Last week, I wrote about four things that network television needed to do to recover its sense of independent identity instead of losing its mojo chasing after cable. I thought of that post again when I saw the trailer for Mockingbird Lane, NBC’s reboot of The Munsters, on which it spent a reported $10 million, and which it is airing as a Halloween special:

Mockingbird Lane looks exactly like the kind of thing that a network shouldn’t be doing: it was probably unsustainably expensive, it was a reboot of a concept no one was dying for, it had a ton of special effects that would have been unsustainable over the long term, it would never have been able to be as frightening or as sexually disturbing as American Horror Story. It’s not yet clear if NBC has given up on turning Mockingbird Lane into a series or if this airing is a test to see what kind of audience would turn out for the show. But it’s probably a good idea not to get into an arms race with cable while you’re still digging yourself out of a ratings hole, and when you don’t have subscription revenue to fall back on.

Tomorrow night’s presidential debate has been positioned as a critical one for President Obama after his passive showing in his first outing and Vice President Biden’s fiery attempt to regain momentum. But it’s also a debate that highlights two important issues: the essential invisibility of women’s issues (as well as other social issues like gay rights and immigration reform) in this year’s presidential debates, and the expectation of deference, rather than vigorous questioning, from presidential debate moderators. The person with the hardest task tomorrow probably isn’t President Obama: it’s moderator and CNN anchor Candy Crowley.

As a woman, a journalist, and a debate viewer, I’m at least glad to hear that Crowley views her role as to push forward the debate and to challenge the responses the candidates give the audience, or, as she she said of her plan for the debate: “Once the table is kind of set by the town-hall questioner, there is then time for me to say, ‘Hey, wait a second, what about X, Y, Z?’” At Time, Mark Halperin has a long piece up about how both the Obama and Romney campaigns have reacted to that statement of intent, which is to say, unenthusiastically. But Crowley apparently was never asked to abide by the memorandum of understanding that the campaigns agreed upon before the debates started, which govern other issues like banning pledges and naming people in the audience other than their own families. And it’s telling that the campaigns expect her to be on board even without asking her to agree.

It’s already frustrating that the lone female moderator for the presidential debates was assigned to the town hall-format debate, a setting where the Gallup Organization picks the audience, who in turn get to submit questions. Crowley can cut questions and order them, and there is room for her to ask follow-up questions, though she is obviously constrained by the subjects the attendees prioritize. Through both the first presidential debate and the lone vice-presidential debate, there’s been a single question asked about issues that particularly concern women, Martha Raddatz’s query about how Vice President Biden and Congressman Ryan’s religious beliefs affected their personal views of abortion. There are a lot of questions that could be posed about the candidate’s national approaches to abortion policy alone, not to mention the inquiries that moderators, male and female alike, could make into the many creeping restrictions on women’s reproductive health and autonomy on the state level.It’s frustrating that women should have to be responsible for raising questions about issues like contraception or pay equity, which of course affect men as well. But given that it seems that if women and the men who care about these issues care about these issues want to see them discussed, women have to ask them ourselves, it’s difficult to see Crowley assigned the debate with this format and its limitations.
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With the National Hockey League’s lockout officially canceling the first two weeks of the season, and with more cancellations likely to come soon, NHL players are banking on a long fight and looking for new places to play. And one of the league’s top player agents has an idea for how they can do it.

Pat Brisson has already negotiated contracts to send players to Europe and other leagues during the lockout, and now he wants to organize an All-Star tour across Europe to showcase the league’s top talents while NHL owners keep them off the ice for the second time since 2004, Sporting News reports:

“We did it last time,” said Brisson, co-head of CAA Sports’ hockey division, which represents 62 NHL players, including a number of star players like Sidney Crosby. Brisson said he would seriously “explore” organizing a world tour that would include CAA clients, as well as possibly clients of other agencies, if there is no deal by early November. [...]

Brisson has already negotiated deals for 15 of his clients to play in Europe during the lockout, and he said more will go if the work stoppage continues. “I would say, in the next month or two, we will have another 20,” he said.

This, I think, is the smartest move for the players if they want to force the owners’ hand in the lockout. Unlike the NFL and NBA players who had to make big concessions to end their lockouts last year, hockey players have other alternatives and are willing to use them, and taking advantage of them is the easiest way to force the owners to start making serious offers on the revenue differences that separate the two sides. NFL players, for instance, didn’t have foreign leagues or established independent leagues to turn to when owners locked them out; NBA players did, but few were willing to take advantage of them. Some of the NHL’s top players are already taking advantage, though, giving them the chance to make a living absent an end to the lockout.

The All-Star tour could also add leverage. The players tried this approach in 2004 to no real avail. But they did it at a time when the league was in a basement popularity-wise and had no real intriguing stars to market. If Brisson could get Crosby and other stars to agree to a tour, not just across Europe but across Canada and the U.S. as well, and find an innovative television network that reaches plenty of homes but has no real hopes of negotiating with the NHL in the future (like, say, Versus before it became the partial home of the NHL after the 2004 lockout), it could pay for itself and strike fear into the owners that at least a small subset of players — the most recognizable — don’t need an immediate end to the lockout to make money.

There are already rumors that some NHL owners don’t want this lockout, and there are already public worries from ownership about how much money they stand to lose if the lockout continues. The players, though, can keep making money through these tours and by signing in other leagues, and even if it isn’t as much as they’d make playing in the NHL, it should be enough to get them back on the NHL ice under the most favorable terms possible.

If there’s a movie that’s arrived in theaters aided more by the tailwinds of current events than Ben Affleck’s Argo, an espionage thriller about the Canadian caper, in which the Central Intelligence Agency faked a Hollywood movie production to spirit six Americans out of Iran after they slipped out of the embassy as it came under siege by hardline students. A handsome, sophisticated, if exceedingly overstuffed caper movie, Argo should also get credit for being exceptionally nuanced about America’s role in Iran. But ultimately, Argo has too much to handle to make its characters as engaging as its geopolitics, and even then, it falters in its willingness to treat its audience like intelligent adults.

In the introduction to Argo, Affleck, from a script by Chris Terrio, briskly introduces the issues at stake—Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh’s nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, the American support of Shah Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Iranian Revolution, the decision to give the Shah access to medical treatment in the United States, and rising tensions at the embassy—while drawing a clear line between those national policy decisions and the views of the people who would shortly be imprisoned there or in hiding in Canada’s embassy in Iran.”What do you expect? We let the guy torture and deball an entire nation,” one diplomat says of the crowd growing outside the embassy. “So great, we’ll take in any punk as long as he’s got cancer?” another complains of the Shah’s arrival in the U.S.

As it becomes clear that embassy security may be breached—in a frightening echo of recent events in Libya, two diplomats watch the crowds mass while wondering “The windows are supposed to be bullet-proof, right?” and reflect that they’ve “Never been tested.”—the people who will shortly become hostages show off an array of complicated emotions. Bob Anders (Tate Donovan) warns his staff about what will happen to the Iranians waiting in line “If they get caught applying for visas to the U.S.” The head of security warns his men “Don’t fucking shoot anybody. You don’t want to be the assholes who started a war.” They burn and shred documents, concerned for themselves and their country, however conflicted they feel about it.

But once the embassy has been taken and the six members of the staff have ensconced themselves with the Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber), the movie doesn’t have much more time to spend with them, exploring their ideas about what’s happening in the country where they once represented their own. “She begged for us to leave. She packed our bags. And I told her, just a little bit longer,” Mark (Christopher Denham) reflects of his wife’s concern for their safety prior to the takeover, which he tamped down in favor of trying to advance his foreign service career. But the movie is more concerned with the men trying to get them out of the country than their captivity.
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On Friday afternoon, Gawker published a long profile of a Reddit moderator who went by Violentacrez. A Texas programmer in real life, Violentacrez has helped shape Reddit’s norms, mentoring and writing documentation for moderators, scrubbing the site for patently illegal content, but also helping establish some of its most distasteful subsections, some openly racist, and others devoted to posting and discussion of sexualized images of very young women taken or republished without their consent. It’s very, very ugly behavior, and Violentacrez, who became a Reddit star, represents the outer limit of speech Reddit will defend. Reddit subsections have responded to the profile by collectively banning links from Gawker sites. But whatever your opinion of publishing Violentacrez’s real identity, the profile and the conversation around it have furthered discussions about a range of misogynistic behaviors, from the belief that men are entitled to images of women, even those obtained invasively, to the idea that men have a more valid right to protection of their identities or to sexual gratification than women have to be free of harassment or to name harassing behavior for what it is.

In the midst of the discussion of the Gawker piece, New Yorker television critic and friend of this blog Emily Nussbaum tweeted “The whole Gawker/Reddit expose is reminding me how thoughtful & prescient Buffy Season 6 was about exactly this type of geek misogyny.” It’s a brilliant observation, and I’d take it a step further. The sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which the titular demon hunter and her friends find themselves harassed by three young men, Jonathan Levinson, Andrew Wells, and Warren Mears, who call themselves The Trio. These characters are each an important example of three different and damaging kinds of views men can have of women, and what toxic and tragic things can come to pass when those different worldviews are conflated and intermingled.

When we meet Jonathan Levinson, the member of the Trio who has the longest history with Buffy and her friends, he seems awfully like some of the men on Reddit and elsewhere who express profound yearning for emotional and sexual connection with women (in particular), but are afraid such connections are permanently beyond their grasp. His failed high school relationships, which take place on the periphery of Buffy’s adventures, read like a litany of stereotypical complaints about the true motivations of women. There’s the reincarnated Inca princess who wants him for his life-force rather than his person. Cordelia Chase, a popular and beautiful girl, uses him to get over her own feelings of rejection with little regard for Jonathan’s emotions. Later, he has a date to prom who apparently doesn’t last. Jonathan struggles with suicidal impulses that Buffy initially mistakes for murderousness, an indicator of his profound self-hatred. And while Jonathan recovers enough to want to live, to honor Buffy for protecting him and other students at prom, he remains profoundly alienated and insecure.
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This post discusses plot points from the October 14 episode of Homeland.

This episode of Homeland clarified what, for me, has been the major struggle with the beginning of the second season of this show, which I still love, but which has been experiencing what feel to me to be some serious growing pains. There’s been a significant imbalance, episode by episode, in the quality of Carrie and Brody’s stories. Claire Danes and Damian Lewis continue to work at the top of their game, but while Danes has been given a relatively streamlined storyline that showcases Carrie’s struggles to adjust herself to life without the CIA to provide her an identity, Lewis has been asked to employ his formidable skills in the service of increasingly ridiculous and unsustainable capers. And that’s never been clearer than in “State of Independence.”

When we first see Carrie in this episode, she’s as high as we’ve seen her since her marker-induced meltdown in season one, listening to jazz like that which focused her concentration and lead her to see Brody’s hand gestures in Homeland‘s pilot. Her father, who has always been one of Carrie’s best advocates, wants to know what she’s doing. “I need to get this done and it needs to be done right,” she says of her report from Beirut, showing substantially more loyalty to the CIA than it’s show to her. I felt a brief moment of pride in her when she acknowledged his insistence that she needs sleep—perhaps the electroshock treatments, the vegetable garden, the teaching gig, the test in Lebanon had produced a Carrie who knew her own limitations, could temper her brilliance to the needs of her brain chemistry without giving it up entirely.

But it turns out that flash of self-care was just set-up for a more devastating sequence when Carrie arrives at headquarters, prepared to walk agents through her report. “I’m sorry. Am I late? I was told 6pm, which would mean I’m 15 minutes early,” she says, falling apart as she realizes that she was given the wrong time to keep her away from the meeting. “Always debrief with the person in the field. It’s in the goddamn manual.” There are good reasons for Carrie not to be in the CIA any more, among them that her illegal surveillance of Brody could weaken an eventual case against him. But it’s cruel to see the people who punished her break the rules out of a distaste for her, and shame her out of an inability to directly exclude her. “He’s still out there, David,” Carrie pleads with her old boss, her old lover, only to be told that “That’s not your concern anymore.” Carrie, always the junkie, needs to know “What about all that stuff I pulled out of the Beirut apartment. Can you at least tell me if there was any actionable intelligence in that?” But it’s a form of self-torture to ask that question and to know that she won’t be allowed to work on the material, much less to know what it contained. Carrie’s brain could burn itself out spinning scenarios for those papers and that bag. And David doesn’t help by insisting on cutting her off. “Between you and me, yes there was,” he tells her, before revealing how little he knows of her. “Carrie, you didn’t come here today expecting to get reinstated?”
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