark Emmert called for a change in the Penn State culture that led to the cover up of Sandusky’s crimes. What he didn’t acknowledge was how deeply involved the NCAA has been in creating and fostering that culture, and as a result, he handed down a decision that reeks of hypocrisy.

Take, for instance, Emmert’s opening remarks, in which he decried the culture of “hero worship” that led Penn State officials to believe they were invincible and others to believe their idols could do no wrong. But in 2010, Emmert engaged in his own “hero worship,” calling disgraced former Penn State head coach Joe Paterno a “terrific example of everything the NCAA stands for.” Paterno, Emmert added, was the “definitive role model of what it means to be a college coach.” He was, of course, until he wasn’t, a fact Emmert’s own “hero worship” blinded him to.

Oregon State University president Ed Ray, who doubles as the chairman of the NCAA’s Executive Committee, got in on the hypocrisy too, announcing that the Penn State sanctions send the message that university “presidents and chancellors were in charge.” He made no mention of the fact that Graham Spanier, the ousted former president of Penn State who played an extensive role in the cover up, once chaired the NCAA’s Board of Directors and held a seat on the Executive Committee. Spanier, just a year ago, was “in charge.” How comforting.

Or take Emmert’s later inability to describe the exact NCAA bylaw Penn State violated — an answer that would have made it clear that the organization wasn’t massively overstepping its legal bounds in the name of public relations.

And though there were dozens of mentions of Penn State’s “culture” and how it needed to change, neither Emmert nor Ray acknowledged their organization’s role in creating the “football first” culture that helped create the scandal. The NCAA has absolved much of its management of college football, outsourcing its postseason to money-making entities like the Bowl Championship Series and other bowl games that often cost its members money. And as revenues for its biggest programs — Penn State included — exploded and created even more incentive to win games at all costs, the NCAA fed the beast, helping enhance and promote bigger athletic spectacles.

Massive public outcry, meanwhile, has already forced changes at Penn State, where Sandusky is headed to prison, former athletics director Tim Curley has been charged, and Spanier could soon face a lawsuit of his own (Paterno died in January). The Dept. of Education is investigating the university, which commissioned the Freeh Report to uncover exactly how deep the scandal went. It removed the statue of Paterno standing outside the stadium on its own, and it will almost assuredly pay heavy civil penalties to Sandusky’s victims.

The university may not have decimated the program on its own, but new administrators faced with public pressure could have made institutional changes to refocus the school’s culture. It could have made sure that football at Penn State, good or bad, champion or loser, would forever be a reminder of what happens when priorities are imbalanced, when football is too important, when the people we are supposed to help become the people we end up hurting. It could have taken positive steps to prevent future incidents by diverting funding from football to awareness programs and other initiatives to prevent child rape and foster education among its fans and students about molestation.

The NCAA, for its part, could have turned it gaze inward and examined its own role in creating the football first culture that made such a devastating scandal possible. Instead, it demolished Penn State for abdicating its responsibilities as an academic institution without acknowledging that it incentivized such abdication.

Penn State, without a doubt, needs a culture change. What Mark Emmert either refuses to acknowledge or does not understand is how desperately his own organization needs one too.

The Downton Abbey panel at the Television Critics Association press tour was a raucous spectacle, with Shirley MacLaine, who will be playing Lady Cora’s American mother, telling raucous stories about Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville, who plays Lord Grantham, ripping open his dress shirt to reveal a “Free Bates” t-shirt, and Brendan Coyle declaring that in Downton personality tests, he comes up as a Lady Mary. But in the midst of all of it, Julian Fellowes, who created the show, offered one of the best explanations I’ve ever seen of how to explore modern concerns in a period framework without becoming thunderously obvious or inappropriate to the period. He said:

There are many subjects that we sort of range among with I don’t know whether it’s women’s rights or homosexuality or whatever, which you wouldn’t find in a novel written in 1906 or whatever. And so you have that freedom. But the discipline is to look at those subjects, but within the context of that period. So you must be careful to try and give people reasonable reactions and emotional responses that are right for their own time and not simply someone who’s been parachuted in from 2012. And that’s the other discipline, really.

I think that’s exactly right, and gets at what’s interesting about period stories. On something like sexual orientation, I understand the impulse to look to history and period stories to demonstrate that people who have been attracted to people of their same gender have always existed. But what’s fascinating about seeing, say, Thomas, live out his life as a gay man in Edwardian England is not, that people had same-sex sexual contact in Edwardian England, but the differences between how he thinks of himself and his sexual and romantic feelings for men or the way the Duke of Crowborough conceives of his relationship with Thomas as separate from his identity, and the way we understand sexual orientation today. It’s the spaces between then and now that are interesting, the distance we’ve traveled, and the understanding that we’ll change again.

In terms of what to expect from season three of Downton Abbey, Fellowes and the cast were very cagey. But the trailer screened before the panel suggested a number of things. The family will face the decimation of Cora’s fortune, something that will change the dynamic between Cora and Robert will change because, as Fellowes said “Cora is less afraid of the future than Robert is. She’s much less afraid of change. And now you’ll start to see more and more of that because she’s less afraid of expressing that.” Mr. Bates remains incarcerated. A rift has come between Thomas and O’Brien, who we see sniping at each other. Lady Sybil and Branson are back from their elopement, something Fellowes suggests may be linked to the Irish Troubles. Branson’s proclivity for causing trouble at dinner doesn’t appear to have abated, though he’s doing it from his seat among the company rather than while standing in as a footman, and his elevation has Carson twitchy. And dear, silly Matthew and Mary are fighting about something big, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping their drive to the altar, or at least for Matthew to insinuate he’s pretty excited to get in Lady Mary’s knickers. I had my quibbles with the melodrama of this last season, but this is a fun, fizzy combination of plots, and I’m looking forward to see how it plays out.

This post contains spoilers through the second episode of the fifth season of Breaking Bad.

When I wrote, prior to the beginning of Breaking Bad’s final episode, that the key to understanding Walter White is recognizing that he is an abuser, I was talking about his interactions with Jesse in this episode, where the younger man blames himself for suspecting that Walt wanted to harm Brock, which, of course, Walt did. For the moment, Walt may be in control of events around him in this episode, but much of this hour of television is about watching other people, strong and weak alike, become vulnerable. In Mike’s interrogation by Hank, and Lydia’s terror when confronted by Mike, we can see some of the ways in which Walter White’s confidence might become his undoing.

In that scene, we see precisely why Walt’s hold on Jesse is so powerful. He has seemingly omnipotent knowledge—even if he doesn’t recognize Jesse’s Roomba, he turns out to be absolutely right that the two should check it for the ricin cigarette again. Walt’s capable of being terrifying and providing a regular guy tone missing from Jesse’s life, telling him, “I don’t know about you, but I, for one, could use a beer.” And he’s set himself up with tremendous power to dispense forgiveness. “You and I working together, having each other’s back, it’s what saved our lives,” he tells the devastated younger man. “I want you to think about that as we go forward.” That he’s able to dispense forgiveness as Jesse digs himself deeper into self-delusion, that Walt can dispense with what ought to be crippling guilt and shame, is a chilling indicator of how far Walt has traveled from common humanity.

But if the experiences of other people around him are any indication, Walt’s chilly self-assurance may not be a long-time guarantee of freedom, much less happiness and self-assurance. Mike finds himself in danger both from Gus’s German partners—an addition to the show I feel mixed about, if only because a build towards a conclusion feels like it should start the world contracting, not expanding—and from law enforcement as the numbers hidden in the picture frame give Hank a lead.
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