EA Sports, the video game magnate behind successful franchises like Madden NFL Football and other sports games, announced this week that it will for the first time include international female hockey stars in NHL 13, the newest version of its National Hockey League game. EA included a female body in its “Create A Player” option in last year’s NHL game, but this year, it is going a step farther, adding former Team USA star Angela Ruggiero and former Team Canada player Hayley Wickenheiser to NHL rosters in this year’s game.

Both Ruggiero and Wickenheiser are four-time Olympic medalists in a sport that isn’t widely known but has grown across the world since it was first included at the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics. The inclusion of women in this game should help bring even more attention to the sport, as Wickenheiser said in a release from EA:

“The EA SPORTS NHL franchise took a big step last year by including female characters to create a more inclusive experience for female hockey fans,” said Hayley Wickenheiser. “I’m excited to be a part of NHL 13 and hope that the addition of women’s hockey legends will encourage greater participation in hockey from young women everywhere.”

EA, for years, has included female golfers in its Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf games, and it is facing a petition drive to add women’s teams to its series of FIFA soccer games after the success of the U.S. Women’s National Team, and the sport in general, at the 2011 World Cup and 2012 Olympics. EA now says it is “inevitable” that women will appear in the soccer game, even if it is too late to include them in the 2013 version.

A cynic could take the view that this is all a marketing ploy — other companies have found success by increasing their marketing efforts to young girls — but I’ll take the opposite view: in a world where women’s sports are becoming more visible, in a world where more young women are playing the games, in a world where we more often talk about the gender issues that permeate the sports world and the successes female athletes have despite numerous obstacles, EA is acknowledging not just the fact that women and girls play sports, but that they play sports video games and should have the same opportunity to participate in the gameplay experience men have every time they sit down in front of their XBox or Playstation.

Lawless, John Hillcoat’s new flick about Prohibition-era bootleggers and the government officials seeking to leech off their profitable flouting of the ban on alcohol, has all the elements of a good American crime story. It’s got two distinct criminal syndicates, one reclusive, taciturn, and reluctant to use violence, and the other deliberately transgressive. It’s got a suitably disgusting officialdom more interested in self-enrichment and control than in the law. It’s got a pair of female characters wriggling out of patriarchy. But unfortunately, somebody — maybe Hillcoat, or screenwriter Nick Cave (yes, that Nick Cave), or whoever decided Shia LaBeouf should have more lines than Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman combined — slapped those ingredients together in a sloppy, unambitious way. The souffle never rises.

The basic conflict of the movie isn’t between Hardy’s clan of bootlegging Bondurants and Guy Pearce’s vicious, greedy Chicago lawman. It’s between de facto leader Forrest Bondurant (Hardy) and his little brother Jack (LaBeouf). Where Forrest uses his local-legend status and massive bulk as quiet guarantors of stability, Jack is ambitious, image-obsessed, and self-deceived about his criminal successes. (Think of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, with more hair and less brains.)

There are lots of little problems: Pearce’s hardboiled lawman probably wouldn’t cringe and close his eyes when he shoots his pistol, and violent scenes rely as much on sound effects as any kung fu movie you’ve ever seen. But the big problem with Lawless is that the rural bootlegger protagonists feel every bit as synthetic and unoriginal as the baddies. Nearly every character is a cardboard cutout who blunders in predictable ways at the right moments to move the story through obvious beats. None of them ever feel like real people (despite good work from Pearce, Jessica Chastain, and Hardy). Some characters simply disappear from the story. There’s not a surprising moment in the whole two hours, but plenty of implausible ones.

These failures are all the more frustrating because the movie’s setup implies some interesting themes: organizational coercion, the contrasts between internal and external motivations for criminals, the difference between violence and power and the consequences of conflating the two. In its messy failure to say anything about those ideas, Lawless got me thinking about two crime stories that take a more deft touch to similar stuff.

2000’s Way of the Gun centers on two kidnappers willing to do violence to innocents in pursuit of their goals, but far more interested in the pot of gold than the rainbow they paint getting to it. The movie’s best scene has kidnapper Benicio del Toro and bagman James Caan talking shop in a bar. They deride the self-important jargon of corporate security and law enforcement types, before the subject turns to their own side of the lawbreaking street: “These days they wanna be criminals more than they wanna commit crime,” del Toro says. “That’s not just crime, that’s the way of the world,” Caan retorts. del Toro and his partner may be unconscionably quick to violence, but they are also businesslike, professional criminals. Like Caan, they are who they are because they’re good at it and it’s a living, not because of status symbols or adrenaline.

When HBO pulled the plug on David Milch’s Deadwood, TV lost one of its most thoughtful shows about violence. The titular goldmining camp’s uncertain future in the expanding United States drives the show’s plot, but the lack of law does not mean there’s a power vacuum. Saloon boss Al Swearengen is the camp’s capo at the show’s outset, and has his control tested first by a new saloon/brothel, and later by the organized might of George Hearst (implicitly backed by the legal forces that previously ignored the camp). Over the course of the show’s three seasons, Swearengen metes out violence in increasingly calculated ways. But even at the outset, when he uses his fists and Dan Dority’s knife to consolidate his holdings, the show makes clear that he understands violence is not power. Violence becomes necessary only in response to erosions of Swearengen’s power; its use is evidence of weakness, not strength. His minimally violent chess match with Hearst in the final season shows he’s internalized that lesson.

Deadwood’s other main character, reluctant sheriff Seth Bullock, follows a similar learning curve with regard to violence. But Bullock’s motivation is never power, and his violence is born of temper rather than calculation. Swearengen’s long game for the camp’s survival and his own enrichment stands in contrast to Bullock’s situational, morally-driven choices about violence. His abortive first-season friendship with Wild Bill Hickock seemed to reinvigorate his sense of righteousness, without imparting any of Bill’s weariness from a lifetime of killing. As the show goes on Bullock works to control his temper, but his desire to imprint rightness on every situation he encounters never flags. Swearengen becomes deliberate with his violence because that’s what his machinations require, but Bullock restrains himself (or tries to) out of a more internal conflict over what kind of person he wants to be.

Before it ever made the New Cult Canon, Way of the Gun lost $8 million at the box office. Deadwood pulled a couple million viewers a night but was always more beloved of critics than seen by non-critic humans. It shouldn’t be hard for Lawless to prove a greater success in business terms, but if it does Hollywood will continue to learn the wrong lessons about how to make violence interesting.

By now, you’ve probably already seen or heard about Clint Eastwood’s riveting, surreal address to the Republican National Convention (if you haven’t, here’s a highlight reel and here’s the full thing), ably discussed by Mychal. The easiest way to understand what happened is, in Mike Grunwald’s words, simply that “a rambling old dude with no teleprompter” acted like, well, a rambling old dude with no teleprompter.

But simply dismissing Eastwood’s performance as rambling insanity misses a crucial part of the speech: it was entertaining as all hell. Eastwood’s diatribe about Invisible Obama telling Romney to perform an anatomically impossible act on himself was met with riotous laughter from the delegates, as were most of his jokes. Even his politically importunate lines, like his poke at the futility of the War in Afghanistan, were well-received by the crowd. The speech was terrible politics, sure, but it was a funny stand-up routine — and that’s how the audience appeared to receive it.

One way to see Eastwood’s routine, then, isn’t that he bombed. It’s that he was doing he was doing the wrong kind of performance on the wrong kind of stage. In a certain sense, that shouldn’t be surprising. Though Eastwood isn’t shy about expressing his political views, and was once mayor of a small town in California, he isn’t a politician. First and foremost, Clint Eastwood is an artist and an entertainer. And the two types approach public performance in very different ways.

The qualities that make effective art are the opposites of the ones that make a good campaign spectacle. Art, even (or especially) when it’s political, succeeds by simultaneously entertaining the audience and opening up new avenues for thought. Art that attempts to lecture at you generally fails as art because it forgets what it’s best at doing. Campaign events, by contrast, are about selling one particular narrative as persuasively as possible. You’re supposed to come away from a campaign event or convention convinced that a particular candidate is Best For America, inspired to work for their campaign. It’s about getting you on a team, not getting you to laugh or think. Even humor deployed in a campaign event is carefully crafted to serve the event’s overall message rather than be comedy qua comedy. Political spectacle, while perhaps an art form, isn’t art.

So when the Romney campaign simply just told Eastwood to go talk (which is basically what happened), it was eminently predictable that he wasn’t going to give a campaign speech even if the scale of this particular meltdown was unimaginable. Eastwood has a history of making riveting, somewhat offensive political art; Gran Torino and its racist, cantankerous Jesus-protagonist being only the most recent and best example. When you throw someone with that sort of artistic sensibility in front of an enormous audience without a script or much advance planning, it’s utter folly to expect them to stay “on-message.” Clint Eastwood is a performer. He performed.

Jamelle Bouie had my favorite tweet of the entire Republican National Convention, when during the epically bizarre Clint Eastwood “speech,” he said: “This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.”

You can’t escape the racial subtext of what happened last night. Eastwood scolded an (imaginary) black man for his perceived slights to the American way in front of an audience of millions, and a sea of mostly white faces laughed and egged him on. There isn’t anyone for “America” than Dirty Harry; like John Wayne before him, Eastwood stands in for the American sense of masculinity and rugged individualism. In his babbling incoherence, he was telling this effete liberal, possibly foreign, definitely un-American, black man the way things are really done around here.

It also brought to mind Eastwood’s Gran Torino. It didn’t receive any Oscar love, but in 2008 Eastwood fielded a lot of praise for playing Archie Bunker with a muscle car and rifle. Critics and audiences couldn’t help but love a character that says to a black street gang “What are you spooks up to?” or tells a southeast Asian character “You’re wrong, eggroll, I know exactly what I’m talking about.” It was cinematic gold to hear jokes like “A Mexican, a Jew, and a colored guy go into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’” Hilarious stuff, right?

It perfectly encapsulates conservative thinking on race. Bigotry isn’t much more than a quirk, like drinking warm beer or being a bad tipper. In the film, Eastwood’s not a bad guy, just a lonely old war veteran further disgruntled by the deterioration of his neighborhood from a white suburban enclave to an ethnic gang wasteland. Don’t let the pandering and tokenism of a few minority eloquent minority speakers fool you: this is the mindstate of the Republican party today. Mitt Romney, who won the nomination in part because he was supposed to be the adult in the room, has played right into it with his lies about welfare and birther jokes. But he’s not a bad guy, he’s just trying to protect the America we all love. Never mind it’s an America some of us have never known.

It’s not a huge leap from “get off my lawn” to “we own this country” to “take our country back.” Someone in this equation is an intruder, claiming something they have no legitimate claim to, and for that they must pay. If Mitt Romney wins the presidency, the rest of us are stuck cleaning his Gran Torino.

This Eastwood episode didn’t overshadow Romney, the convention, or the campaign. It was the campaign.

Because it’s the end of the summer, I’m returning to my ancestral homeland to eat fried clams, read a book a day, give myself what is bound to be a truly hilarious-looking sunburn, and steel myself to talk you through the enormous amount of truly terrible television that will be coming your way in September. I’ll miss you all badly, but I promise not to abandon you. A crackerjack squad of guest-bloggers will be taking my place. They are:

-Zack Beauchamp is a Reporter/Blogger here at ThinkProgress. He previously contributed to Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish at Newsweek/Daily Beast, and enjoys philosophy and All Things Whedon.

-Alan Pyke graduated Oberlin College in 2008 (to his eternal sheepishness), hopped around the country as an organizer for 18 months, then settled in D.C. to write about politics. When he’s not doing that, he’s thinking about hiphop, The Clash, spanish movies, Jimmy McNulty, or nursing odd pet theories (the preeminence of dumbed-down drug rap is analogous to hair bands’ brief, shiny takeover of rock music). He reviews movies and concerts for Brightest Young Things, and occasionally reviews rap/R&B records for RapGenius. Follow him on Twitter @PykeA.

-Mychal Denzel Smith is a writer and social commentator, whose work has been seen on The Atlantic, The Nation, The Guardian, Ebony, The Root, and theGrio. He covers a range of topics, including but not limited to: politics, social justice, pop culture, hip-hop, mental health, feminism, and black male identity. Follow him on Twitter @mychalsmith.

-s.e. smith is a writer, agitator, and commentator based in Northern California, with a journalistic focus on social issues, particularly gender, prison reform, disability rights, environmental justice, queerness, class, and the intersections thereof, with a special interest in rural subjects. International publication credits include work for theSydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, and AlterNet, among many other news outlets and magazines. Assisted by cats Loki and Leila, smith lives in Fort Bragg, California. Follow s.e. on Twitter @sesmithwrites.

-Jessica Wakeman writes about pop culture, politics and feminism for TheFrisky.com. She has also written for Bitch Magazine, Radar, the New York Daily News, the New York Times Book Review, and BlackBookMag.com. Jess lives in Queens, New York, and is a 2005 graduate of NYU. Contact her at Jessica.Wakeman@Gmail.com and follow her on Twitter @JessicaWakeman.

As always, be excellent to them and each other in my absence. I’ll be back on September 11.

GLAAD’s Network Responsibility Index is one of the most fascinating and comprehensive looks at the on-screen diversity of American television, examining not just gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters, but racial and gender diversity as well. And the version of its report released today says a lot not just about which networks are doing well at integrating LGBT characters into their programming, but about generation gaps between viewers and which kind of gay people are most integrated into the American imagination.

On broadcast television, there’s a striking gap between the network aimed at the youngest viewers and the one that targets the oldest. The CW consistently leads its rivals in programming that includes gay characters—in the 2011-2012 television season, 29 percent of its program hours included gay characters or gay people, bolstered substantially by its reality programming. 62 percent of those impressions were of LGBT people of color. During the same period, CBS only had gay people or characters in 8 percent of its original programming. The CW, of course, is so dangerously at the bottom of the ratings that it’s at risk of actual extinction, while CBS leads the ratings by a significant margin. The attitudes of young viewers should drive LGBT-inclusive programming, but their actual consumption behaviors mean they’re creating a less strong market than their rising consumption power would indicate.

It’s also important to note that, while more LGBT characters and people are appearing on television, their numbers are still small enough that a single character or program can significantly shift a network’s performance. Reality programming is the major driver of LGBT representation on NBC and ABC. CBS has so few LGBT characters that Kalinda Sharma, the bisexual investigator on The Good Wife, ends up accounting for almost one third of the hours of representation of non-straight people on the network, and that show provided 48 percent of those hours overall. Diana Berrigan, the FBI agent on White Collar, made the USA Network the leader in representations of black LGBT people and lesbians all on her own. White gay men remain the most popular kind of LGBT people on television.

These small numbers mean both that the cancellation of a single program can significantly decrease a network’s representation of LGBT characters. But it also means that a few chances can make a network get better quickly. FX, a network that’s been defined by its explorations of heterosexual masculinity, for example, went from 19 percent of its programming hours including LGBT characters to 34 percent on the strength of Archer and American Horror Story. That’s a blessing and a curse. Progress is fragile. But it’s also relatively easy to accomplish.

And this year’s NRI has an interesting finding about the impact of popular culture on public opinion from its Pulse of Equality survey, which is conducted by Harris Internactive. “Among the 19% who reported that their feelings toward gay and lesbian people have become more favorable over the past 5 years, 34% cited ‘seeing gay or lesbian characters on television’ as a contributing factor,” the report says. That doesn’t mean television works for everyone, of course: Ann Romney’s love for Modern Family hasn’t exactly made her any more amenable to marriage equality. But if popular culture makes 6.5 percent of Americans think more favorably about LGBT people over a five-year period, that’s a significant contribution, and one that’s worth fighting for.

One of the interesting side effects of the debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act earlier this year was the question of whether the legislation would damage the alignment between the tech community the Democratic Party. But as the Republican convention winds down, the GOP isn’t exactly making a major pitch either to Hollywood or to tech donors.

““The Republican Party platform language strikes a very smart balance: it emphasizes the importance of us doing more as a nation to protect our intellectual property from online theft while underscoring the critical importance of protecting internet freedom,” Motion Picture Association of American chairman Chris Dodd said in response to the Republican platform.

But there isn’t that much detail there. The platform talks about intellectual property mostly as a trade issue between nation states rather than as a matter of consumer behavior abetted by the kind of entities the content industries have identified as major malefactors. In the party’s section on China, IP comes up as part of a larger package of issues: “Our serious trade disputes, especially China’s failure to enforce inter- national standards for the protection of intellectual property and copyrights, as well as its manipulation of its currency, call for a firm response from a new Republican Administration.” And in more general terms, the platform promises that “Punitive measures will be imposed on foreign firms that misappropriate American technology and intellectual property.”

On tech, the Republican platform doesn’t really differ from the Democratic promise in 2008 to “implement a national broadband strategy (especially in rural areas, and our reservations and territories) that enables every American household, school, library, and hospital to connect to a world-class communications infrastructure”—it just blames Democrats for making “no progress toward the goal of universal coverage—after spending $7.2 billion more. ” And it has a real contempt for net neutrality, describing it as “trying to micromanage telecom as if it were a railroad network,” in itself a revealing sentiment.

We’ve yet to see what the Democratic platform will include, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some attempt to bridge Hollywood and the tech community and make up for the damage done by the SOPA debate. But these are party platforms, and this is a year when the broad strokes of the economy are going to predominate in favor of a segment of the economy that may be key to some donors’ hearts, but won’t swing a huge chunk of swing voters at the ballot box. It’s easy to forget this while we’re immersed in the internet, but we’re a long way from the point where a substantive conversation about cable, the internet, and the way we govern and access content is going to be a mandatory part of the political conversation.

The National Football League Players Association, a year removed from being locked out by NFL owners, is monitoring the NFL’s current lockout of the league’s officials for its ramifications on player safety, the union’s top official told ThinkProgress. And as officials attempt to end their dispute with the league before the start of the regular season next week, NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith said the union reserved the right to examine “every possible remedy” to ensure the safety of its players.

The use of replacement officials, Smith said, “flies in the face” of the players’ efforts to make the game safer during their own negotiations, which resulted in a lockout by NFL owners, before the 2011 season. “The issues that we, the players, pushed hard for in the collective bargaining agreement were structural, fundamental changes in the way football is played,” Smith said. “All that flies in the face of a unilateral decision to prevent the most experienced on-field first responders from being involved in an incredibly physically challenging activity.”

Nevertheless, the NFL is prepared to use replacement officials to start the season, according to a memo obtained by CBS reporter Mike Freeman that the league circulated to all 32 teams today. “[W]e will have replacement crews on the field when the regular season begins,” the memo reads. “The replacements have undergone extensive training and evaluation, and have shown steady improvement during the preseason.” That improvement hasn’t been evident — the officials have been openly questioned by players and have struggled with routine duties like marking off yardages and correctly identifying teams.

The lack of experience of the replacements is of major concern to the players. NFL officials combined have nearly 1,500 years of professional experience, Smith said, while the replacements pale in comparison. NFL officials are required to have at least 10 years of experience, including five at the top collegiate or other professional levels, a requirement many of the replacements don’t meet. “Should we really be content with caretakers whose experience is on the high school and Lingerie Football League level?” Smith asked.

The biggest issue for the NFLPA, which, under Smith’s leadership, has openly supported hotel workers and other workers involved in labor disputes, is ensuring that its players operate in a safe working environment. There is a “real obligation of every employer in this country to provide employees with as safe a working environment as possible,” Smith said. “To me it’s impossible for the National Football League to say they are doing that if they choose to remove the most experienced referees from the field.”

Asked for specifics on what action the union may take if the league doesn’t settle its dispute with the professional officials, Smith declined to answer, saying only that the NFLPA was “looking at every possible remedy.”

A deal to end the lockout doesn’t seem imminent, as the NFL has refused to go back to the negotiating table with the officials, according to Mike Arnold, the lead negotiator for the National Football League Referees’ Association (NFLRA). “Their view seems to be, ‘If this thing’s going to settle, it’s going to settle on our terms,’” Arnold told ThinkProgress. “We think it’s been pretty clear that their negotiating strategy from day one has been to lock us out. In March of 2010, we sent a letter asking to negotiate. They never responded. They said they’d get something together, then they never did. That was a sign that they were going to lock us out.”

The NFL is seeking changes to the compensation and pension plans its officials, who work as part-time employees, receive. But the offers from the NFLRA, including a proposal to grandfather in a 401(k) retirement program to replace the current pensions, have fallen flat. When it comes to compensation, the two sides don’t appear that far apart: Arnold said the union and league offers differ by $16.5 million over the 5-year collective bargaining agreement. That breaks down to roughly $100,000 per season — or a little more than $6,000 a game — for each of the league’s 32 teams. “We’re talking peanuts,” Arnold said, noting that since the last CBA was signed in 2006, NFL revenues have grown from $6.5 billion per year to $9.3 billion.

When I read Arnold’s numbers to Smith, he said, “If $100,000 per team is the only thing that’s keeping the best referees off the field and maintaining the gold standard in on-field health and safety, the National Football League should be ashamed of itself.”

The NFL, for its part, did not mention the compensatory differences in its memo to teams, instead focusing on the pension dispute and “operational differences” related to hiring and evaluation. The league did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s quite clear, from the memo and from the NFL’s actions to this point, that the league has embraced the tried-and-true corporate strategy of locking out its workers and then attempting to wait them out, hoping to settle on its own terms. The easiest way out now, it seems, is for officials to abandon their fight, but Arnold made it sound as if the NFLRA is prepared to continue waiting for the NFL to negotiate. “They locked us out. We’ve been serious, made major concessions, and have been willing to negotiate. But all they’ve told us is to take it or leave it,” Arnold said. “It takes two sides to negotiate. We’re prepared, we’re ready to go.”

As for the players set to take the field with replacement referees next week, the future remains unclear.

It says a lot about how the Republican convention is going that the biggest buzz isn’t over any one speech, but over the possible identity of a mystery speaker slated for Thursday night. The rumors seem to be coalescing around actor Clint Eastwood. And if he takes the stage in Tampa tonight, Eastwood’s appearance will reveal more about the current state of the Republican party than about Eastwood or the man he’s there to endorse.

Eastwood endorsed Romney at an Idaho fundraiser in early August, citing the claim, later proven false, that Olympians’ medals would be taxed (their cash prizes are taxed as income), and saying “He’s going to restore a decent tax system that we need badly so that there is a fairness and people are not pitted against one another of whose paying taxes and who isn’t.”

Taxes and regulations have long been touchstone issues for Eastwood. When he ran of Carmel-By-The-Sea in 1986, his campaign was in part inspired by his fights with the town over building permits, and he was backed by small business owners irritated by the city’s regulations intended to make sure Carmel wasn’t overrun by tourists. In statewide California politics, Eastwood backed term limits. And during President Regan’s 1985 budget fight, United Press International reported that “Sen. William Armstrong, R-Colo., presented Reagan with a blue sweatshirt inscribed with the phrase ”Make My Day,” which Reagan borrowed from actor Clint Eastwood to dramatize his intention to veto any tax increases.”

But it’s not as if the actor’s politics are a perfect fit for a Romney administration. In an interview with GQ last fall, Eastwood cited the importance of issues like global warming and described his political evolution and support for equal marriage rights:

I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21, because he promised to get us out of the Korean War. And over the years, I realized there was a Republican philosophy that I liked. And then they lost it. And libertarians had more of it. Because what I really believe is, Let’s spend a little more time leaving everybody alone. These people who are making a big deal out of gay marriage? I don’t give a fuck about who wants to get married to anybody else! Why not?! We’re making a big deal out of things we shouldn’t be making a deal out of.

He’s never been particularly pro-life either, saying in the eighties that the extreme rhetoric that contributed to clinic bombings made him nervous (and for extremists in the Republican Party today, when actress Sondra Locke sued Eastwood for palimony in 1989, she accused him of encouraging to have two abortions and a tubal ligation). Eastwood endorsed John McCain in 2008 on the grounds that his experience in Vietnam would better equip him to handle the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, though he celebrated the breakthrough that Obama’s election represented even as he expressed skepticism of the younger man’s experience. Eastwood’s always been clear that he doesn’t fit comfortably into one party, though the one he seems most inclined to accomodate himself to is the GOP.

But if Eastwood takes the stage at the RNC tonight, he’ll be behaving exactly the way conservatives wish movie stars would behave: putting the self-interest created by his wealth over his opinions on social issues. Some day, there will be a reckoning between the wing of the Republican party that espouse limiting government’s influence in business and the one that wants to increase federal limitations on Americans’ sexual and reproductive lives. But as long as the people who believe in the former and oppose the latter aren’t willing to prioritize the freedom of women and gay people along with their freedom from taxes, that day will be pushed off a little further.

I always feel a bit stifled by Boardwalk Empire, though the show can achieve moments of emotional transcendence, like Richard Harrow’s attempted suicide last season, or Jimmy Darmody’s march to his execution. But this trailer gets at something intriguing that I’ve been thinking about in the context of anti-hero shows:

Much of the time, shows like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad experiment with how far characters can transgress while we still like them, or before the universe that they operate in demands that they be punished. But it’s another thing to ask how violent someone can get and still retain the humanity and respect for other people’s rights necessary to function on a day-to-day basis. Tony could kill someone and go on with Meadow’s college tour, but Walter White’s murder of Gus Fring seems to have broken down some of the things that moored him in his place. Of course, Tony was raised to integrate violence into his life along with other social norms and into his conception of being a man, while for Walter, it’s a rather new, and more volatile, discovery. In Nucky’s case, the question will also become how much violence a political system, as well as a home, can handle before the person who commits it can no longer be accommodated in polite company.

It seemed inevitable that FX would renew Charlie Sheen’s Anger Management for another 90 episodes after its initial run this summer, which no matter how much I hated it, found an audience (though not as big an audience as the initial announcement of it seemed to suggest was necessary for a renewal). Now that it’s happened, I’m resigned and more than a little sad. But if FX is going to continue to make money off of Sheen, here are five interesting—and even a few redemptive—things it could invest that cash in.

1. A female anti-hero drama, preferably starring C.C.H. Pounder: Glenn Close’s legal drama Damages didn’t quite work out on FX, which has since retrenched its brand as a dude-heavy network, though its Cold War drama The Americans, starring Kerri Russell, should help a little on that score. If FX is going to go lowest-common denominator on content with Anger Management and give Sheen a continuing platform and advertising dollars to rehabilitate his public image, they should reinvest the profits in helping the anti-hero genre grow and giving a woman a similar platform and career boost. C.C.H. Pounder did amazing work for the network on The Shield. FX should consider bringing her back.

2. A show about a man trying to grapple with his abuse of women: One of the grosser things about Anger Management is the way it’s reduced—and so much of the show is a meta-reappropriation of Sheen’s real-life personality—Sheen’s mistreatment of women to cheating and callousness, smoothing over his record of physical violence towards them. In the run-up to Anger Management, FX suggested the show could be about a man grappling with his treatment of women. If the network made that show, made it about a man with a history of abusing, and genuinely confronted repentance, violence, and control, it would be a landmark show.

3. A Louie-style low budget show from a woman or a person of color: In the wake of Girls’ debut on HBO this spring, there was an enormous discussion about the absence of women and people of color as television creators. That conversation, as is often the case with these things, has died down somewhat, but it shouldn’t go away. “John Landgraf wanted to let you know that the door is open for you to come to FX anytime and do the same show Louie does in your own version,” FX’s press guru John Solberg told Chris Rock at the Television Critics Association Press tour this summer. “So you are welcome to come.” The network should get serious about that invitation, but not just to Rock.

4. A genre show: With Game of Thrones, HBO’s found an awesome story engine to put dragons and zombies on-screen—and also to stage big, long discussions about gender and violence. FX has looked at adapting the comic Powers, about two cops who investigate crimes involving superheros, for television, and if that doesn’t work, it should look forward with an eye towards the fact that genre shows aren’t just about the special effects—they’re about issues, too.

5. A story about a male-dominated culture from the perspectives of women: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with FX’s core brand being shows about masculinity, a theme that’s produced a lot of interesting television. But the secret of Sons of Anarchy is that the show is at its best when it’s exploring biker life through the perspective of its old ladies, Gemma Teller, Tara Knowles, and Lyla Winston. That’s a formula FX could use to keep its identity while moving female characters to the center of the frame more frequently. And done right, it could mean the network gets shows about how different masculinities affect women.

The bridge is yours.

-Hollywood bros against animal poaching!

-We may get a Beverly Hills Cop TV show because everything old is new again.

-I would definitely like to poke around the Motion Picture Academy’s archives.

Over at The Mary Sue, Susana Polo makes an absolutely critical point for the debate about whether the cable model is about to collapse and people about to start cutting the cord en masse:

That the world is ready for streaming, a la carte television to become the default way that folks get their cable subscriptions delivered to them. This week the FCC released their eigth Broadband Progress Report, on the state of broadband internet service in the U.S., and they’ve collected some pretty interesting info. While broadband internet is available in 96% of American households, only 60% of Americans actually subscribe to the service. And of those 60%, only a minority of them actually get download speeds as high as 4 megabits per second, the minimum required speed for actual broadband as defined by the FCC. Most households are getting along with 768 kilobits a second. It’s hard to say whether this is because of subscriber preference, or because, well, many cable companies don’t exactly work very hard to guarantee that the speed they advertise is the speed you get. As Livescience points out, the bare minimum download speed for Netflix videos is 500 kbps, and that’s for particularly poor quality video.

Getting folks to give up cable in favor of streaming video services isn’t a matter of changing a single consumer preference. If cord-cutting is going to be a genuine movement, people are going to have to grow less attached to sports packages and more attached to faster internet, and to start demanding the availability of the latter. That’s a more complex cocktail of cultural changes than simply declaring that the cable companies are out of control.

Fuera de Serie, a Spanish magazine, has created an international uproar with its latest cover, in which it photoshops First Lady Michelle Obama into a French painting, and ends up portraying her as a slave woman, with her right breast exposed. If the cover had been published in America, it’s easy to imagine the quarters from which it might have come, and what the image would have been intended to convey. But the full context is much more complicated—and much more revealing—than that.

I don’t think the intention of the cover is to be racist, or to denigrate Mrs. Obama in any way. In the editor’s note introducing the issue in which the story appears, Fuera de Serie explains, roughly translated, that the author, “in order to understand the manner in which Michelle has seduced the American people, the journalist Pablo Scarpellini details the secrets of the woman who has not only conquered the heart of Barack Obama.” The title is “Michelle: Granddaughter of a Slave, Lady of America,” which suggests her as a powerful symbol of the American experience, though it’s off by a couple of generations. The article itself may turn out to be less positive, but that kind of language doesn’t indicate a desire to sell a vision of Michelle Obama as a slave. Marie-Guillemine Benoist, who painted the work Obama is photoshopped into as a commemoration of the French abolition of slavery, was explicitly a feminist, and her work, when it was first exhibited, was interpreted as humanist.

But while the generations between her enslaved ancestors and Michelle Obama may seem distant to the editors of Fuera de Serie, but I’d venture to guess that it is a nearer shadow to Michelle Obama herself, and to many, many Americans. The state of African-Americans is such that the prospect of being harassed or killed by representatives of the state, of facing major challenges to economic self-determination, is not something that seems so broadly outlandish that it can be invoked without conjuring up the specter of real and ongoing harm. This image of Michelle Obama could only be liberating in a world where there aren’t a lot of people who are vocal about their desire to put the first black First Lady back into what they believe to be her place. History’s ghosts are powerful. Those who dare summon them should be clear about what they want, and be prepared for the consequences.

Ever since the news came down that Joss Whedon would direct The Avengers 2, work with Marvel on the overall direction of its franchise, and make a television show that would be part of the franchise, the last part of the equation has been the biggest question. Whedon began his career in movies, but he truly excelled on television, and a show from him would be a major event, even if it wasn’t the connective tissue in a multi-billion-dollar franchise, and even if, given his track record, his involvement could be a significant way to get more women involved in that franchise, which is currently dominated by men.

Now, it appears we know at least the basic subject of the show:

From ABC Studios, the project is based on the long-running comic created by Jack Kirby and revolves around the secret military law enforcement agency dubbed S.H.I.E.L.D., which stands for Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistic Directorate. Whedon is on board to co-pen the pilot alongside his brother Jed Whedon, and his wife, Maurissa Tancharoen, who all previously teamed on the three-part web series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. (The CW will air the Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, Felicia Day starrer in October.) Avengers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer mastermind Whedon will direct the pilot, should his schedule permit.

That leaves a lot of unanswered questions: Cobie Smulders, who played S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill and would be an obvious main character for this show, is committed to How I Met Your Mother, and I have no idea if her Marvel contract could compel her to do both, or if that would be logistically possible. The same uncertainty is the case for both Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner (who was once under contract to ABC), who as S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives Black Widow and Hawkeye would also be logical significant characters.

But whatever the ultimate lineup, I think this is a logical choice. I wrote yesterday before the announcement came down that a S.H.I.E.L.D. show would make sense because “it could fill in all the spaces between the big battles with smaller bureaucratic fights and the consequences that follow a throwdown like the one between Loki and his forces and the men and woman at Fury’s command.” It’s also a somewhat safe one that brings elements of the films that are most like procedural cop dramas to television, preserving a familiar tone and structure.

I just hope that that safeness doesn’t mean that Whedon and company will pass up a chance with this safe concept to make the Avengers universe a little less monochromatic, and a little braver and more thoughtful about the use and abuse of power. In the current comics continuity, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s director is a woman, Daisy Johnson. Having a whole squad of agents would open up space for characters like Jimmy Woo. And if Samuel L. Jackson isn’t available to play Nick Fury, why not have his son, Nick Fury Jr. feature in whatever lineup gets pulled together? It’s excellent that the Whedonverse means that a woman, Tancharoen, is going to be working on this project at a high level. But it would be even better if that translated into a more diverse, more interesting character slate as well. I can forgive white dudes arguing with each other making up much of a one-off movie. But not a television show, and not for much longer in the franchise as a whole.

I also really dearly hope that Whedon builds on both the tensions between Nick Fury and the S.H.I.E.L.D. council, and on Maria Hill’s apparent doubts about Fury’s leadership, even if those characters can’t be in the show, in some form. As much as The Avengers are an awesome teamup, it’s relatively terrifying that Fury has essentially pulled them together as his personal army, their functionality dependent on his ability to manipulate them correctly. And it’s even scarier that a quasi-governmental body with nuclear weapons is out there calling shots beyond the scope of the U.S. government. We have a very romantic relationship with both vigilantism and decisive military action in our pop culture that The Avengers relied on to cast a warm glow over a lot of what went down in the movie, and as Whedon did with his exploration of the abuses of the Watchers’ Council in Buffy, or the bureaucrats in Cabin in the Woods, I hope he can be more nuanced about that concentration of power going forward. This is a fantastic opportunity. I hope Whedon makes it mean something.

Yahoo’s got an alternate look at what could have been the beginning of The Avengers, and what would have been a striking, and fascinatingly, different movie:

One of the most underdeveloped elements of The Avengers—or one of the most interesting pieces of setup for a future film, depending on how it’s played—was Nick Fury’s relationship with the S.H.I.E.L.D. Council, a shadowy, multi-national organization that apparently has access to nuclear weapons, and has some power to oversee his work. It wasn’t clear who they were or what authority they had, or what ability they have now to call The Avengers to account. Those tensions are all fascinating story engines that Fury essentially blew off or ignored simply by acting as he wished in the face of great danger. It’s one of the reasons that an Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. show would be so interesting—it could fill in all the spaces between the big battles with smaller bureaucratic fights and the consequences that follow a throwdown like the one between Loki and his forces and the men and woman at Fury’s command.

And it would be a nice way to reckon with the actual costs of superhero throwdowns. The Avengers skips straight from the fear and devastation and the near-nuking of New York to a world where the city is restored and there’s a vigorous debate underway about what it means that superheroes exist. But so much of superheroism is about destroying the world to save it. That’s a terrible tension, and accepting it, and not just the prospect of people with abilities, is part of what living in a world with superheroes would relaly mean.

As much as I’d love to see Diana Prince be the subject of a movie franchise or a television show (though, of course, not one by David E. Kelley), that seems like a pretty remote possibility at this point. But at least I’m glad to hear that Fox is considering a tantalizing alternative, a story about Athena herself and not simply a riff on the goddess:

The project, which has received a script commitment, is based on Joy’s graphic novel, Headache, a coming-of-age drama about a 23 year-old woman who discovers she’s Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare. Each week she must maintain her secret identity while battling a slew of ancient monsters from Greek mythology and searching to uncover which of the other Greek gods is secretly plotting against her to take over the Earth.

I also really just like the idea of a contemporary woman suddenly finding out that she’s basically in charge of two areas of human life where men tend to assume they’re predominant today, even though gender obviously never held the ancient Greeks back any in terms of who they worshipped. Maybe we can have a mansplaining episode in which Athena fixes Will McAvoy.

The bridge is yours.

-Al Gore > Bill Clinton, if only for the former’s willingness to guest on 30 Rock against the latter’s immediate demurral.

-Belated congratulations to Rosie O’Donnell on her nuptials!

-How should we react when authors disown their work?

-The Master looks great. Also, more Amy Adams shooting guns, please: