One of my favorite sitcoms is Happy Endings, ABC’s show about a group of friends who live in Chicago. Much like Modern Family found a way to revitalize the family sitcom (though it’s fallen off notably in quality), Happy Endings found new juice in the group-of-close-friends comedy. In part, it did so by changing what that group of friends looked like, adding Max (Adam Pally), who became one of the most innovative gay characters on television simply by being a person rather than a stereotype, and Jane Kerkovich-Williams (Eliza Coupe) and Brad Williams (Damon Wayans, Jr.), a loony-for-each-other new married couple who also happen to be one of the rare interracial couples on television. But it’s also a mile-a-minute joke factory deeply rooted in the characters’ quirks and the specifics of their relationships with each other, whether Max is dosing Penny (Casey Wilson), who he’s been taking care of after she has an accident, with sleepy tea so he can get at her physical therapist, or food truck operator Dave (Zachary Knighton) and Jane’s younger sister Alex (Elisha Cuthbert), whose broken engagement kicked off the series, are trying to date again while denying that they’re in a serious relationship.

Coupe and I spoke in advance of the third season of Happy Endings, which returns to ABC tonight at 9 PM, about Jane, whose combination of obsessive-compulsion and gleefully whacked-out sexual chemistry with Brad have made her one of my favorite characters in television. She told me where her style of physical comedy comes from, how she draws on her own marriage for inspiration, and why New England WASPs are so hilarious. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’ve noticed that you have a very specific approach to physical comedy: Jane gets a lot of mileage out of being very stiff or very boneless. Is that something you developed for her character, or does it come out of personal experience?

It’s really funny, because I used to play ice hockey as a kid. I grew up in New Hampshire. I’m from Plymouth, New Hampshire. It was a thing. My dad was a semi-pro hockey player, both of my brothers played, I mean, I was raised by a boy. I was taught to box, I was taught to play hockey, I played baseball and softball for a while. And it was always an ongoing joke, like when I played hockey, I was so stiff on the ice. My dad would be like, “You gotta crouch down, Liz.” And I’m like, “I know,” and he’s like “No, you gotta get down towards the ice.” And I’d be like this, and I thought it was really funny. I was like, I’m such a stiff person. But then I started realizing that can be really funny. It’s either zero or a hundred with me. I’m either that, or I’m like [in a funny voice] “What’s up?” completely loose, because I think I got so much criticism for being that way, so it was like, let’s do both. The physical comedy of it all, saying all of that, I mean, there was one episode in the first season where I’m drunk and I’m all over the place. But it’s fun to go to extremes. I was obsessed with Jim Carrey, like obsessed, and I was obsessed with, I think Sandra Bullock also does some great physical comedy, and I think subconsciously, I may locked that and my head and said “Oh, that’s how you do it.”

I also think with women, either women are supposed to be totally relaxed and loose or they’re thought to be uptight. You seem to mine a lot of comedy from perfectionism, from people holding themselves together when they really want to just let go.

I think that’s what I love about my character. Coming form New England, which you know, the WASPY “Everything’s fine!” but on the inside they’re just completely crumbling. That’s how I feel like my aunts and my mothers are: “Everything’s great! Everything’s fine! We’re fine! Good, good, good, everything’s fine!” But turn a corner and they’re alone and they’re like “Oh my God! Everything’s falling apart!” And I think watching someone who’s unhinged try to hold it together is one of the funniest things. And I think that it’s far more interesting, unless, of course, we let them be completely unhinged. Whenever I see, on a movie or in a play, watching someone completely full-on cry is not as interesting as watching them trying not to cry. In real life, I’ll cry by myself, alone, in a private place, at home or with my husband. But around a lot of people, if I’m emotional, I’m going to try to hold it together, which is actually, if you’re going to put a camera on that and give it a time slot of 9 o’clock on Tuesday nights, is funny.

One thing you also seem to do is play a lot of characters between how they see themselves and how they come across to other people. Do you find that juxtaposition interesting?

Yeah, I think probably because I am that a lot in my own life. My friend once told me that “You are the most confident insecure person I’ve ever met in my entire life.” And I was like, “You’re right, you’re right, you’re right.” It is really interesting to see someone who thinks “I am totally cool and going with the flow” when it’s “Oh my God, if you honestly believe that about yourself, it’s hilarious.” I guess I’ve noticed that in my characters, especially in Jane, especially the second season, we saw a lot more of that, what she thinks she is and what she really is. It’s an inner struggle she’s having, so conflicted, but if you put it on a TV show it’s really funny, but I think a lot of people can relate to that.
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I’ve been a little worried that Iron Man 3 was going to repeat the cycle of Tony Stark being an entitled, self-regarding rich bro before rising to the occasion that’s become the character’s signature arc, but this trailer has my mind at ease:

If you’re going to have a giant, years-long story, continuity should be a benefit of The Avengers franchise, rather than a hindrance. So I’m excited to see that Shane Black, who directed Robert Downey, Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which helped bolster Downey’s comeback, is making a movie that’s deeply engaged with the impact of the events of The Avengers on Tony Stark. “Nothing’s been the same since New York,” Tony reflects in the trailer’s voiceover. “I experience things and then they’re over. I can’t sleep, and when I do, I have nightmares.” It makes sense that a man who enjoys life as much as Tony does would be shaken by his own decision to sacrifice himself, and that, powerful he is, he’d be unnerved by his first glimpse of the world beyond the one he’s known and dominated on almost every level. “Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist,” as Tony laid out his resume in The Avengers, doesn’t count for quite as much in a world where there are giant alien armies prepared to descend on Midtown.

I’m less immediately stoked about Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin, both because it would have been nice to see an actor of Chinese, rather than Indian and British origin, play the role, and because there’s a bit too much Bane in at least what we’re seeing here. “Some people call me a terrorist. I consider myself a teacher. Lesson number one. Heroes? There is no such thing,” said in a funny voice, feels like Black and company picked it up off the cutting room floor for The Dark Knight Rises. Loki’s been so much fun in The Avengers because, as Bruce Banner put it, “his brain is a bag full of cats.” He’s twisty, unpredictable, and we’re a long way from his end game, but perhaps most importantly, his motivations, courtesy friend of the blog Zack Stentz and company, have been clear going back to Thor. Coding a villain as intellectual is not actually a substitute for explaining who they are and what they want.

The bridge is yours.

-Maureen Ryan is dead-on about why Revolution is a success even though it has a potentially fatal flaw.

-Todd VanDerWerff’s interview with Happy Endings‘ Adam Pally is great.

-On the value of Big Bird for adults as well as kids.

-The myth of the tortured genius.

-More Django Unchained:

Yahoo’s Chris Wilson has built one of my favorite tools of the election cycle, a survey of network television shows that breaks down which presidential campaigns, party committees, and affiliated groups are advertising are advertising on which programs. A couple of my favorite results:

-Democrats and Republicans are about even in the numbers of ads they’re airing on NCIS, the most popular scripted show on television. No one can resist Mark Harmon, apparently. Now if only one of the candidates would use the show’s Israel politics in a stump speech…

-2 Broke Girls may be crazy, crazy racist, but the first black president’s campaign is targeting viewers of CBS’s recession comedy aggressively: the Obama campaign bought more than 90 percent of the 62 ad buys on the show. Maybe the administration is counting on viewers who identify with Caroline and Max to care more about health care affordability and covered contraception than the idea that racial jokes are hilarious.

-The Voice, NBC’s singing competition, skews Democratic, with 462 of 681 ad buys going to the Obama campaign or Democratic groups and committees. The Olympics, by contrast, had the most Republican-heavy ads, with 250 out of 323 ad buys backing Romney—probably because there was an actual hook there to hang one of the central elements of his campaign on.

-Saturday Night Live, somewhat surprisingly given the show’s history of lampooning Republican candidates, breaks close to even, with 250 Republican ad buys and 258 Democratic ones. Maybe the idea is that the Republicans will catch hate-watchers?

There’s a lot more data there, and the numbers will change as we head into the ad-heavy final weeks of the campaign. But it’s fun to sort through these results, if only to get a sense of who the candidates believe are the target audience for particular shows.

Chevy Chase’s hatred for his job on Community as Pierce Hawthorne, an aged millionaire taking classes at Greendale Community College to make up for his empty personal life, has become the stuff of entertainment industry legend, as well as continued proof of Chase’s unpleasantness. But his latest meltdown raises larger questions than ones about his ego or his poor relationship with Dan Harmon. As Deadline reported over the weekend, “People close to the situation say that Chase had been increasingly frustrated and uncomfortable with the direction of his character, Pierce, who is a bigot. After getting fed more lines he found offensive during a scene yesterday, I hear he snapped and launched the tirade, airing his frustration and suggesting that the way things with Pierce are going, he may next be asked to call Troy (Glover) or Shirley (Brown) the N-word.” The meltdown raises an interesting challenge not just to Community, but to shows like Ryan Murphy’s Glee and The New Normal, which rely heavily on Pierce-like characters: how do you write an interesting bigot.

Community and Glee use their heavily-prejudiced characters to complimentary ends. On Community, Pierce’s racism and sexism are the clearest manifestations of how generally annoying he is. He’s the kind of person who, when Shirley accuses him of sexual harassment, declares “Sexually harassing? That makes no sense to me. Why would I harass someone who turns me on?” He’s the kind of guy who’s clueless enough to pull himself out of an existential crisis by telling himself “Well, I do have a young, African-American friend now.” Pierce is oblivious to how he comes across, but that’s in part because his bigotry doesn’t really appear to have an impact on anyone around him, and as a result, he doesn’t suffer much in the way of consequences. Periodically, Pierce gets isolated from the group, as he did at the end of Community‘s second season, but that’s generally due to broader incompatibility with the group’s younger, kinder members, rather than because he deeply wounds anyone or says something that the other characters on the show deem completely beyond the pale. His racism and sexism are the way the show demonstrates his disconnect from people in general, rather than a way to illustrate the power of ideas like the ones he espouses. At its best, Community captures the way that bigotry can isolate people from the connections they genuinely crave. But often, Pierce is merely a crank, without that level of interiority.

On Glee, Sue Sylvester is similarly harmless. She exists mostly to coin catchphrases for the show, and to create a baseline in which her occasional moments of behaving like an actual human being seem surprising and emotional. Sue’s occasionally a proxy for interesting ideas, like the war on public arts funding. But mostly, she’s not even specifically prejudiced. She’s just mean.

Murphy’s done a more interesting job on The New Normal. As I wrote before the television season started when a Utah NBC affiliate decided not to air the show:

What I think is narrowly effective about The New Normal, and that might make the affiliate’s audience most uncomfortable, is that it shows bigotry as directly hurtful to the people in range of it. For most of the pilot, Jane (Ellen Barkin), an older divorced woman, is an outrageous caricature of a biased person, who speaks aloud what for most people is subtext or subconscious fear, rather than having her anti-gay views and her racism subtly inflect her thinking, bubbling up in surprising ways that leave everyone around her on edge. But the people around her do a nice job of acting out the pain her outrageous statements cause them. She acts as a roadblock in her daughter Goldie’s (Georgia King) efforts to better herself the one way she believes she can—Goldie is a young single mother—by carrying another couple’s child for a large, one-time fee that would allow her to attend law school. Jane is mean to the gay couple (Justin Bartha and Andrew Rannells) who choose Goldie to be their surrogate. Even when she doesn’t mean to, Jane inadvertently ends up coming across as racist to one of the men’s assistant (Nene Leakes). Jane’s views are more disruptive and hurtful than the act of two men building a family together.

There’s a fine line to walk between marginalizing characters who espouse bigoted ideas, and acknowledging that power that racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of hatred still have in the world. The New Normal falls down when it has Jane say outrageous things that are meant to be points at which we see her as hilarious and marginal, but end up just sounding offensive and flat. And Community can sacrifice moments of interesting development by failing to pursue the consequences of some of the most terrible things Pierce says, coasting on joke construction. I can see why Chase would get uncomfortable playing a character whose racism, sexism, and homophobia go less questioned than he wishes they would, mining ideas he finds abhorrent for simple laughs—whatever you think of him personally, he’s a long-term, outspoken liberal—and who doesn’t have much of a shot at growth or reckoning. These are difficult balances to get right. But as we grow towards a time where people like Pierce and Jane are more genuinely marginal in the real world, these are kinds of characters it’s even more important to try to get right.

We’ve finally got the first trailer for the adaptation of Midnight’s Children, long considered unfilmable, and at a first glimpse, it looks like the project will put paid to that idea.

One thing I can’t tell from this trailer is whether this adaptation is preserving the magical elements of Midnight’s Children, or jettisoning the idea that the children born in the first hour of India’s independence came into the world with superpowers. I’d regret the downgrading of Rushdie’s characters, some of the most interesting superheroes of color ever written, into average men and women, though I can see that being the easiest way to make the book manageable. Special effects are expensive and can be easy to do extremely badly.

But while I’ll reserve judgement on that element of Midnight’s Children, I’m excited to see the movie as a whole. It’s such a relief to see another country’s history treated as if it’s worthy of epic treatment, rather than as a backdrop for Western character’s adventures, as India was in The Avengers. A period like the Indian Emergency, in which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi postponed elections, preemptively arrested dissidents, and issued decrees that let her bypass the democratic process, is important to see on screen not just because it’ll introduce new audiences to critically important parts of India’s past, but because it introduces new narrative arcs and character types into the storytelling ecosystem. And as I wrote back when news of the project broke last year, Midnight’s Children should push American superhero stories to step up their game: it has the guts to be an alternate history of India, rather than a fantasy that skates lightly over the issues it alludes to but isn’t quite willing to engage with.