VH1 has yanked Ev and Ocho, a spinoff from its Basketball Wives franchise, that would have followed Dolphins wide receiver Chad Johnson and Evelyn Lozada in the early stages of their marriage, after Johnson was arrested over the weekend on battery charges. It’s one thing to pretend that people who don’t actually like each other are friends, or that people who are friends are fighting, or that celebrities are in danger of fake explosions. It’s to give a guy whose wife ended up at the hospital with a cut forehead while he got dragged off to jail a chance to sell himself to audiences as an appealing newlywed.

Entertainment companies have choices about what kind of people they want to be in business and what kinds of fantasies they want to sell. Johnson is hardly a money machine like Charlie Sheen, so the decision to drop him isn’t as painful to the network as it would be for the networks of the world to collectively and permanently turn their backs on that particular member of the Estevez clan. But still, it costs money to shoot a show and then shelve it. I’m glad that for now, VH1 isn’t interested in peddling that fantasy, and is willing to take the hit on the show.

Much of the response to the Penn State scandal seems to come from a sense that actors with some control over the governance and judgement of Penn State ought to be taking some sort of action. As my colleague Travis Waldron has pointed out, the harsh fines, bans, and vacated wins the NCAA imposed on Penn State’s football program seemed more like an attempt to make up for the organization’s own burnishing of Joe Paterno’s legacy than a response that would have a meaningful impact on the conditions that allowed Jerry Sandusky continued access to Penn State facilities and the legitimacy his Penn State connections conferred upon him. The decision to remove Joe Paterno’s statue was not the result of a long-considered process, but an immediate need to act. And at first glimpse, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education’s warning to Penn State that its accreditation could be in danger might seem like a similarly punitive action. But the questions the Commission needs to ask are reasonable ones, and working them through with Penn State could help that community and the general public learn more about the university’s future.

Accredited colleges need to be financially stable and in compliance with government requirements, and it’s reasonable that the Commission would want to be reassured of Penn State’s ability to meet those requirements. The NCAA fines alone come to almost half the $136.3 million in gifts to the university in fiscal 2011. Then, there’s the inevitable civil suits against Penn State, which is one of several schools not considered part of Pennsylvania’s state government, and thus covered by sovereign immunity, which would protect it from being sued. It looks like Penn State will try to offer compensation to Sandusky’s victims, but we’re a long way from knowing whether those victims will want to go to court instead, whether any of them would participate in a compensation fund, and what either the compensation or the damages handed down by a jury would look like, though it’s likely to be an extremely expensive process.

Penn State isn’t broke—it had $4.6 billion in revenue in fiscal 2011, and as of last September, the university’s endowment stood at $1.83 billion. But it’s not unreasonable for the Commission to inquire—especially given that Penn State’s insurer, the Pennsylvania Manufacturer’s Association, is trying to deny the university coverage on the grounds that Penn State concealed the risk Sandusky posed to the institution—how Penn State plans to assume the costs of the scandal. If Penn State dips into its endowment to compensate victims, how will that lost potential for income affect programs and staffing? If giving rates slow, whether because alums are horrified at what their university let take place, or because, as inexplicable as it may be to outsiders, loyalists believe the university treated Joe Paterno unfairly, what is the university’s long-term financial plan?

Beyond the question of finances, Pennsylvania state law requires “Licensees who are staff members of a medical or other public or private institution, school, facility or agency, and who, in the course of their employment, occupation or practice of their profession, come into contact with children shall immediately notify the person in charge of the institution, school facility or agency or the designated agent of the person in charge when they have reasonable cause to suspect on the basis of their professional or other training or experience, that a child coming before them in their professional or official capacity is a victim of child abuse.” And the Clery Act requires universities to report sexual assaults (and other kinds of violence) on campus if they want their students to be able to use federal financial aid and can fine schools heavily if they fail to comply—the Education Department is investigating Penn State for violations of the Act. Given the failure of Penn State officials to abide by their state and federal obligations in the Sandusky case, and the fact that abiding by government requirements is one of the things universities need to do to remain accredited, it’s reasonable for the Commission to want to see a plan for how Penn State plans to make sure the law is obeyed in the future, and even to interrogate the integrity of the university’s reporting in assault cases that don’t involve the football program.

What would be unfair is for the Middle States Commission on Higher Education to pull Penn State’s accreditation simply because it feels the need to do something, punishing current students by making their degrees worthless. But if it moves forward with the clear goal of preserving what makes Penn State a good school and incentivizing Penn State to become a safer place with a healthier culture, an inquiry into whether the university is meeting the standards for accreditation could play a useful role in Penn State’s reconstitution of itself in the wake of this terrible blot on the school’s collective character and history.

After the shooting at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado in July, I finally started reading Dave Cullen’s Columbine, which I finished just as word broke that a white supremacist had killed six people and wounded three at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin before committing suicide. There’s been a lot of conversation, particularly in the wake of The Dark Knight Rises massacre, about the desirability of denying the people who commit these crimes press and memory. At the request of victims’ families, President Obama declined to use the name of James Holmes, who is accused of the Aurora shootings. But reading Columbine, and then re-reading Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, and then the recently-released forensic report on the mental health of Jared Lee Loughner, who recently plead guilty to killing six people and wounding 13 others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, I realized why that impulse to erase mass killers has never quite resonated with me.

I don’t really want to understand James Holmes, or Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, or Jared Lee Loughner, or Seung-Hui Cho to understand them, or to come up with a policy solution that would prevent such killings from happening again, especially given the overwhelming obviousness of the role legal guns and ammunition play in making these death rates possible. But I want to read about them and their acts not to fathom the unfathomable, but to gain understanding of a more common humanity: what it means to parent a child gone badly wrong, how to value life in its normalcy rather than its extraordinariness, how men like these test our commitment to the due process of law.

One of the reasons that Columbine, in particular, is important, is that it dispels myths about both persons and policy that grew up in the wake of the shooting. Cullen’s reporting dismantled the idea that Harris and Klebold were social outcasts of some variety, or members of the Trenchcoat Mafia. The point ends up being, in this case as in others, not that schools should monitor social cliques more carefully or ban certain kinds of clothes from campus, but that officials and adults involved with the boys before their killings should have taken available warning signs seriously, and existing procedures should have been followed to their logical conclusions. If Detective Mike Guerra’s search warrant, based on evidence that suggested Harris might be constructing pipe bombs, had been authorized and executed, Harris and the writings on his website might have been recognized for the serious threats they were. If Wayne Harris, Eric’s father, who meticulously documented his son’s troubles, what he believed to be the roots of them, and the punishments he meted out to his son hadn’t believed that another boy was the problem, noting, “Brooks Brown is out to get Eric. Brooks had problems with other boys. Manipulative & Con Artist,” his serious approach to his seriously malevolent son, combined with functional law enforcement efforts, might have helped avert a disaster.

We like narratives that point to entirely unaddressed issues, often cultural ones, however useless they may be, because they give us something to do that doesn’t involve rectifying past mistakes. And it’s easier to institute a dress code than gun control laws—even if both infringe on personal freedom, gun owners have better lobbyists than teenagers. But we need to report on killers and their lives to avoid falling into easy, false narratives about causation, if only because it often proves more important to fix existing safeguards than to impose new ones.

And beyond policy, knowing the true stories of spree killings helps us value the lives of the people who were lost to random violence. In We Need to Talk About Kevin, the people killed by Eva Katchadorian’s son at his school were:

a basketball player, a studious Hispanic, a film buff, a classical guitarist, an emotive thespian, a computer hacker, a gay ballet student, a homely political activist, a vain teen beauty, a part-time cafeteria worker, and a devoted English teacher…Every one of them enjoyed something. Never mind whether this passion was pursued with any flash; whatever his parents claim, I gather Soweto Washington hadn’t a chance at going pro; Denny was (forgive me,Thelma) an atrocious actor, and Greer Ulanov’s petitioning New York congressmen who were going to vote with Clinton anyway was a waste of time. No one is willing to admit as much now, but Joshua Lukronsky’s obsession with movies annoying to many more students than just our son…Be that as it may, Joshua did love movies, and even his outright irksomeness didn’t keep Kevin from coveting the infatuation itself. It didn’t seem to matter infatuation with what. Soweto Washington loved sport and at least the illusion of a future with the Knicks; Miguel Espinoza, learning (at any rate, Harvard); Jeff Reeves, Telemann; Denny Corbitt, Tennessee Williams; Mouse Ferguson, the Pentium III processor; Ziggy Randolph, West Side Story, not to mention other men; Laura Woolford loved herself; and Dana Rocco—the ultimate unforgivable—loved Kevin.

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The bridge is yours.

-Jodie Foster is developing a lady-centric mob drama for Showtime? I am so in.

-Fox has intern troubles.

-Jessica Chastain says movie tough guys are really adorable kittens.

-Disney princess plastic surgery: just as disturbing as you might think.

-Keep The Lights On is very good and you should watch it:

In a long piece on Parks and Recreation as part of Deadline’s look at Emmy-contending shows, I was struck by this section on what made the show successful, and how it’s influenced the television landscape:

Producer Daniel Goor says that finetuning Poehler’s character was essential to assure viewers that she was not just a female version of Steve Carell’s self-absorbed Michael Scott of The Office.

“Once we clarified that the other characters in the ensemble liked her, it made it easier for people who liked her, too”, Goor says.

Goor also believes that Poehler’s strong female presence is helping the show surf this season’s new wave of comedies created or cocreated by women, about women, including HBO’s nominated Girls, New Girl, Suburgatory, and Up All Night.

“I think in way we lucked out, and we’ve kind of inadvertently surfed this trend, because our show is very much about a girl, a girl with a job”, Goor says. “Amy Poehler is very much the lead of this show, we’ve tried all along to make it her perspective, and the perspective of a woman working in a man’s world”.

(Goor notes as an aside that Up All Night creator Emily Spivey and Suburgatory creator Emily Kapnek both served on the staff of Parks.)

Parks and Recreation is one of a few shows, along with Community, which has already spun of showrunners of its own in the form of Anthony and Joe Russo, who created Animal Practice, and New Girl, which spawned its first showrunner in Dana Fox, who created Ben and Kate, which premieres on Fox on September 25, that may never achieve astronomical ratings but that seem likely to be labs that produce a lot of influential writers in years to come. I can’t wait to see what, for example, Community‘s Megan Ganz, or Parks‘ Aisha Muharrar (who wrote the upcoming season that takes Leslie Knope to Washington) do when they get their own shows someday.

But Goor’s remarks also strike me as an illustration of how hard it can be to replicate the best parts of a show like Parks and Recreation. I think it’s absolutely true that the show didn’t make it clear whether Leslie was admirable or a joke in its first season, and the entire show clarified and clicked into place when it became clear that she was extremely competent and committed, and the people around her admired her for it. But Leslie isn’t just likable—she stands for ideas more specific than the archetypes represented by Regan’s working mother, Whitney’s committmentphobe, or Jess’s lovable kook. That may be a limitation on the show’s ultimate audience, though I do wonder if a less surreal take on small-town public service could capture a wider viewership. But the point remains that Leslie has some problems that are inflected by gender, but the bigger idea she represents isn’t solely bounded by her sex. More lady shows could stand to have big ideas where the program’s perspective on it is tied to a main character’s gender, but not solely defined by the fact that she’s a woman. I’m all for explorations of femininity and what it means to be a woman, and I wish more male audiences were interested in those kinds of shows, or that the entertainment industry trusted them to be. But not everything every woman does is about gender and gender roles.

And it’s important that the default for telling those kinds of stories about public and national service, or saving the world, or surviving the workday not always be male. As long as male characters are coded as an acceptable representative for all of humanity but female characters can only represent the experiences of women, and in some cases, a very narrow slice of womanhood, we’re unlikely to get to a place where the depictions of men and women are roughly equal in terms of both number and characterization.

NBC’s Stars Earn Stripes, a reality competition show in which “stars” ranging from Todd Palin to Nick Lachey complete challenges theoretically drawn from military missions and raise money for military charities when they win, was always going to attract some raised eyebrows. Whether it was the show’s contribution to the growing Palin family reality empire, the involvement of an apparently severely underly-employed Gen. Wesley Clark, or the late-summer cheesiness of the concept, Stars Earn Stripes is perfectly engineered to win news cycles if not fans. But I don’t think NBC anticipated this latest twist: Archbishop Desmond Tutu and a number of other Nobel Laureates have published an open letter to NBC president Bob Greenblatt (who in between this and Sharon Osbourn’s accusations of discrimination is not having a great start to this season) and other executives involved with the show, calling Stars Earn Stripes an ugly glorification of war.

I don’t entirely agree with Tutu and his esteemed company: Stars Earn Stripes doesn’t make it look exciting or fun to fire on live targets, or to expose yourself to real risk. The show is marked by a patent phoniness, whether it’s the cheerful blue and red plastic targets and paint used to mark competitors’ courses, the hay bales that simulate houses, the command center General Clark hosts from that looks like it was sold off the lot of a canceled science fiction show, and the corny, B-movie explosions. This is a rich man’s paintball course, not an effective tool for convincing people to kill in their country’s service. The signatories are right when they say that “Real war is down in the dirt deadly. People—military and civilians—die in ways that are anything but entertaining.” And the show doesn’t actually make entertainment out of those deaths.

But Stars Earn Stripes is a perfect illustration of a deeply pernicious problem: it severs the concept of supporting the troops from any other meaning than praising their competence. “This is a show to say thank you to the people who are in uniform now, who have been in uniform, and the people who protect us 24/7, 365 and do things that you can’t pay people to do,” Dick Wolf, who is executive producing the show, said at the Television Critics Association Press Tour And what I hope, if there was one sentence that comes out of the show at the end of it, it’s going up to people in the military and just simply saying thank you for your service, because they don’t mind hearing it.” Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the idea that we should thank members of the military for their service. But reducing support for the troops to the sum of thank-yous and viewing them like action movie stars is the equivalent of President Bush suggesting that American families hit up Disney World as a way of affirming the goodness of life in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
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A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin can write one hell of a palace coup or behind-the-scenes political maneuver. So it’s no surprise that when he gets fired up about a real-world issue, like efforts to make it harder for eligible voters to actually cast their ballots, he has words for the people he believes responsible. He wrote on Saturday:

It is one thing to attempt to win elections. But trying to do so by denying the most basic and important right of any American citizen to hundreds and thousands of people, on entirely spurious grounds… that goes beyond reprehensible. That is despicable.

It would really be nice if there were still some Republicans of conscience out there who would stand up and loudly denounce these efforts, a few men of honor and integrity for whom “win the election” does not “win the election at any cost.” There were once many Republicans I admired, even I disagreed with them: men like Everett Dirksen, Clifford Case, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Scranton… yes, even Barry Goldwater, conservative as he is. I do not believe for a moment that Goldwater would have approved of this, any more than Robert A. Heinlein would have. They were conservatives, but they were not bigots, nor racists, nor corrupt. The Vote Suppressors have far more in common with Lester Maddox, George Wallace, John Stennis, and their ilk than they do with their distinguished GOP forebears.

The people behind these efforts at disenfranchising large groups of voters (the young, the old, the black, the brown) are not Republicans, since clearly they have scant regard for our republic or its values. They are oligarchs and racists clad in the skins of dead elephants.

Maybe we could have a kingsmoot, the one functional form of democracy in Westeros and Essos, instead of elections? It would be hard to a significant percentage of Americans to show up and then stick around for days to argue about the future of the presidency, though. And Mitt Romney would just show up and offer everybody car elevators and plunder and run off with the election anyway. But I think we can all agree, across party lines, that if finding ways to ensure broad poll access to all Americans who are eligible to vote while also ensuring the integrity of the ballots they cast will help get The Winds of Winter to us faster by giving Martin fewer things to be distracted by and angry about, that’s a worthwhile priority.