Salon’s TV critic Willa Paskin is one of my favorite people to read, and one of the people I turn to whenever I need to make an idea sharper. We got together to discuss the new television season in a conversation that spiraled from how depressed we are by the new fall comedies, to what Homeland, Gone Girl, and We Need To Talk About Kevin have to do with each other:

There are two parts of the conversation that I think are going to be particularly important to my work going forward. First, is a conversation we had about the relationship of story structure to comedy and drama, which has really reshaped a lot of my thinking about how television works. Then, in the latter half of the conversation, Willa offers what I think is a brilliant riff on how our understanding of anti-heroes has gone off the rails that clarified what I want to I write about gender and difficult women on television. In any case, I was grateful to have had this conversation and I hope y’all enjoy it.

This post is a discussion of the first three episodes of the third season of The Wire. Next week, we’ll discuss episodes four through six.

The moment from the beginning of the first season of The Wire that’s lodged most in political and historical memory is Bunny Colvin’s speech about the paper bag. It’s true that his insight that there’s never been a paper bag for drugs and the genesis of Hamsterdam drive the core action of this season. But while the bureaucracy’s inability to tolerate Colvin’s innovation is the major theme of the season, it’s also valuable to examine how bureaucratic actors can enable each other in doing harm. We may spend a lot of time watching street-level partnerships evolve, bend, and sometimes break in The Wire, but the partnership between Burrell and Rawls, and the work they do in the CompStat room this season, is just as important.

Unlike the street partnerships, there’s a clear power imbalance between the pair. Burrell has the power to promote, to play politics, but it also makes him vulnerable. “What makes you think they’ll promote the wrong man?” he asks Daniels, to whom he’s promised much and is late on delivery. “We do it all the time,” Daniels tells him coolly. Carcetti offers Burrell opportunities, telling him “We’re losing 10, 12,000 residents a year to the county…The Mayor’s acting like a ten percent bump in the murder rate is business as usual…If you were smart, you’d come to me when the Mayor shorts you.” But much of the first three episodes of the season involve Burrell trying to figure out whether to accept his offer, and when he does, how to play it effectively.

Rawls and Burrell work so well together because the former makes space for the latter. Rawls gets to be profane and aggressive, opening up wounds Burrell can slip into and deliver death blows. “I don’t care how you do it. Just fucking do it,” he declares in explaining CompStat’s plan to put a hard limit on the number of murders Baltimore will report for the year. When Bunny asks them “How do you make a body disappear?,” Burrell gets to be comparatively elegant, telling him: “If you want to continue wearing those oak clusters, you will shut up and step up. Any of you who can’t bring in the numbers we need will be replaced by someone we can.” When Marvin Taylor reports that even though “I deployed my resources per your instructions…They move, sir. Every day. They’re going to sell their drugs somewhere,” it’s Rawls who informs him “They all tell me you lack a fucking clue,” and Burrell who smoothly relieves him of his command. It’s Rawl’s who throws a crude temper tantrum at Colvin, telling him, “What I got instead is some half-assed ‘I wish we were doing better’ platitude that’s meant to fool maybe a six-year-old girl into thinking you’re doing your job. But she’s left the room. She’s asking the stripper if she can have your job because she sure as shit doesn’t want yours.” And it’s Burrell who transforms that crudeness into something more elevated. “If the felony rate doesn’t fall, you most certainly will,” he tells Colvin. “The Gods are fucking you, you find a way to fuck them back. It’s Baltimore, gentlemen. The Gods will not save you.”

Watching the two men is a fascinating reminder that bureaucracy doesn’t only produce complication, duplication, and incompetence. It can be a tool of cruelty, both within the ranks, and to the people the bureaucracy works on. Rawls’ cruelty can be effective, as we saw in his management of Jimmy McNulty’s reaction to the shooting of Kima Greggs in the first season of The Wire. But here, it’s being used to browbeat, to obfuscate, and to cement a culture of lying. The glimmers of hope from the bureaucracy in these episodes are small: the possibility that someone else’s loss in a Parks Department layoffs could mean an opportunity for Cutty, the reminder in death that a police “was called. He served. He is counted.” CompStat itself is a scandal. But the means by which it’s enforced are spirit-crushing on their own.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been following the response to a truly idiotic move by fashion house Paul Frank. For Fashion’s Night Out, an annual shopping event, the company decided to host a party called “”Dream Catchin’ with Paul Frank,” where, according to blogger Adrienne K., who is Cherokee, attendees posed with tomahawks, bows and arrows, and feathered headbands. It’s a colossally insensitive move, and hardly a novel one, given that the appropriation of so-called “native” culture has been a big deal in fashion for a couple of cycles now.

Normally when a company or an individual does something this clueless, promoting justifiable frustration from the people they’ve appropriated and stereotyped, they make a statement and a donation, and the beat goes on. But according to Adrienne, Paul Frank reached out to her and other Native American bloggers for their feedback, and outlined a comprehensive approach to shut down the campaign the event was based on, and to educate other people in the industry about how Paul Frank went wrong, and they can, too:

The phone call went so much better than I could have even imagined. Elie was gracious, sincere, and kind from the beginning, and truly apologetic. He took full responsibility for the event, and said he wanted to make sure that this was something that never happened again, and wanted to learn more so he could educate his staff and colleagues. We talked about the history of representations of Native people in the US, and I even got into the issues of power and privilege at play–and the whole time, he actually listened, and understood. Such a refreshing experience.

I could go on and on about the call, but enough background, here are the incredible, amazing, mind-boggling action steps that the company has taken and has promised to take in the near future:

-They have already removed all of the Native inspired designs from their digital/online imprint

-The company works off a “Style Guide” that includes all of the digital art for the company, and then separate manufacturing companies license those images and turn them into products. Elie and his staff have gone through the style guide, even into the archives, and removed all of the Native imagery, meaning no future products will be produced with these images.

-They have sent (or it will be sent today) a letter to all of their manufacturers and partners saying none of this artwork is authorized for use and it has been removed from their business

-Elie has invited Jessica and I to collaborate with him on a panel about the use of Native imagery in the industry to be held at the International Licensing Merchandisers Association (LIMA) conference in June. This would reach a large and incredibly influential audience all in one place.

and the MOST exciting part:

-Paul Frank Industries would like to collaborate with a Native artist to make designs, where the proceeds would be donated to a Native cause!

I excerpt this at length because I think this kind of response is a model for the kinds of actions both companies and publications should take when they clown themselves this epically. Can you imagine what would happen if a fashion magazine—say, French Vogue—after publishing an editorial of a model in blackface, held a roundtable with bloggers of color, explained the editorial process that lead to the editorial being commissioned and run, and outlined the changes they’d made along the way to prevent themselves from publishing content that was both emotionally and editorially unworthy of their brand?

Organizations love to apologize without making process changes or explaining them. ABC News chief Brian Sherwood’s explanation that he’d rebuked Brian Ross after the latter speculated that Aurora shooter James Holmes was affiliated with the Tea Party, coupled with his evasions on which internal procedures lead to the information going on the air and what they’d changed, is a textbook example of this kind of approach to crisis management. It is embarrassing to reveal that, say, you don’t employ anyone who might have the perspective to point out to you that a “pow-wow” is not an okay thing to do, or that a news organization airs information it found on Google without verifying it. But cauterizing those wounds and explaining how you’ve worked backwards to make sure you don’t make the errors again is a short-term pain it’s worth enduring.

The bridge is yours.

-The latest on Inspector Spacetime.

-Not satisfied with Homeland, Howard Gordon is making another television show about CIA agents.

-Jesse Plemons steals Taylor Kitsch’s thunder.

-Kal Penn will be back on your television in January.

-Four months ’til Downton:

At Sundance, I got a chance to see Arbitrage, the financial thriller from director Nicholas Jarecki that opened last weekend, that’s one of the first movies about the financial crisis to actually be about the financial crisis. The movie follows finance titan Robert Miller (Richard Gere) at a moment when he’s about to sell the firm he created from the ground up, even though he’s made what could be a disastrously bad bed on Russian copper. And as his daughter Brooke (Brit Marling), who has grown up working in the company and doesn’t want to sell, begins to figure out that the firm he’s selling is a house of cards, Robert crashes a car he’s driving, killing his mistress. As he struggles to cover up her death with the help of a young man (Nate Parker) whose father worked for Robert, a detective (Tim Roth) desperate to nail Robert starts closing in on him. I spoke with director Nicholas Jarecki about growing up in a family of commodity brokers, not wanting to just tell Bernie Madoff’s story, and why we love financial bubbles. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to actually start by asking you sort of where the concept–not just for the film as a whole–but for having it be sort of a prediction algorithm at the heart of the movie, instead of pure Ponzi scheme. We’ve seen so much of Bernie Madoff in the pop culture response to the financial crisis, but I was curious about the decision to have that be at the center.

Well, I thought a lot about Madoff: when I started writing the story he had just been caught and I was reading all this wonderful financial journalism in Vanity Fair, of all places. Greydon Carter had commissioned these pieces, which he collected into a book called The Great Hangover. It was all this wonderful financial journalism from great writers like Michael Lewis, and real inside stuff. And I was pretty familiar with this world because my parents were commodity brokers, and still are. And so I know a lot about business and was around it all my life in New York. But Madoff was less interesting to me because I read something he said in jail, “Fuck my victims. I carried them for 25 years and now I’m doing 125 years.” So to me, that was very sociopathic, and the idea of a Ponzi scheme also too simple. I felt like I’d seen that movie, even 25 years ago. Even 25 years ago I feel like I’ve seen that movie, you know?

So what I was more interested in was kind of a man, once good, after many years of success perhaps read one too many of his own press releases, and down the slope he goes. And for that story, I needed a financial crime that was less overt, a little more of a slippery slope, if you will, you know, something that he could get into, make this illiquid investment and you know “Okay we need a little more time”…That’s the thing he never really saw coming, and he says that to his daughter. He says, “It’s like a plane crash–it just happens.” So, even the most brilliant minds in the world–I know from personal experience–can make mistakes like this, and the world can turn upside down, and the South Pole is north.

Well, it also struck me that while Bernie Madoff could have happened at any time and place, and the fact that he was exposed in the middle of the financial crisis, his crimes have been conflated with the crisis, even though they don’t seem to have the same root symptoms. You seemed to find something actually much more symptomatic of the economic trouble we’re in–that sense of certainty that the market would always go up despite past lessons.

Well I’ve lived now, personally, through three bubbles. ’87, [the] ’00 tech bubble, and now the housing bubble. And I’m 33 and I think I’m just starting to conclude that we like bubbles. It’s something that we do. We like to build and get really enthusiastic and “Let’s go get that house, flip it, it’s no money down….The sky’s the limit!” And it’s not. And that’s when people get carried away. I think that’s kind of a common human thing. So in a way, I understand Robert Miller – he was trying to make a good deal. He was trying to make money. It was too good to be true. Unfortunately it was too good to be true. But it could have gone the other way…These brilliant hedge fund guys, they took some HUGE gambles. And what if those gambles hadn’t work? They easily couldn’t have. So we see in Cosmopolis, a film that just came out that some friends made, the main character and he’s made a big bet on the Yuan, the Chinese currency, and he loses his whole fortune in one day. And it can happen. And I know people it’s happened to.
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Not that I don’t love Parks and Recreation enough already, but after a season that articulated a difficult point—that it’s actually very hard for the old-fashioned values we profess to admire in politics to win out—beautifully, I’ve been very excited to see how the show is going to make a difficult transition. Moving Leslie to City Council, Ben to Washington, and Andy, potentially, to the police department were all probably necessary both to grow the characters, and to widen the show’s aperture beyond the Parks Department, which could risk becoming a cliche. And watching this preview clip for next week’s episode, which follows Leslie and Andy to Washington, makes me especially optimistic, for three reasons:

1. It’s giving Leslie a larger stage. Taking Leslie to City Council was always going to give her a chance to do more than organized Harvest Festivals, and us an opportunity to get to know her new colleagues more extensively than Leslie’s meet-cutes with Councilman Hauser ever allowed. But I like the idea of her going to Washington, even glancingly. Leslie was always headed for bigger things, no matter how much she loved the Parks Department. And if the first phase of the show set up her move from a civil service position to elected office, as Parks and Recreation enters what could be its final season, it makes sense that show sets up a promise for an end-game: Leslie leaving Pawnee altogether for a brighter future, and a chance to make a bigger impact

2. And through it, bringing the Parks and Recreation touch to the federal government. That said, having conquered Pawnee, it makes sense that Leslie gets a new test for her optimism. I love the idea of Leslie lobbying for federal funds—and the prospect of her testing out her commitment and cheer in an environment vastly more cynical than Pawnee and dysfunctional on a scale Leslie can’t even begin to imagine. I don’t want to see Washington break Leslie Knope. But sending her there is good preparation for her new job at City Council.

3. The show is giving April some challenges, and a chance to figure out what she likes. I know there are some people who would love for April to stay her cranky, aggressively disinterested self forever, mourning the loss of a unique female character to adulthood. But April shouldn’t be denied the chance to grow up, and the best B arc in Parks and Recreation last season was watching her start to feel the stirrings of passion. Ben’s decision to take April to Washington gives her a little space from her marriage to Andy, and her mentorship by Ron, to develop other skills and attachments. Ron and April were a fantastic fit initially, given their shared desire not to get anything done. But it’s been good to see her work with Chris, who shoved her into enthusiasm. And now it’ll be a further development to let her work for Ben, closer to a peer, who can help develop the flares of initiative she’s shown on projects like the pet drive.

Back in June when the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, I predicted that one of its long-term effects would be on medical procedurals. One of the most common ways for televised doctors to show that they’re compassionate is for them to treat patients even if they don’t have insurance in defiance of hospital administrators’ wishes or their own well-being. The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling’s sitcom about an OB/GYN, which premieres tomorrow on Fox, is making insurance and medical bill collection a core component of its storytelling. It will take a while to get most Americans insured, but as coverage is increasingly standard, medical procedurals will have to find a substitute for that kind of storytelling.

And shows may start incorporating health care reform into their storylines sooner than I even expected. As The New York Times reported on Saturday, California, as part of its efforts to stand up its health care exchange, has hired Oglivy Public Relations to handle a significant campaign to educate state citizens about their obligations and options, and the plan includes major outreach to Hollywood:

Realizing that much of the battle will be in the public relations realm, the exchange has poured significant resources into a detailed marketing plan — developed not by state health bureaucrats but by the global marketing powerhouse Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, which has an initial $900,000 contract with the exchange. The Ogilvy plan includes ideas for reaching an uninsured population that speaks dozens of languages and is scattered through 11 media markets: advertising on coffee cup sleeves at community colleges to reach adult students, for example, and at professional soccer matches to reach young Hispanic men.

And Hollywood, an industry whose major players have been supportive of President Obama and his agenda, will be tapped. Plans are being discussed to pitch a reality television show about “the trials and tribulations of families living without medical coverage,” according to the Ogilvy plan. The exchange will also seek to have prime-time television shows, like “Modern Family,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and Univision telenovelas, weave the health care law into their plots.

“I’d like to see 10 of the major TV shows, or telenovelas, have people talking about ‘that health insurance thing,’ ” said Peter V. Lee, the exchange’s executive director. “There are good story lines here.”

Now whatever happens will depend on the willingness of shows to play ball—and the extent to which viewers actually understand that the storylines that end up incorporated in the shows reflect accurate information and services that are really available to them. But at a time when Very Special Episodes have become common to the point that there’s nothing very special about them at all, I can’t think of a better reason for shows to explain to viewers that they’re really doing something different than explaining to their audiences that, unlike the miracle doctors on screen, there’s something out there in the real world that can actually make a difference to the uninsured among them.