I’m sort of sorry that Homeland is skipping ahead six months from the events of its season finale to the advent of its second, if only because there are few people I’d be more interested to see actually go through therapy and related mental health treatments than Claire Danes’ Carrie Mathison:

In its first season, Homeland got more attention for being about terrorism, intelligence, and national security, but it’s at least as interesting as a show that uses a national security framework to talk about what it means to be mentally healthy. The fact that Carrie is investigating a possible terror plot is a way of heightening the stakes for whether she is right or deluded, and whether the people around her are capable of overcoming their suspicion of her, rooted in her mental illness, and evaluate her work as they would if she was mentally healthy. But correctly executed, those would be fascinating and important questions, particularly given the misconceptions our society embraces about people with mental illness.

The Killing tried to do something similar this season, showing Sarah Linden buckling under the stress of the Rosie Larsen investigation. But the show turned Linden’s mental health issues into a shock plot, full of white gowns and hospital therapists, rather than a more nuanced exploration of how she maintains her mental health, and how her mental health plays into her style as an investigator and her experiences as a mother. NBC’s Do No Harm, a Jekyll-and-Hyde story about a neurosurgeon, which will debut in the midseason, has a similarly sensationalistic take: the show’s doctor becomes a sexually aggressive, drug-snorting, violent jerk when his other side kicks in. As S.E. Smith pointed out after The Dark Knight Rises shooting in Colorado, mentally ill people are victims of terrible violence more often that they are perpetrators. It’s braver and more interesting to explore what it means to live with mental health issues long-term, than to turn to mentally ill people solely to create fear and tension.

Graduate students at some of America’s prestigious private universities are taking the case that they should be able to organize and collectively bargain to the National Labor Relations Board, which has decided previously that as students they did not have the right to organize and collectively bargain. The NLRB has decided to revisit that case after a regional director deemed that grad students who also work and earn wages from their schools could be dual-purpose subjects, acting at once both as students and as employees.

The briefs filed by both sides lay out a wide array of arguments for why the students should or shouldn’t be able to organize, but based on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s review of the briefs, it would seem the argument boils down to the fact that if graduate students could bargain, the current system used by private colleges and universities would be unsustainable:

“It is no exaggeration to state that the future of American private graduate education is at stake in these cases,” argued a brief submitted by Brown University, which faces the prospect of the board reversing a 2004 decision that prohibited the unionization of its graduate-student assistants.

This seems like a spurious argument, if only because graduate students at public universities are allowed to bargain collectively and those graduate schools are still alive and well. Even if it would change the terms of the private graduate education system, though, the point is relevant only if one believes that the assistants’ rights as employees aren’t more important than maintaining the status quo. And the interesting thing here is how closely this fight parallels the debate about organizing and paying college athletes.

As Bylaw Blog’s John Infante tweeted yesterday, “just replace ‘graduate student’ with ‘athlete,’” and the meat of the story doesn’t change. College athletes are also trying to spark an organization movement, and the arguments in opposition are similar if not the same. Brown is using the same basic argument for not allowing bargaining among its graduate students as the NCAA uses to justify not paying its athletes: that doing so would undermine the system and make it unsustainable. The NLRB’s previous decision on grad students is similar to earlier legal decisions that deemed college athletes “student-athletes” and not “employees,” in that it denies the obvious economic benefits schools receive from them.

The point, as civil rights activist and author Taylor Branch explained to me before, remains the same: whether we’re talking about graduate students or college athletes, rights have to come first. If private universities or the NCAA can’t both give players and students their rights while also functioning in a sustainable manner, that isn’t a justification for maintaining the current system. It’s a justification for creating a new one.

The news that makes me excited to start buying books issue by issue just keeps coming. First came the news that Jeff Parker, starting in October, will start writing Red She-Hulk as the main character of the Hulk books. Now comes word that Jonathan Hickman, known for writing long superhero arcs, is going to write The Avengers, and he tells Comic Book Resources that among his first concerns are making the team more diverse than the one we see on the big screen:

“The idea is that the Avengers have to get bigger,” Hickman told CBR. “That means bigger in every sense. That means the roster has to be bigger, and the missions have to be bigger, and the adversaries and scenarios they find themselves in have to be larger. I’ve played with this stuff a little bit over in the Ultimate Universe. Obviously, it’s a completely different weight class here, but in a lot of ways that’s the kind of velocity that the book should have. We (Tom Brevoort and I) also felt like that if the book was going to be about an Avengers world, it should look more like the world. Of course there are complications starting out when the necessary movie characters are five white dudes and a white lady, but, you know, bigger roster. Frankly, I’m really, really excited at how we address that. The lineup is killer.”

That’s not just good news for people who are dying to see some of their favorite superheroes get some more attention, or who feel frustrated by the whiteness of the big-screen Avengers lineup. It’s a way of mixing up Marvel’s franchise storytelling. It would have been supremely easy, given the vast success of the movies, for Marvel to concentrate the Avengers comic storytelling very tightly on the same set of characters. But Hickman said in the same interview that he intends to let the movie characters’ storylines play out in the books devoted to them and use The Avengers to tell individual stories about the heroes he’ll add to the team and about how those heroes interact in small groups. That means less homogenized storytelling. It means that if fans of the movies who come to the comics for the first time, they may have a chance to get invested in an entirely new set of characters. And Marvel may have a chance to build a constituency for an excitement for about characters they weren’t brave enough to make Avengers the first time around.

If last year was the he-cession television season, with a series of unsuccessful shows about the struggles of men to stay financially solvent in the downturn, this is the year of the stay-at home father figure. On Fox, Ben & Kate, and on NBC, Guys With Kids and The New Normal are all, with varying degrees of success, exploring what fatherhood means.

The best of the pilots for these shows I’ve seen is that for Ben & Kate, created by Dana Fox, who was an adviser on New Girl, and this year is out on her own. In that show, Ben Fox, who is based closely on Fox’s real-life brother, is a shiftless man who ends up moving home to live with his sister Kate and her daughter. Kate is a single mother, and Ben ends up deciding to take over her daughter’s care, an idea that both frees Kate up to get her life back on track, and spurs Ben on a road to maturity he’s thoroughly avoided. When I asked Fox at her panel how she would avoid falling into the cliche of treating men with small children as if they were inherently hilarious, she said she hoped to create a specific dynamic that would avoid that trap.

“Growing up he got into so much trouble,” Fox said of her brother. “He’s a really, really smart guy who intentionally does incredibly dumb things all the time and would get us into so much trouble…And the thing that I noticed was that he was “the” world’s greatest father, and I sort of thought, like, in a million years, if you had met my brother when he was younger, you would never think that he could have kept two children alive, much less actually kept them happy and well adjusted…I realized that, you know, this character who was so sort of inherently goofy himself and so young at heart himself could talk on the same level to this kid. And when they talk, it’s like two grown ups talking. He doesn’t talk down to her. He really thinks that…they’re kind of best friends.”

That’s a terrific dynamic for a showrunner to articulate, specific and fully realized, and the Ben & Kate pilot really captures the relationship Fox described. If only Guys With Kids and The New Normal, which play out the dudes-with-babies-are-riotous dynamic inflected alternately by heterosexuality and homosexuality, had the same level of insight.

Guys With Kids is neatly encapsulated by what Jimmy Fallon, who created the show, described as his inspiration for it in his session yesterday. “[He and his producing partner] were just talking about all the guys that we were seeing around New York City and Time Square, like with the Baby Bjorns and the babies on the backs of their bikes, and I was saying, like, these are like young good looking guys,” he told the audience. “They’re just embracing the role of dad, and we both said at the same time ‘DILFs.’” That phrase became the working title for the pitch, and while it may be a new (and deeply unnecessary) turn of phrase, the show that’s resulted from it, about a group of young fathers who live in the same New York apartment building, feels like a refugee from 1995. All the humor is predicated on the idea that men wearing baby bjorns, or in fact, spending time with their children during the work day, is such a strange and comical juxtaposition that it will inherently produce laughs. The premise might have worked if the show presented itself as a broader version of NBC’s Up All Night that ditched the extremely wealthy parents of the title and simply taken the fact that men take care of children as a matter of course, exploring the specific relationships they have with their children instead. But the story is a long way from that happier medium.

The New Normal, by contrast, perhaps could only be made in 2012, but that hardly makes it free from cliches, some of which undermine the show’s entire message. In this sitcom, from Glee and American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy, a gay couple, played by Girls’ Andrew Rannells’ and Justin Bartha, decide they want to have a child together and choose as their surrogate a single mother who hopes to use the money from surrogacy to go back to law school. It’s not a bad premise, but it gets off on an extremely sour note: the couple begins thinking surrogacy because Rannells’ character falls in love with a baby in a department store who is wearing an adorable sweater. It’s a sequence that confirms all the worst stereotypes about gay men as materialistic, selfish, shallow, even seeking instant gratification, and it’s done extremely effectively.

“My partner and I have been having conversations about surrogacy and meeting with people and talking about it,” Murphy said. “We’re really writing hopefully a great depth to this couple, and it’s not hard to be it’s not easy to be a gay couple having a child. We deal with those issues. For me, obviously as somebody who very much does have that dream, I don’t feel that way. I would never feel that way.” That may be his hope, but the gaps between Murphy’s emotions and his execution is clear throughout The New Normal.

I think Ben & Kate stands a chance of being excellent, Guys With Kids could develop into a sold if unmemorable show, and The New Normal may be simply too bounded by Murphy’s private obsessions, including Real Housewife Nene Leakes, to reconcile its ambitions and what it actually offers to the world. But the show demonstrates the challenge of trying to do shows about men taking up their share of childcare. We live in a world where for some people, that’s a new normal, and for others, it’s unfathomable to the point of hilarity.

I’d expected the sharpest questions at the panel for Revolution, NBC’s dystopian drama about a world where electricity ceases to function, would be about the show’s rather uneven execution of its premise. But the panel for the show went in a different direction entirely when creator Eric Kripke, explaining the rules of the world, explained that “Guns are possible in the world, but they’re confiscated, because we’re living in the Monroe Republic, which is a dictatorship, and they’ve taken away people’s right to bear arms.” Star Giancarlo Esposito, who plays the enforcer for that regime, continued the theme. “Can you imagine not having the right to bear arms, not having the right to protect your family or yourself?” he asked. His character is a enforcer for the Republic, the person who is confiscating those arms, who believes himself to be “the one step that is keeping everyone safe. Without him there would be total anarchy.”

These are freighted statements in any context, but after the shooting at The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado last week, they read as particularly uncomfortable. And HitFix’s Dan Fienberg asked Kripke whether he was comfortable with having the show, and his and the cast’s remarks about it, out in a world that’s embarking on another painful round of conversations about our unwillingness to seriously consider gun control.

In response, Kripke said that he thought his remarks about guns were part of a larger context of the show, which is a metaphor for the American Revolution. “I think we’re talking about, you know, a dictator who is also conscripting soldiers, taxation without representation, taking away the freedoms of what was once the citizens of the United States in a hundred different ways and that what we’re really talking about is, at the end of the day, a very patriotic show that is in many ways about people fighting for freedom, freedoms to be able to go where they want, say what they want, be together with their families,” he said. “I think it’s a much bigger show that is about that is more about, like, what it means to be a citizen of this country and what are the things that are positive about it and what are the things that are worth fighting for.”

But these aren’t neutral concepts, much less agreed-upon ones. And they certainly aren’t issues that have been left behind in our historical past to be resurrected as part of a far-fetched science fiction show. Our political language has been tainted by the suggestion that President Obama wields dictatorial power, and one of the biggest challenges in his presidential campaign had to do with his remarks about how gun owners view their weapons and their relationship to the government. Conversations about taxes remain bitterly divisive. A show that premieres in the heat of a presidential election that portrays an African-American man confiscating white people’s guns and enforcing the will of a dictatorial regime that levies crushing taxes on them may not intend to deliver a specific political message, but it certainly runs the risk of giving credence to certain strains of argument that its creators may not in fact agree with.

It’s worth noting that in the cut of the pilot critics received prior to the session, the first time a private citizen attempts to use a gun he’s stockpiled in violation of the Munroe Republic’s ban on private weapons, he fails. Miserably. The result is a massacre, in which the Monroe Republic militia handily dispatches the residents of the small town who have dared to stand up to them.

Revolution may prove to be a subtle and rich show—Kripke’s discussions of the premise left me much less skeptical than I was previously. But it enters an environment where it can’t possibly be a mere thought experiment, bearing ideas that have not been precisely beneficial to our national conversation. That’s something Kripke and his staff will have to reckon with in a time when even the meaning and conditions of America’s birth are subject to vigorous contention, a wedge to divide rather than to unite us.

Over at The Daily Beast, Maria Elena Fernandez has written a piece that explains both why Charlie Sheen continue to employed, and in two paragraphs, everything you need to know about the utter venality of advertising:

In turn, Sheen is more well-known and more polarizing than ever, according to his Q score. Immensely popular at the height of his run on the high-rated Two and a Half Men, Sheen is now familiar to 87 percent of Americans six years of age and older, a seven percent increase in his status prior to his Violent Torpedo of Truth Tour. But even as he’s become more of a household name, the number of people who dislike him also went up, increasing his negative score from 31 to 47 in just one year. The average celebrity registers a negative score of 26, Schafer said. Sheen, however, remains very popular among 18-to-34-year-old men, who happen to be the toughest demographic to reach in media and marketing.

“It looks like from everything that transpired, it was his female appeal that got hit the hardest,” Schafer said. “He’s a complete turn-off to women right now, whereas, back in the day, at the height of Two and a Half Men, he was way above average with female consumers. He’s lost most of his consumer strength with women of all ages and men 35 and older. But young males, 18 to 34, were relatively unaffected by all of his ranting and raving. They actually like him as much as they did before, so if you’re a marketing person and you’re seeing that you have someone that can really attract that hard-to-find consumer group, then maybe Charlie’s a good approach because he’s going to create both awareness and emotion.”

That statistic about how Sheen’s latest antics changes the perception of him is also pretty telling, too. Women, unshockingly, are unlikely to resonate with an addict with a record of violence against women. Older men get it, too. But younger men (and not all of them, of course) apparently still have tiger blood in their eyes. And the ability to reach them is one way of determining the financial value of a bad reputation. But I also feel like that divergence is a symptom of the real clashes we’ve seen over culture and sexism in the past few months. In some cases, men and women are just not seeing the same things.