When I walked out of Dredd, the exceedingly, even distractingly violent update of 2000 AD’s comic book meditation on the fascist tendencies in American depictions of law enforcement, I told the friend who joined me at the movies that I wished it had been a Judge Anderson movie. It’s not that Karl Urban isn’t good as the titular Judge Dredd, a perpetually dour man with little to no patience for violent criminals. But that as Judge Anderson and Ma-Ma, the violent drug lord Anderson and Dredd pursue on a day when Anderson’s been sent into the field for the final evaluation that will determine whether she becomes a Judge, it’s much more fun to see Olivia Thirlby and Lena Headey play two very different kinds of very tough women than to watch Dredd do his thing.

When she starts out her first day on the job, Anderson’s at a disadvantage: she’s a mutant and a psychic who got into the Judge Academy on special dispensation and when Dredd meets her, scored three percent too low to pass her graduation exams. Dredd takes her out to evaluate her as a favor, but he plainly doesn’t expect her to succeed, much less live—her unwillingness to wear a helmet so her psychic abilities can work at the highest level makes him skeptical. But in the field, Anderson does well, most notably in a show-down with Kay, a lieutenant in Ma-Ma’s organization played by The Wire‘s Wood Harris. Once he finds out she’s psychic, Kay tries to rattle Anderson by picturing himself raping her. Anderson is unperturbed. “You’re picturing a violent sexual liason between the two of us in a pointless attempt to shock me,” she tells him, bored. Rape culture apparently persists in Mega City One, and young women are still learning not to let themselves be debilitated by it. When Kay imagines Anderson fellating him and tells her it’s to shut her up, she reminds him that she isn’t the innocent girl Kay thinks she is, and that she’s fully prepared to bombard him with images and ideas he’s less prepared to deal with than she is. It’s not a good thing that Anderson has to be prepared to defend herself against both physical and mental harassment and assault. But in a sexually violent society, she’s more resilient than a sexually violent man is.

Then there’s Ma-Ma, who is so terrifying in part because she marries a kind, motherly tone to dreadful orders. Whether she’s ordering a flaying of rival gang members who have challenges her, threatening a young man she’s already horribly victimized, or leading the demolition of an entire floor of an apartment building, Ma-Ma rarely raises her voice. The disconnection between the tone she adopts, which people want to respond to, and the things she asks them to do or orders them to do is deeply disturbing, and it’s a reminder of how powerful femininity and motherhood can be. Raw domination is not the only way to exercise power. And in an even more extreme fashion than Anderson, Ma-Ma is a victim who retaliates with sexualized violence of her own. Mutilated by her pimp, Ma-Ma bites off his genitals while being forced to fellate him, an image that recurs throughout the movie.

A lot of the violence in Dredd feels unnecessary to the plot or the movie’s argument: a jaw ruined by a bullet or a mass of flayed flesh on the floor of an apartment building are mostly a test of whether you flinch or not. But I actually found the images of sexual violence in Dredd to be an exception. In their own ways, Judge Anderson and Ma-Ma want to save themselves from fates that other people feel confident inflicting on them. Violence and humiliation in retaliation may not break the cycle. But they’re an attempt to warn those who would attack women that the response is less predictable and more vigorous than the attackers expect.

I love pretty much everything about the Draw The Line campaign, a project of the Center For Reproductive Rights, which is attempting to get people to sign up and register their support for a Reproductive Bill of Rights:

I’m generally opposed to contempt as a political emotion, but I think here it’s effective because it reinforces what’s compelling and fun about the ad, the idea that you can be part of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The ad sells the idea not merely that you can end up part of a social network that has a particular cultural cachet, but that you have an affinity with the people in it, that we share disgust and frustration with people who seem impossibly distant from our own lives.

When the broadcast television season began several weeks ago, one of the things that stood out most from network to networks was the ratings. NBC may have started to claw its way out of the ratings cellar with Revolution, one of the few bona fide hits of fall, but lots of its broadcast counterparts found themselves in trouble. CBS, normally top of the heap, saw two of its new entries, drama Made In Jersey and sitcom Partners, tank out of the gate. Fox renewed two new comedies, The Mindy Project and Ben and Kate, despite the fact that they debuted with half the audience their comedy block anchor, New Girl, started out with a year before. On Twitter, my fellow television critics mused that they’d always thought there was the potential for the bottom to fall out of the broadcast television model, but that they didn’t see it coming so soon. At the same time, cable shows like FX’s Sons of Anarchy were creeping up in the ratings, beating the networks in the core demographic of viewers if not in total viewers. Network television seems to have lost its sense of what it can do better than cable, and to be floundering in developing shows as a result.

But it would be great for network to get its groove back, and not just because it’s one of the few media that can create an ongoing mass cultural phenomenon. As demand grows for alternatives to bundled cable, it’s important for broadcast television to be a vigorous, vibrant alternative to cable networks so it’s in those cable networks’ interests to compete however they can for viewers. And for those of us who love great television, it would be fantastic to see the end of a race to the lowest common denominator, and to see good programming catch on. While there’s no guarantee that doing the right, creative thing will garner network audiences, here are four ideas for how broadcast television can rediscover what makes it unique.

1. Avoid Special Effects Arms Races: Subscription support means that HBO can afford to spend $60 million a season on Game of Thrones, building a complex fictional world that includes castles, dragons, and ice zombies. Network television, especially given declining viewership and correspondingly shrinking ad rates, won’t ever be able to keep up with that kind of investment. So it shouldn’t try, settling for shows that look bad, or that end up blowing their budgets on CGI dinosaurs rather than acting talent. I may not like NBC’s Revolution much, but when it comes to genre, it’s doing the right thing, building a post-apocalyptic society that is dense with forest rather than full of heavily made-up zombies or other magical creatures. Constraints can make for a lot of creativity. Network should accept its limitations, and build smart worlds within them.

2. Shorter Seasons: I’ve written about this repeatedly. But an obsessive focus on producing high numbers of episodes of shows is a great driver of mediocre concepts, and of overextending successful series like How I Met Your Mother. Miniseries and shorter seasons are a great way to attract excellent actors to television, whether it’s Sigourney Weaver in Political Animals, an effort I think was doomed by its time slot or Kevin Bacon, who will arrive on Fox this winter playing an alcoholic FBI agent in The Following. It would also be a way to fit stories to the number of episodes actually needed to tell them, one of the great strengths of British television. And shorter seasons and miniseries would also help solve one of television’s most pernicious scheduling problems: month-long hiatuses on shows that have just begun to hit their stride. The television season is an artificial construction and a not particularly logical one. It’s time to start experimenting with alternatives to it that serve stories and audiences instead.

3. Genuinely Family-Friendly Shows: The success of Downton Abbey is an illustration of a serious gap in the television market: programming that people of all ages can watch, enjoy, and discuss. So much of what’s on television is narrowly targeted or toned by age right now—a show like New Girl wouldn’t even be close to appropriate for a pre-teen audience, but its appeal has a cutoff well inside the target demographic. CBS’s Partners may be an attempt to speak to a younger generation whose friend groups have always included gay couples, but in tone and style, it’s aimed more at older viewers who are still getting used to the idea. Setting aside in-jokes or concepts that are targeted at certain demographics and trying for concepts and tones that are more universal could meet the needs of entire families. The 8 PM hour is considered a dead zone on broadcast television right now, which is too bad. There’s no reason to waste the hour after homework and before a reasonable bed time.

4. Innovate Around Sex And Violence: There’s an odd perception that much of cable television’s edge over broadcast is due to the fact that cable shows can depict sexual and violent situations that would be verboten—or at least risk drawing very heavy fines—on network television. Fox is attempting to chase cable standards with The Following, its extremely violent serial killer show, but across the board, I think that’s a mistake. Too often, cable’s taken its licenses as mandates, and produced sex and violence unmoored from narrative or emotional demands. Network could compete not by courting FCC censure, but by making the leadup to sex sensual and adult, and countering body-of-the-week callousness by making deaths real losses with devastating impact. You don’t have to see a character’s head get bashed in for their death to feel debilitating.

The bridge is yours.

-Samsung is taking aim at Apple’s brand.

-A Captcha system that detects users’ empathy.

-Sabrina the Teenage Witch turns fifty.

-Watch an awesome short film about a tree:

When men’s magazines name their sexiest ladies, the interviews that accompany them are normally an exercise in eye-rolling. But Mila Kunis, who is on the cover of this month’s Esquire, gives much more interesting answers to somewhat more interesting questions than is the norm, discussing everything from her family’s immigration from Ukraine (they are Jews and wanted to avoid rising anti-Semitism as the Soviet Union dissolved), to being threatened with blacklisting when she refused to do a magazine cover that made her uncomfortable for the promoting of Max Payne. And it’s particularly interesting to hear her talk about her political involvement, especially given the way some of her skepticism about Esquire itself comes out:

I want to follow up on an answer you recently gave to Glamour. You said you engaged in political street art. Uh, political street art?

I can’t really go into detail because I’m going to get into trouble.

Why would you get into trouble?

Because it’s illegal.

Can you be vague about it then?

It has to do with the Defense of Marriage Act. It’s my friend’s issue. I’m supporting him.

[She goes off the record.]

Yeah, you could be arrested for that.

But I’d be arrested for something I believe in… . Good luck including something about gay rights in Esquire.

Of course I could include that.

Okay.

Do you consider yourself political?

I find it all to be incredibly entertaining. I went to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with Wolf Blitzer. It’s weird: You get invited by people you don’t know — and I never wanna go again, because I had the most incredible experience. Ever. I watch CNN or MSNBC all day long, every day. So I meet with Wolf, and I was like, “Oh, my God. There’s Wolf Blitzer.” Like two drinks in, I just start talking. “So, about Ahmadinejad’s nephew …” Wolf was surprised I followed politics.

Politics can also be incredibly demoralizing.

The way that Republicans attack women is so offensive to me. And the way they talk about religion is offensive. I may not be a practicing Jew, but why we gotta talk about Jesus all the time? And it’s baffling to me how a poor person in Georgia can say, “I’m a Republican.” Why?

Some people don’t like to hear celebrities talk about politics.

I don’t think I’m a celebrity. I’m a working actress. I think there’s a difference.

It’s nice to see an actress remind a magazine that she doesn’t take off her opinions or convictions along with her top, and that her choice of career doesn’t somehow prevent her from being an engaged citizen with serious commitments.

Of all the new shows I’ve been monitoring this fall, the one that confounds me the most thus far is The Mindy Project. I had what were almost certainly unfairly high expectations for the program, about a young ob/gyn based in part on Mindy Kaling’s mother, given Kaling’s work on The Office, her status as a fully-developed cross-platform comedic voice, and my enthusiasm for the subject material, including women’s health and medical billing. But I can’t decide if I like the show, in part because I can’t decide if I like its main character.

Low-level female difficulty on television tends to be most interesting if it’s to an end. Liz Lemon’s crazy is the result of a poor work-life balance and in response to the insane expectations of women in Hollywood. Hannah Horvath’s wild vacillations are the result of a girl being told she’s talented but never being expected or forced to turn that talent in any applied direction. So far, Mindy’s damage, seems more like a symptom of bratty entitlement than part of a larger constellation. I appreciated that her character carried out a competent delivery in the first episode, but not so much that it erased my real sense of anger at her for missing another patient’s delivery because she was being a mess and then acting irritated when another doctor got credit for and business out of doing her job. Similarly, the idea that she’d hire a nurse because of a shared affinity for romantic comedies turned me off. Mindy seems more like a child than the grown person with character and nuance the show seems to want me to believe she is, more the supporting character with her love of romantic comedies as a single, defined quirk that provides fuel for recurring jokes, rather than the multi-faceted main character The Mindy Project needs her to be. Some of these elements feel like natural transitions from Kaling’s stint writing and playing Kelly Kapoor on The Office, and perhaps an illustration of some difficulties Kaling is have extricating herself from a character who is drawn closely from her own experiences and viewing Mindy independently as the woman who is ushering her character into the world and into prime time.

But it remains a problem for the show that Mindy is someone who, if I met her in real life, I don’t think I’d want to spend much time with. The bar is lower for people I don’t have to meet in the real world and admits much stranger fictional creations than I’d accept real ones. But they aren’t completely divorced from each other. A character who falls in the dangerous zone of irritating, rather than being either genuinely compelling or a fascinating, illustrative train wreck is a difficult one to attach to.

The Mindy Project also feels to me, so far, like an illustration of why, while it’s really important to have shows that star women of color and women whose bodies don’t fit an exceedingly narrow Hollywood ideal, the presence of both of those conditions is not actually sufficient to make a show good or interesting. It’s nice to see that Kaling didn’t shrink in between her transition from a supporting player to a star. But it’s exhausting to see Danny (Chris Messina), the doctor who is her obvious love interest, tell her, with what seemed like apparent intent to hurt her, that she could stand to lose fifteen pounds. And I thought last week’s episode, in which Kaling repeatedly re-orders frozen yogurt while on a date with Seth Meyers, ended up making her look like a child (something that was also the case during her first-episode date with Ed Helms) rather than saying something sensual and interesting about her appetites or her relationship with food. Maybe Danny will come around about Mindy’s body, maybe the show’s thoughts about Mindy and food, which has popped up as a theme twice, will cohere. But right now, the show is in an odd interim place where more mean about Mindy’s weight than it is either treating her like a normal sitcom star no matter what she looks like or actually examining Mindy’s relationship to her body. I’m not sure it’s progress to put someone of Kaling’s size (which honestly, seems fairly close to mine, and thus not even truly that daring) on television if the joke and character beats feel old and slightly cruel.

Thus far, the show’s perspective on race feels like it’s coming from a bunch of different directions, and I’m more interested in the ways in which they’ll cohere into a complete picture. The scene in the first episode where Mindy, drunk and riding a stolen child’s bike down a dark suburban street, hollers “Racist!” at a driver who honks at her, is a very smart, subtle one-word joke both about the possibilities both that people’s actions are influenced by racism and that charges of racism can be not just spurious but frivolous. The show hasn’t commented directly on what it means for a South Asian woman to covet romantic comedy dreams, though Mindy’s boyfriend, who she meets cute in ideal romantic comedy circumstances, does leave her for a younger, Eastern European woman—the dream is only available to everywomen who meet certain racial and age criteria. Then, there’s her attitudes towards lower-income patients, which is inflected by both class and race. Mindy may act like she has a candy heart with a little boy who translates for his veiled, uinsured mother, telling him to lie to her about their family’s insurance status so she can accept her as a patient, but she complains bitterly about poor patients to her coworkers. That constellation of factors is sharper and more interesting than anything The Mindy Project‘s done with body image or Mindy’s relationship with food, and I think the show might be sharper if her relationship with romantic comedies was filtered through a lens of race and class rather than foregrounded. I understand that romantic comedies are the show’s hook. But I can’t help but wonder if the show would be more interesting if Kaling’s specific perspective on them was a bit more foregrounded so the show would feel like a conversation with a close, smart friend rather than a recapitulation of archetypal story beats.

And really, I suppose, that’s what I’m finding difficult about The Mindy Project, which should be everything I like on television. I need Mindy to give me a reason to keep her around. Because unlike her best friend Gwen, we’re not bound by chains of friendship stretching back to colleges that require me to do hangover maintenance on her and debrief over lunch. We’re still getting to know each other. And so far, though Fox has given the show a full season, I’m not sure whether I want to stay for another drink or another episode.

For more on The Mindy Project, Pitch Perfect, and other pop culture ephemera, check out the latest episode of A Movie and An Argument With Alyssa and Swin:

By Arturo Garcia

In the wake of the big, clumsy Avengers/X-Men crossover AvsX, which concluded on Oct. 3, Marvel Comics is selling the reintroduction of a version of the original X-Men as a bold move. And the company’s sort of righ–for all the wrong reasons. Because what Marvel’s saying is, a franchise built and marketed as a grand metaphor about race is going to center around white people. “Re(e)volution”? More like Re(e)tread.

As part of the upcoming “Marvel NOW!” marketing line, the cynically-titled All New X-Men will allegedly feature the team’s original five members–the young Scott Summers (Cyclops), Jean Grey, Warren Worthington (Angel,) Hank McCoy (Beast) and Bobby Drake (Iceman)–landing in the present-day Marvel Universe. (I say allegedly because, this being comics, you have to account for the chance they’re actually from Another Dimension, An Alternate Timeline, Skrulls in Disguise, a veiled insult to cosplayers, what have you.) The move is especially disappointing coming from the new series’ writer, Brian Michael Bendis, who has shown the ability–and more importantly, the clout–to elevate characters of color in other parts of the Marvel Universe.

It was Bendis who took Luke Cage from a blaxploitation throwback to a featured player in the pre-movie Avengers franchise, and Bendis deserves credit for not only crafting a heroic death for the Ultimate (alternate) universe’s Spider-Man, but introducing a Black Latino, Miles Morales, as his successor and using the Spider-Men mini-series to solidify his role. So it’s disheartening to read him gushing to Newsarama about some mythical consensus of X-Men fans: “That’s the thing X-Men fans always say they want,” he said. “You go anywhere—’Bring back Jean Grey!’ But they don’t want a reincarnated Jean Grey, and they don’t want a dug-up Jean Grey. They want Jean.”

I’m not sure who Bendis is talking to, but I’m willing to bet there’s also a sizable contingent of fans who’d like to see Storm–a former leader of the team and a former Queen of Wakanda–have a more prominent role than being chained up on the cover of Wolverine’s latest series. Or who would prefer younger characters like X-23 and The Runaways (this group, not that group) to be involved in something other than a Battle Royale homage. It doesn’t say much for Marvel’s confidence in its product or the customers it chooses to listen to see that it would rather dote on characters from 1963 than renew development of more recent properties — nearly 30 years’ worth, as Matt Price pointed out at Nerdage. Price’s post highlights years of opportunity the company has let go by the wayside: all of those teams, introduced as the Next Generation of the Mutant fight for equality, have been stuck in comics Neverland; they’re the Lost Boys and Girls of the Marvel Universe until, well, probably forever, if series like All New are going to be taking priority.

Or maybe it’s just time for Marvel to give up the ghost; while series like Uncanny X-Force and the issues of Uncanny X-Men that preceded AvX were solid when showing us professional superheroes, the fact is that the company has squandered many story possibilities the Mutants-As-Minority analogy has offered, even before the epic racefail that was X-Men: First Class. I talked about that creative stagnation at Racialicious last year, nothing that “We never met, say, a relatively-super-fast courier in the New York depicted in ‘Amazing Spider-Man.’ Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson never hired a legal assistant with an extra-eidetic memory in ‘Daredevil’” Mutants have been part of Marvel’s world, but never really in it, unless they were either engaging in terrorism against “normal” humans, or part of anti-terrorism factions.”

We’re talking about a company, after all, where an executive feels it’s okay to publicly state that a team of black Avengers would be “contrived.” Why expect it to show enough awareness to introduce a political successor to Charles Xavier? Instead, we get characters from the Mad Men era. The idea has a little bit of charm–Jean as Joan? Scott as Don? Bobby as Pete? Comedy alert!–and will probably goose sales for the immediate future. But it would be easier for Marvel to make their “events,” and their overall line, mean something if it invested more in characters who were most relevant after the Civil Rights struggle it claims to be trying to evoke.

Arturo R. García is the Managing Editor at Racialicious and an Editor at The Raw Story