An agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. show may not have been what I would have chosen for Marvel’s foray into television in cooperation with Joss Whedon, but it is a logical move, a way to build out the Marvel universe with relatively low special effects requirements and in a procedural framework that will be familiar to audiences who aren’t used to watching superhero shows. But I’m optimistic about the character lineup that’s been announced for the show for a couple of reasons:

SKYE | This late-20s woman sounds like a dream: fun, smart, caring and confident – with an ability to get the upper hand by using her wit and charm.

AGENT GRANT WARD | Quite the physical specimen and “cool under fire,” he sometimes botches interpersonal relations. He’s a quiet one with a bit of a temper, but he’s the kind of guy that grows on you.

AGENT ALTHEA RICE | Also known as “The Calvary,” this hard-core soldier has crazy skills when it comes to weapons and being a pilot. But her experiences have left her very quiet and a little damaged.

AGENT LEO FITZ and AGENT JEMMA SIMMONS | These two came through training together and still choose to spend most of their time in each other’s company. Their sibling-like relationship is reinforced by their shared nerd tendencies – she deals with biology and chemistry, he’s a whiz at the technical side of weaponry.

First, given the huge imbalance in the Marvel universe, it’s really nice to have three female characters to two male ones. I like great male characters, and I’m always curious to see what Whedon does with men and masculinity, a rather under-discussed element of his work, but if we’re seeing this show as part of a larger whole, this is a welcome course correction.

And second, it’s nice to see that, at least from the initial descriptions, we’re going to have different kinds of women in the show, too, from a charismatic heroine, to an action hero, to a lab rat. Particularly in the high school years of Buffy, Whedon did a nice job of showing how women with different personalities and styles could click as friends, grate up against each other, hurt each other, and work together. It was fascinating to Buffy, not a day-to-day academic whiz (though a good test-taker), and Willow, who made up in smarts what she lacked in fashion sense, form an extremely effective and for the most part, emotionally balanced partnership. The “Lovers Walk” episode of Buffy‘s third season, where Cordelia catches Xander cheating on her with Willow was interesting in part because it upset Cordelia’s understanding of her appeal and social standing relative to Willow. And in later seasons, Tara’s gentleness was a strong counterpoint to Buffy and Willow’s personalities: whether in magical practice or in terms of her relationship with Buffy’s younger sister Dawn, kindness can be even more effective than authority or strength.

Whedon did this kind of conflict of styles and surprising complementarities extremely well in The Avengers. Steve Rogers’ everyman values and old-fashioned perspectives on duty and teamwork clashed with Tony Stark’s ego and individualism. Tony may have goaded Bruce Banner, but in his fellow scientist, he recognized a kindred tinkerer and a man with some of the control problems that have plagued Tony in the past, if with more significant consequences. Thor sees in Bruce a man who needs a rumble sometimes. The final action sequences in the movie, though they have flaws, wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying without the friction that preceded it. These were men who could work together so effectively because they’d probed all of each other’s weak points and figured out all the places where their skills could complement each other. I’ll be excited to see Whedon use this part of his skill set again with a mixed group of men and women, and in an extended narrative on television.

I got an early birthday present today with the publication of Three Parts Dead, the first novel by my friend Max Gladstone, and a book I’ve gotten to read in various iterations over the years. It’s the story of Tara Abernathy, a necromancer who gets hired by a McKinsey-like firm called Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, and for her first assignment, finds herself staffed to a city called Alt Coulumb, which has a rather significant problem: God, specifically Kos the Everburning, who keeps Alt Coulumb powered, is dead. With the help of her boss, Elayne Kevarian, an anxious junior priest named Abelard who was on watch when Kos died, a vampire, a cop with an unfortunate addiction, and some gargoyles Tara gets to know Alt Coulumb, a rich and fully-realized fictional city, and learns a lot about the nature of faith.

That latter aspect is a significant part of what makes Three Parts Dead so excellent. The novel and the world it explores is based on an economic understanding of faith, and the relationships between gods and their worshippers, as well as between humans themselves, are significantly governed by contracts freighted with power and significance. Max writes:

Gods, however, made deals. It was the essence of their power. They accepted a tribe’s sacrifice and in turn protected its hungers from wolves andw ild beasts. They received the devotion of their people and gave back grace. A successful god arranged to receive more than he returned to the world. Thus your power and your people grew together, slowly, from family to tribe, from tribe to city, from city to nation, and so on to infinity. Nice strategy, but slow. Theologians centuries back had developed a faster method. One god gave of his power to another, or to a group of worshipers, on a promise of repayment in kind, and of more soulstuff than had initially lent. Gods grew knit to gods, pantheons to pantheons, expecting, and indeed requiring, their services to be returned. Power flowed, and divine might increased beyond measure. There were risks, though. If a goddess owed more than she could support, she might die as easily as a human who shed too much blood.

After Tara’s graduation from the Hidden Schools, a magical academy inspired in part by Max’s wife’s experience in law school, and before she joins Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, she works as a country magician.
“Ned Thorpe lost half the profit from his lemon crop every year, due to a bad arbitration clause in his reseller’s contract. Ghosts stole dead men’s bequests through loopholes in poorly written wills,” she reflects of her work. “Shopkeeps came to her to draft their pacts, farmers for help investing the scraps of soulstuff they eked out of the dry soil.” But she’s something of an atheist. “Millions of people live without gods,” she reflects. “They live good lives. They love, and they laugh, and they don’t miss churches and bells and sacrifice.” When she gets to Alt Coulumb and starts sorting through the web of contracts Kos signed before his death, the contracts she has to maintain, and her understanding of worship, gets rather more complicated.
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The bridge is yours.

-Dear Taylor Swift, you are not helping your case here, Love, Alyssa.

-I want nothing more than to be able to root for Danny Strong, but his work on Game Change does not give me confidence for Mockingjay.

-Charlie Jane Anders makes the case for why we need a new Star Trek.

-I would kind of totally watch a web series about bitter actors whose pilots don’t get picked up. Very meta:

Last night’s football game between the Bears and the Cowboys may have been a regular-season game, but it marked a rather more dubious milestone: the Cowboys opened what I imagine is the first underwear outlet in a professional sports stadium:

How ’bout them Cowgirls. Pink, the shop for young women from Limited Brands Inc.’s (NYSE:LTD) Victoria’s Secret chain, has teamed up with the Dallas Cowboys to open an NFL apparel store inside Cowboys Stadium. Jerry Jones, owner of the National Football League Dallas Cowboys, told a Dallas radio station that the store was opening Monday. “We think it’s cute as a bug,” Jones said, according to reports.

I hate the trend of turning arenas into amusement parks, in part because they imply that whatever sporting event is taking place there isn’t actually engaging enough to hold an audience’s attention. And I think the kinds of extras teams add to their stadiums are telling. Kids, who are presumed to get bored during games, get Build-A-Bear Workshops and playgrounds. And now women can shop for cute clothes while their husbands or boyfriends enjoy the game. Men, it’s presumed, fueled by beer and grease, will be glued to the game, even if they end up watching it on a flatscreen at one of the bars that crop up at stadiums in one of the great weird cons professional teams have pulled off with miraculous success.

I’m all for team gear that actually fits women, demand for which teams seem to have capitalized on rather nicely, if I may say so about my Wes Welker jersey, and I’m up for almost anything that dissuades teams from seeking public financing for stadiums. But it would be awfully nice if franchises focused on making the actual experience of staying in your seat and watching a game appealing, rather than by cynically suggesting that ladies need malls and kids need jungle gyms to make it all the way through to the final seconds of the fourth quarter.

On Fox’s Raising Hope, which returns tonight at 8 PM, Martha Plimpton plays Virginia Chance, a housekeeper and young grandmother to the titular Hope, her son Jimmy’s daughter, who he unexpectedly conceived with a one-night stand who turned out to be a serial killer. The show’s portrayal of a multi-generational working-class family is one of the true originals on television, and Plimpton is marvelous as Virginia, who alternates between managing her own aging grandmother, Maw Maw (Cloris Leachman), who is struggling with dementia, her job, and managing the misadventures of Jimmy and her husband Burt. And off-screen, Plimpton is a vigorous feminist advocate who’s penned editorials on the War on Women and wears the A Is For… campaign’s scarlet A on her dress at public events and awards ceremonies to call attention to the wave of legislation that would limit women’s abilities to make decisions about their own health. We spoke in August about what makes for good political art, where the rising tide of animosity against women comes from, and the subtleties of Raising Hope’s perspective on poverty and feminism. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to start by asking you to talk a little bit about your political evolution. I know you grew up in this incredible family of actors and intellectuals. I’ve read interviews where you talk about how Hair shaped your musical tastes…But I was curious if we could step all the way back about where your politics come from.

Well, I grew up in New York, in Manhattan. I was raised by primarily single women–my mother was a single mom, my grandmother was a single mom, my Nana, who’s sort of like another grandma to me.. She helped raise me–she was a single mom. And they were all sort of liberal and, you know, feminist, and you know, my grandmother was a New Deal Democrat, and everyone in my family had been Democrats for generations, that I’m aware of – my immediate, my direct line of descendants…I was born in 1970. My mother was something of a hippie, and she was an actress. And we were surrounded by artists and actors and writers and show people, and these are people who tend to be liberal in their approach to life and in their politics.

And, of course, in the ‘70s there was some exciting shit going on, you know? There was the end of the Vietnam War, and Watergate, and the legacy of the Civil Rights movement, and the women’s rights movement. And I grew up in New York which meant that Bella Abzug was a common fixture on the evening news, and I knew who Gloria Steinem was from the time I was very little, and I knew who Martin Luther King was from the time I could speak, and it was just considered part of being a human being to be politically conscious and aware of the circumstances of others. This was just how to live a decent life, was to pay attention to what was going on in the world and what’s happening to people who are hurting, or people who are struggling. And it’s hard to say what the source of that is in my family, but it’s certainly always been there.

My mother actually worked for Bella Abzug in the 70s and I have some pretty goofy family stories, so I can only imagine what it would be like to see her as an elected official.

Now my Nana was a life-long New Yorker, she was born in the Bronx, and she moved to the West Side with her two daughters, and she was very politically active and she was a bookkeeper of the New York contingent of Freedom Riders in the ‘60s. She worked to get those rubber mats – you know those mats on the playground that never used to be there? Her daughters’ school was the first one to have those rubber mats, and those eventually became standard throughout the city. And Bella Abzug wanted my Nana to go into politics. She said, “You know, you really need to think about running for City Council.” And my Nana, who was a very active and a very passionate woman, said, “No, absolutely not. I’ve got two daughters to put through college. If you think I’m going to run for City Council you’re crazy.” She wanted to work in the background, you know what I mean? She wanted to work from the ground up. But I love that story, it makes me really proud that Bella tried to get her into politics.

That’s one of the things that’s always struck me – that it’s hard to have somebody get into politics when they have family commitments, as well. It’s one thing to do things locally. When you were growing up in New York, the city was full of really terrific, politically engaged art. I was wondering if there was anything you went to, or any of the people you met who were sort of particular inspirations or models of how to live a life as a politically engaged artist?

Well, yeah, the first show I ever did, when I was eight-years-old, was a film workshop of a play called Runaways. It was a musical that was written and composed by a woman named Elizabeth Swados, who was this very interesting theater maker, who came from that world of downtown crazy artists who were making sort of revolutionary, weird work. You know, stuff that was that was like I said avant-garde and sort of bridged the gap between radical, political, and poetic, and historical. Runaways was about street kids. And at the time there was a lot more work being done about people on the margins, you know?

The ‘70s were a sort of peak period for artists who wanted to explore issues of class and culture, and in the theater that was particularly true. And so most of our friends–most of my mother’s friends–worked in that area, and you know, came from that world…I don’t know if they necessarily saw their work as being overtly political, but I think that it was informed, you know, clearly informed by their desire to make people pay attention to political ideas, if that makes any sense.
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The Directors Guild of America has released its annual report on who directs television series, and the results are not exactly promising—and they illustrate one reason it’s hard for women and people of color to make gains in the industry. The percentage of episodes of television in the 2011-2012 television season directed by white men rose from 72 percent to 73 percent. White women directed 11 percent of episodes, the same as last year. And women of color and men of color basically traded work: men of color directed 13 percent of episodes, down from 14 percent last year. And women of color directed 4 percent of episodes, up from 3 percent in the previous season. In other words, the amount of work available to white men is relatively secure. And men and women of color aren’t making gains relative to the whole: they’re trading off gains with each other.

But it’s also worth noting which shows are doing better than average, some of which are predictable, and some of which are not. The Game, created by Mara Brock Akil, had 100 percent of its episodes directed by women or people of color, as did Single Ladies, which was created by Stacy Littlejohn, and produced by Queen Latifah’s Flavor Unit company. Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal clocked in with 67 percent female or minority directors, Nurse Jackie with 60, Girls with 44 percent, and Don’t Trust The B—- In Apartment with 23 percent. If male showrunners are having trouble finding women and people of color to direct their television shows, they might do well to ask the women around them who are creating television shows who they hire.

But it’s not only shows created by and about women who have done well hiring women and people of color to direct episodes. 36 percent of the last season’s episodes of Sons of Anarchy, a show created by Kurt Sutter, himself a white guy, were directed by women like Gwyneth Horder-Payton, a veteran of The Shield, Paris Barclay, who won two Emmys for NYPD Blue, and Mario Van Peebles. Grimm, created by three men, had women and people of color behind the camera for 48 percent of its first-season episodes. And The Walking Dead, the bloody zombie show based on the comic books by Robert Kirkman, had 53 percent of its episodes directed by women and minorities under the leadership of Gale Anne Hurd in its second season after Frank Darabont left the show. Being a lady doesn’t mean you can handle veiled autobiography, or stories about dating and sex. Women can do the tough stuff, too. And some men seem to recognize it.