I’m still trying to figure out what I think about Bunheads, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s delightfully weird and very, very female show about a dance school in California. But in Willa Paskin’s long and fantastic interview with Sherman-Palladino, she points out something I’ve found utterly baffling about the entertainment industry:

I always find it funny that people take the wrong message from any success. Like “Bridesmaids” comes out and people go, “Oh, women are funny, they shit in the street. Let’s make sure now everybody shits in the street!” Not like, “OK, but it’s a well-constructed script with very good characters and the core of it is actually about female relationships,” nothing about that. They take the one shitting in the street thing and then for months you’re going to have every actress that you love shitting in the street. Until they realize, “Oh, it doesn’t work that way, I guess, so now women aren’t funny.” No, no, no! It’s not that women aren’t funny, it’s just that all of them don’t have to shit in the street!

I feel the same way with these sitcoms. It felt like dirty girl sitcoms, that’s the way to go, and NBC especially made these giant deals with like Whitney Cummings, and Chelsea Handler, and Sarah Silverman and all these women whose stand-up acts are so filthy they will never translate to television because they can’t! Sarah Silverman cannot do her act on TV, it’s not allowed! I’m not saying that her sitcom won’t be great — or I don’t know if they picked her up or not — but it’s like this trend of like “OK, so that’s how every woman is going to be now.”

I don’t even know that this is a trait that’s specific to women. It’s been fascinating to watch actors like Brandon Routh and James Marsters, who began their careers as pretty faces, score successes by treating their looks as if they’re less important than their acting chops, even by turning their extreme good looks into a joke by playing porn stars and maniacally excited dance show hosts. And I can even see why casting directors would value a surface thing like handsomeness, which is very, very broadly applicable, over a talent for self-parody or silliness, which are narrower skills. But it’s funny to see how an industry can both seize on a single, wildly aberrant scene in a movie instead of its overall themes and tones, or ignore that there’s an intimate connection between a comedian’s filthiness and her impact. Maybe it’s all a matter of wishful thinking, hoping for the thing that’s easiest to replicate, or the possibility of replicating something at all.

Lizzie Armitstead is one of the U.K.’s Olympic darlings. On Saturday, she won a silver in the 140 kilometer bicycle road race — the first medal for the host country.

But while Armitstead was thrilled with her win, she also took advantage of the limelight to bring attention to something that was annoying her — Olympic sexism, and a lack of leadership on the issue from those who head up athletic associations.

Asked about her meeting with Pat McQuaid, president of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), Armitstead brought up sexism, saying, “It was the kind of moment where you kind of want to say ‘Let’s sit down and have a conversation after this’”:

“It’s something that can get overwhelming and very frustrating, the sexism that I experience in my career,” she continued. “But it’s something that as an elite athlete that you just get used. At the moment there’s not much I can do to change it but after my (athletic) career I hope to.”

Asked to elaborate on the sexism, she said it was “obviously just a big issue in women’s sport.”

“The obvious things like salary, media coverage, just general things that you have to sort of cope with in your career. Like I say if you focus too much on that, you get very disheartened and I try to focus on the positives.”

Armistead said plenty could be done to improve the problem “but certainly I think we could get more help from the top — which is the UCI. Just certain things like forcing perhaps pro teams to have an equivalent women’s team et cetera, but I don’t want to focus too much on the negatives really.”

She raises a great question here about where it becomes McQuaid’s responsibility to step in. No one could have expected UCI’s president to to police the playground where Armitstead was teased as a kid, but it’s not unreasonable to think that a President of a major athletic league could influence, say, salary scales for athletes. Or give Armitstead a professional stage to perform on.

Armitstead could have given McQuaid a piece of her mind. It would have shown a different kind of leadership, and might have been gratifying for her. But ultimately that single action won’t change ingrained sexism in an institution. She says she doesn’t have time for anything bigger, like organizing female cyclists or filing a lawsuit. As she rightly points out, “the problem is we are elite athletes training every day trying our best every day. So it’s very difficult to try to come together when I’ve been at home five weeks this year, to try to tackle that massive issue.” That’s why it’s up to leadership to listen to its athletes and come up with solutions. It’s just that they too often don’t.

If Armitstead wants to fight sexism after her athletic career, she will be in good company: There are a record number of women athletes in the Olympics this year, many of whom are also experiencing sexism. And Olympians, when they are not in training, do have a stage on which to spread their message. It could be a long time, though, before 23-year-old Armitstead is done with cycling and ready to tackle sexism. Even then, she may not feel empowered to step up. When a reporter asked her point-blank if she’d seek legal action, Armitstead said, “it’s something I’m not qualified to even think about. I’m just a cyclist.”

The biggest argument people who support the cable business model—or think it’s inevitable and immutable—make is that a lot of channels would go out of business if consumers had to select them individually from a menu rather than getting them as part of a bundle that subsidizes their production. I tend to be all right with that scenario, not because I want to see people lose their jobs, but because I’d like to be able to direct more of the money I spend on the bundle on the specific channels that are most important to me, and to see companies like HBO unmoored from the most restrictive terms of their engagement with the bundle. Now, a new study from Lazard Capital Markets and Clear Voice research provides some sense of the networks that inspire the most loyalty in consumers—and would be most likely to survive the end of the bundle era—and which inspire the least. Via The Hollywood Reporter:

The index found that 38 percent to 43 percent of consumers would cancel or switch their pay TV service if they lost top broadcast networks. More than a third would cancel if they lost ESPN, the top cable channel in terms of viewer loyalty. And 29 percent would cancel if they lost the second-ranked cable network, Discovery. Despite recent ratings challenges, Viacom reached an average cancel rate of 15 percent, led by its Comedy Central (20 percent) and Nickelodeon (19 percent).

And Deadline has more details:

As you might expect, the Big Four broadcasters, ESPN, Discovery Channel, History, USA Network, and TNT have the most dedicated followings. (At the bottom of the list: OWN, Fox Soccer Channel, CNBC, Oxygen, and CMT.) The problem for Disney is that its channels aren’t popular enough to continue to justify the nearly $8.4B a year they currently generate from program fees — about 26% of pay TV’s total programming outlays. Crockett figures Disney’s take could drop 65.2% to $2.9B a year. Other potential losers include Time Warner (not including HBO) which could see yearly payments fall 28.6% to $2.5B, and News Corp (not including its regional sports networks) which could slide 23.2% to $2.8B. But CBS (not including Showtime) could be a big winner in an a la carte world with payments +454.2% to $1.5B. It’s followed by A&E (+168.6% to $1.9B)m Scripps (+164.3% to $1.4B), Discovery (+153.1% to $3.1B), AMC Networks (+87.1% to $782M), NBCUniversal (+66.0% to $4.2B), and Viacom (+1.4% to $3.3B).

I don’t see the end of the bundle coming immediately, but if studies like this continue to suggest incentives for a new model, we could see the beginning of carriage negotiations that could win the networks more freedom. I actually think that might be how we get something like stand-alone HBO GO, as part of a negotiation where cable companies become willing to give the premium networks like HBO and Showtime more freedom to distribute their content in order to preserve at least some of their cable subscription revenue.

It’s not exactly news that ABC, which is part of the same corporate family as Disney, wants to get in on the massive success of The Avengers (and give the franchise a cross-promotional boost in between major movie events) and develop a television series based in the Marvel universe but not overly dependent on the ongoing set of superheroes who are getting major motion pictures. But apparently discussions are heating up again. And given ABC’s brand is closely associated with serialized storytelling and female characters, this is a great opportunity to get a superheroine in the mix. ABC’s already tried and failed to develop an AKA Jessica Jones show, so assuming that character is out, and excluding characters whose rights are held outside of Marvel or who have already appeared in the movies, here are five Marvel women who might be perfect for television:

1. She-Hulk: I know. Broken record. But the story of Jennifer Walters, attorney and Avenger, is begging to be turned into a smart procedural. The show could have a case of the week—Jennifer sues J. Jonah Jameson for libel on behalf of Spider-Man and files wrongful death suits against a corporation whose carelessness creates new superheroes at the cost of human lives—as well as to longer, Damages-like investigations across the course of entire seasons. And while Hulk effects are expensive, the show could keep Jennifer in human mode most of the time to save money in a first season, and have her spend more time as She-Hulk if the series progresses and is successful.

2. Sif: The Marvel movies have Thor, a god with ties to Earth. So why not bring Sif, his fellow female brawler, who’s occasionally gotten herself stuck outside of Asgard, to the human realms and see what happens? It would be a fascinating thought experiment in what it would be like for ordinary people to deal with Strong Female Characters who step off the screen, expecting equality. As much as I’d love to see a Wonder Woman movie or show again, it seems we’re ages away from that. So why not experiment with another goddess? Jaimie Alexander didn’t have nearly enough to do in Thor, so Marvel should let her shine on the small screen, and out from the shadow of Thor’s hammer.

3. Ms. Marvel: Air Force pilot. C.I.A. operative. Feminist magazine editor. And now, in the comics, she’s taken on the mantel of Captain Marvel. A TV series would have an embarrassment of riches to choose from in picking a setting to tell a story about Carol Danvers. If Marvel is going to do a Secret Invasion storyline, which would feature the Skrulls who showed up in The Avengers shapeshifting and disguising themselves as humans, a TV series could also be a great way to introduce Ms. Marvel, who played a major role in beating back the Skrulls in that comics storyline, to the franchise.

4. Dazzler: Want to do something soapy and fun? Originally invented as a way to do cross promotions for Casablanca Records, Dazzler is a performer when she isn’t a reluctant superheroine, and she could be a way to tell a story about struggling to make it in the entertainment industry, even with a little something extra on offer. And a Dazzler show could also be a way to do an anti-hero story. All the super-powered people we’ve seen in the current era of movie superhero storytelling have taken up the call. Dazzler is more than unusually reluctant, and could be a way to explore what happens when significant power comes unmoored from a sense of responsibility.

5. Spitfire: If ABC wants to hop on the Downton Abbey bandwagon, the network could revisit Spitfire, a World War II-era British superheroine from a noble family. The story’s got vampires, Nazi sympathizers, the Blitz, and efforts to hunt down war criminals. Captain America could swing by in an occasional flashback. And ABC could co-market lipstick and forties styles.

When I was a girl, I once write a very serious entry in my journal explaining how I was finally starting to feel like a grown-up. The cause of my sense that I’d passed a milestone? I finally understood the jokes in a Doonesbury strip. Garry Trudeau’s sweeping chronicle of American life, perhaps more than any other cultural artifact, ties the generation of my family together. A print of Mike Doonesbury walking across Yale’s snow-covered Old Campus was one of the first big presents I could afford to give my father. The clipping Ellie’s little sister’s birth, announced as “It’s a baby woman!” is tucked into family photo albums along our own momentos. And now, Alex Doonesbury is grown up, married to Toggle, an Iraq war veteran, and as of this weekend, officially Doonesbury‘s new main character.

Daily cartoon strips may not get as much credit as they ought to for shaping the cultural zeitgeist, but throughout her life, and mine, Alex Doonesbury’s been one of the best female characters, of any age, in any medium. She’s a child of divorced parents with a complicated relationship with her mother that made her mature and self-protective rather than the victim of cliche trauma, and loving, collaborative tie to her stepmother, a Vietnamese refugee adopted by American Jews. In addition to both of these women, Alex has a father who spars with her on politics, works with her on business projects, and treats her like a mature person with worthy ideas. She’s been a full member of the cast almost from her birth because she was that important in Mike’s life, and she became so in ours. Alex is a computer genius without falling into sexy hacker tropes, and her skills brought her closer to her parents and all the way to MIT, a point of pride so fierce that MIT students rigged the voting to win her as a fictional fellow student. And her love story with Toggle, a disabled veteran with less education and a decidedly different family background from Alex’s own, has been part of Doonesbury’s transition into a more expansive portrait of American life.

In walking her down the aisle to Toggle at her June wedding, Mike ceded pride of place in her heart to a new man, and informally deeded the strip to a new generation of characters. The joyful rehearsal dinner at Walden College the night before the ceremony brought the strip’s core characters together again in the place where we first met them. “Is Alex’s tribe what you expected?” liberal radio host Mark asked Toggle, seeing it all for the first time, as might be the case for newer Doonesbury readers. But part of what was striking was both the characters who had left, which characters were at the margins—J.J. and Zeke snuck in as bartenders, while Kim is the radiant mother of the bride—and the new people sitting at the table. Ray Hightower, B.D.’s Gulf and Iraq War buddy, not one of the original characters, is at the main table now, representing a critically important tie from one generation to the next, linking B.D. to Toggle, and to the rest of the core cast. Reverend Sloan is regretting that he and Joanie never got together. Mike stands on the left side of the single large panel, preparing to give a toast in the single-frame panel, and the other characters’ conversations cut him off. On the right is his daughter, telling the guests “Everyone shut up! Go ahead, Daddy.” The composition emphasizes the extent to which this transition, if not Doonesbury as a whole, is about a father and a daughter. And in an emotionally wise piece of writing, Doonesbury skips over Mike’s toast, leaving that moment free for all the fathers and daughters reading to fill in with their own words, and Mike’s tribute to Alex a loving mystery.

The next day, as Mike prepares to lead his daughter down the aisle, he flashed back for a moment, seeing her not radiant in the wedding dress that brought him up short, but as a little girl with a fistful of wildflowers. “You okay?” Alex asked him. “You seem a little out of it.” “I’m fine,” her father told her. “You go play.”

Those days are gone, and so is Doonesbury‘s old order. It’s true that this has been an ongoing transition, and that Doonesbury has, unlike other strips that keep its characters preserved in amber, always allowed its characters to age and die, and achieved some of its finest artistic, emotional, and political moments in those departures. But there’s still something moving about seeing Mike formally announce that it’s Alex’s time, that she’s ready—and then to take it back as she, breaking the fourth wall, demands a cuter nose and that the aging hippies give pride of place to the kids they raised, who grew up to be programmers, and novelists, and world-class slackers. It’s bittersweet, and the transition won’t be a clean, complete break. But in between its talking cigarettes and dying AIDS patients, Red Rascals and journalists-turned-bloggers, Doonesbury has always been as weird, and biting, and tender—and now, as generous and far-sighted—as the best of life itself.

Nina Shen Rastogi has a fantastic piece in Slate about race and Hollywood casting, specifically about what casting notices communicate about what producers and directors are looking for, and how agents, managers, and even actors’ assumptions about what roles are open to which people limit pools of people trying out for certain parts. I think that last part is particularly important, because while the predominance of older white men in the creator ranks certainly creates a bias towards better roles for men who look like them, in the absence of specific encouragement, it seems people tend to default to rather conservative assumptions about the opportunities available to them, and to their clients:

We discussed a breakdown for the upcoming ABC series Nashville, which described a male role as being “Caucasian or mixed ethnicity.” I said that, to me, that seemed like a way of opening the door for an actor who was ethnic but not too ethnic. Kadish suggested the phrase “mixed ethnicity” was meant as a kind of euphemism for “exotic”—but one that didn’t carry the same connotation of sensuality or physical attractiveness. But “we don’t know what anyone means by ‘mixed,’ ” she admitted…

Marsh stressed that talent agents’ experiences and expectations shape the casting process as much as the breakdown does. He showed me a notice for the part of an emergency room nurse with one line on the FX series Sons of Anarchy. Some 1,800 performers had been submitted across a wide range of races and ages. And yet, even though the breakdown didn’t say anything about the character’s gender, most of the actors submitted were female—reflecting the popular belief that nursing is a woman’s profession.

A couple of actors I spoke to singled out another breakdown code word they frequently find themselves having to negotiate these days: “all-American.” “I think everyone understands what they’re trying to get at when they say that,” said Alfredo Narciso, a Brazilian-Filipino actor who primarily goes out for Latino roles. “They’re looking for that Midwestern type, blond-haired, blue-eyed, somebody who looks like they were born and bred in Iowa. And the funny thing about that is I was born in Wisconsin—born and bred. But I would never be considered for that. I would never be called in for that. Even if I was submitted for it, even if I was pushed for it.”

It’s amazing how meaningless these phrases are, and I can’t even imagine trying to read the entrails and figure out what it would be worth pursuing or not. It would be nice if agents were bolder about putting their clients up for parts, rather than discouraging them from pursuing parts ostensibly open to people of all races and ethnicities, or siloing them based on race or gender. But folks who are writing notices and the people asking them to find actors seem to need some lessons in both using plain language, and in honestly assessing their own intentions and openness to whoever is truly best for the part.