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.