In mid-January, the critic Noel Murray wrote a perceptive and important essay for The AV Club about how much depictions of both nerds and people with autism have improved in popular culture in recent years. He explained that:

Five years ago, when my son turned 6, I wrote an essay for this site called “Rain Man Revisited,” in which I lamented that movies and TV episodes about autism tend to treat the autistic as aliens in our midst, defined only by their family members, who spend their lives waiting for their autists to say “I love you.” The situation has vastly improved since then, even beyond Sheldon Cooper. The HBO movie Temple Grandin did justice to an icon in the autism community, showing Grandin as a complicated person with accomplishments and pleasures as well as limitations. Community, The Middle, and Parenthood have created distinctive ASD characters in the pop-culture-consumed Abed Nadir, the obsessive-compulsive bookworm Brick Heck, and the inadvertently insensitive Max Braverman. And Ryan Cartwright’s performance as the autistic superhero Gary Bell on Alphas has been one of the truest I’ve yet seen, accurate in the autist’s at-times-frustrating inability to control his own quirks while also allowing Gary to be amused and amusing on his own terms.

In the weeks since Murray published his essay, I rewatched Freaks and Geeks, Paul Feig’s genius single-season show about the students at a suburban high school near Detroit, and Undeclared, collaborator Judd Apatow’s show about college freshmen living on the same hall. And while I was struck by any number of things in both shows, part of what stood out for me was the depictions of nerds. There’s no question that the geeks on both shows face any number of social challenges, from bullying, to building friendships with women they find attractive, to communicating sincerity when their default mode is sarcasm, to determining the status of a relationship after you’ve slept with someone once. But they’re decidedly not autistic: in fact, many of their problems stem from a mismatch between the geeks’ strong emotions, sincerity, and desires to connect and the environments in which they operate, which tend to overvalue coolness, detachment, and irony. It was a set of depictions that made me wonder if the depictions of nerds and autists have improved because we’re over-conflating geekiness and the presence of characters somewhere on the autism spectrum, rather than reflecting the range of both nerds and people with autism.

One of the best creations of Freaks and Geeks is Harris Trinsky, a long-haired nerd played by Stephen Lea Sheppard who, incidentally, has his only other acting credit Dudley Heinsbergen, the character in The Royal Tenenbaums who is being studied by Bill Murray’s Raleigh, who describes Dudley as suffering “from a rare disorder combining symptoms of amnesia, dyslexia, and color-blindness, with a highly acute sense of hearing.” Harris unmistakably geeky—the Dungeon Master of his social circle’s Dungeons and Dragons games, a good student, slack-physiqued in a way that suggests he isn’t trying to assimilate by bulking up or going out for sports—yet he’s also something of a sage. He advises Sam Weir, Neal Schweiber, and Bill Haverchuck to fight their bully, Alan White. He has a girlfriend, Judith, who he gets “scented oils and plenty of time with her man,” though they don’t appear to be having sex. Chief Freak Daniel Desario comes to Harris for an assessment on whether or not he’s a loser, and Harris calmly tells him “You’re not a loser ’cause you have sex, but if you weren’t having sex, we could definitely debate the issue.” When Coach Fredericks institutes a requirement that students shower after gym class, Harris is the one of the geeks who reacts with utter calm—he’s not ashamed or anxious of his body. Harris is very, very different from his contemporaries, but he’s not made uncomfortable the ways in which he’s socially out of step. Instead, Harris is comfortably and confidently marching to the beat of his own drummer.

The question for the rest of the geeks—and even for some of the freaks—is whether they’ll end up deciding that the tune Harris identified earlier than the rest of them is a fit, or whether they’ll end up socially assimilating in other ways. Sam, as his friendship and experience dating Cindy Sanders suggests, may have more capacity than Harris does to socially assimilate. The most conventionally handsome of his friends, once Sam hits his growth spurt and develops some fashion sense that doesn’t involve powder-blue jumpsuits, he may face even more intense questions about which social groups he wants to be a part of, rather than finding happiness in the group that will have him. Sensitive Bill may not grow into those options, but his bluntness has its appeal for popular students who are also going through the process of finding out that the social group where they initially landed may not be the one where they’d prefer to end up, as was clear in the episode where he and the other geeks attend a makeout party, and his seven minutes in heaven with a cheerleader turns into something more sincere and extended.
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AdWeek reports that Comcast, which is purchasing the rest of NBC Universal, will begin using that company’s rules for advertising across its whole enterprise. And that includes a ban on firearms advertisements:

In a statement, Comcast said it decided this month it would adopt the advertising guidelines used by NBCUniversal, which will not accept ads for weapons or fireworks. (Last week, the cable giant announced it would acquire the 49 percent of NBCU it didn’t own for $16.7 billion.) NBC’s ad policy, last updated in June 2012, reads: “NBC does not accept advertisements for weapons or fireworks. Commercials that include weapons or fireworks as props will be approved on a case-by-case basis.” News of the policy change was reported by the local ABC affiliate in Flint, Mich. Williams Gun Sight Co. was outraged that its 30-second spot could no longer run on cable. A Comcast spokesperson didn’t know how long the NBC policy banning ads for firearms and weapons had been in place at NBC. “It’s a long-standing policy,” the spokesman said.

Voluntary restrictions on gun ads are relatively common in the wake of gun violence. In 1999, President Clinton asked representatives of the entertainment industry to eliminate advertising that included images of guns and gun violence. In 2003, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune decided it would only accept for ads that were antiques or collectibles after a man murdered his wife with a weapon that he purchased from the Guns & Rifles section of the classifieds. And this January, ESPN refused to renew an advertising contract with East Coast Guns on the grounds that its advertising criteria had changed to exclude ads that featured hand guns and ammunition for those weapons.

Comcast’s decision seems more likely to be the product of standardizing corporate practices as part of the acquisition than a direct response to the Newtown massacre. It would be a public relations problem for the company for a sales representative operating under one set of standards to accept an advertisement that local affiliates are unable to run. But it’s also probably a good call for the company given the current environment. I’ve said this before, but I think one of the most reasonable steps the entertainment industry could take in response to concerns about the impact of violent media would be to align the ratings of products that are being advertised with the ratings of the products they’re being advertised during. It would be labor-intensive to place ads that way. But making sure that viewers who have turned into general-interest or all-ages programming aren’t surprised by images of graphic violence would at least help consumers make viewing choices, even if it wouldn’t address the concerns of people who are worried about the desensitizing impacts of media violence.

The bridge is yours.

-Patton Oswalt is coming to Pawnee!

-An interview with Malik Bendjelloul, director of Searching For Sugarman.

-Game of Thrones playing cards.

-Mark Hamill would like to be in the Star Wars sequels.

-Sony’s PS4 won’t block used games.

I don’t quote him often enough here, but Maclean’s critic Jamie Weinman is one of the people whose work I’m always most interested to read. And this meditation on how, narratively, popular cuture tends to overvalue looks because movies and television don’t do enough to establish other aspects of characters’ personalities, is a great illustration of why I feel that way about his work. Weinman argues persuasively that it’s actually quite hard to translate why couples come together for a mass audience without going to looks as a primary motivator:

The main reason for this is that in real life there are many different reasons why people would get together, beyond looks – which, after all, are subjective. But the actors are often playing characters who don’t have any of the redeeming qualities they have in real life. Woody Allen in real life is smart, talented and successful. But the people he plays in films are usually not very smart, talented or successful. (He was most plausible as a romantic lead in Annie Hall, one of the few movies where he really played someone on more or less his own level.) You can believe that the real Larry David could attract someone for reasons other than his money, while it’s hard to believe that of the fictional Larry David, since his bad qualities are so exaggerated.

It’s also very hard to establish any other reason beyond looks why characters are attracted to each other. It can be done, it’s just very hard, and maybe impossible to judge until you see the actors on film together. Writers try to do this all the time; any time there’s a couple, they try to establish some reasons why they’re in love, so it’s not just a superficial physical attraction. And a lot of the time, the reasons are unconvincing: they’re compatible because they engage in “witty” banter that isn’t witty at all, or they both like some poet the scriptwriter vaguely remembers hearing of.

This is probably also one of the reasons that so many shows in particular get themselves stuck on implausible will-they-or-won’t-they relationships. People have a lot of intangible reasons for staying apart from people who would actually be a good match for them—a newly-single Jess and Nick on New Girl are a good example of this apparent irrationality—but it’s very hard to communicate that kind of internal hedging. But because will-they-or-won’t-they relationships are one of the biggest form of stakes that comedies in particular can play with, sitcoms will keep going to that well, even if it’s something that’s hard to do well.

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of days about how to approach Ender’s Game, Summit Entertainment’s forthcoming adaptation of the beloved science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card about children who are trained to fight off an alien invasion at an elite military academy to which they’re removed early in their childhood. I think I’m not alone in finding Ender’s Game to be a foundational text—Valentine Wiggin, the younger sister of the main character, who becomes a sort of proto-blogger, is one of the reasons I’ve ended up doing what I’m doing. And at the same time, I find the political views that Card holds abhorrent: he’s a member of the board of the National Organization for Marriage, and has publicly committed to fighting back against a government that, to his interpretation, would change the established definition of marriage. As someone who’s volunteered with Freedom to Marry, and who holds marriage equality as one of my political priorities, I have no interest in giving Card any of my money to pursue an agenda I find hateful and dangerous. I’m trying to figure out if Card has points on the back end, and if purchasing a ticket would mean, even in an extremely small way, giving him money above and beyond what he’s already received for the film rights to the novel.

But at the same time, Card’s involvement as the creation of the work that’s the basis for the movie isn’t my only interest in it. As someone who thinks the emergence of Abigail Breslin, who will play Valentine, and Hailee Steinfeld, who will play Petra Arkanian, one of the child soldiers in Battle School, as young action heroines is a significant tool in bending the curve on career trajectories for Hollywood actresses, I feel a strong desire to see Ender’s Game succeed as a way to credential them for an audience of genre movie fans. I’m also curious to see what Gavin Hood, as a politically engaged South African director, will do. Card, to me, is not the only person who matters here.

But he’s also a particularly noxious illustration of a paradox that plagues politically engaged consumers of culture: a terrible person who has made significant art. I’ve never given Roman Polanski any of my money, even though I think he’s unlikely to commit sexual assault again, because I have no interested in financing his ongoing mockery of the American justice system—but I also haven’t felt particularly drawn to any of his recent movies, with the exception of The Ghost Writer. I don’t believe in piracy as a means of consuming art while causing economic harm to someone I find objectionable, if only because it’s a form of subverting the system that isn’t targeted: lots of other people suffer losses when someone who was legitimately potential customer, as opposed to someone who never intended to purchase the product in the first place, pirates a work rather than purchasing it. So what’s a customer who wants to consume ethically to do? All of these suggestions come out of my thinking about Ender’s Game, but they’re equally applicable to almost any situation where a person with deeply harmful views has created something worth consuming on its own merits.
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This post discusses plot points from the February 20 episode of The Americans.

When The Americans debuted in late January, one of the things that excited me about the show was the way anti-heroism functioned within it. Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, the deep-cover KGB agents at the heart of the show, weren’t being made sympathetic to us because they were incredibly badass despite using their powers for evil, as is the case with a Walter White, or many of the characters in Game of Thrones. Instead, we were being persuaded to sympathize, even more so than is the case in Showtime’s Homeland, with characters who want to bring down the United States government, and to see the United States through the lens of their ideology and their geopolitics.

Last night’s episode of The Americans was a through-the-looking-glass perspective on the Cold War that revealed the disadvantage the Soviet Union perceived itself to be at relative to the United States, and how the paranoia that governed the Soviet system poisoned its own agents’ decision-making. The catalyst for that exploration? The shooting of President Reagan outside the Washington Hilton by John Hinckley, Jr., a mentally ill man who hoped to impress Jodie Foster. As its lens on those events, The Americans generally stayed out of the inner circle, and focused on people who had a small role in the events. For Stan, the Jennings’ FBI agent neighbor, that meant confirming that Hinckley was a lone gunman rather than a Soviet agent. And for Elizabeth and Phillip, that means trying to make sure that the federal government doesn’t blame the Soviet Union for the assassination attempt.

Both parties are caught off guard in the task, though Stan gets a head start. Agent Amador is quizzing him on his Russian, and bribing him with jelly beans, in a nice nod to Reagan’s tastes, for right answers, when the news comes in. Phillip and Elizabeth, by contrast, are late to the country’s upset—they were secluded in a hotel for an afternoon tryst. “Thank you…For making us take the afternoon off,” Phillip tells Elizabeth. “That’s what you want to thank me for?” she asks him playfully. But once they see the news on a television in the hotel lobby, they’re all business, and the show parallels Stan and the Jennings activating their sources.

Elizabeth, motivated by her memories of Stalin’s death as a child in the Soviet Union, is convinced that a coup is underway, especially when Al Haig, then serving as Secretary of State, announces on television that he’s taking charge until Vice President Bush, who was on an airplane at the time, can land, be briefed, and assume command until Reagan is ready to return. Stan’s source believes the same thing, and tells him so, seeing Haig’s military rank rather than his diplomatic position. “Are you serious?” Stan asks her. “He’s one of your top generals and he’s announced he’s taking control,” Nina explains. “What do you call that?” And The Americans gives some support to the idea that the Soviets aren’t purely viewing the events through the lens of their own experience. In a downtown bar, a low-level Bush staffer complains about the constitutional questions posed by “Al, ‘I’m In Control Here’ Haig”‘s actions, while a similarly low-level Haig staffer insists that “It reflects the political reality.”

But Phillip’s one of the few characters who is able to parse that the American anxiety about Haig’s action stems from a different place than the Russian fears—it’s more about process, and less about the prospect of a long fall away from the American tradition. “All these years, walking these streets, living with these people, you don’t really understand these people. Haig could have ten nuclear footballs, and they wouldn’t have a coup,” Phillip tells Elizabeth. “Can you please just try to get yourself in a different way of looking at things?” She’s not having it. “I remember where I came from. Not having all these things. Having it be about something different than myself,” she spits at him. “You don’t think they’re all about lies and conspiracy like everything else? Why do you think it’s so different?” Phillip doesn’t have a really good argument for her yet, though he manages to win this round of the debate by switching the subject to the weakness of Soviet command and control, and convincing Elizabeth that they need to stop a war from happening. But his ability to answer Elizabeth’s query convincingly in the long run will be critical to resolving the tension between them, and the question of whether they defect and stay together, or whether Elizabeth stays loyal, while Phillip is pulled inexorably away from her, America as a whole his green light at the end of the dock.

And they aren’t the only couple who are having trouble with their cover, and with making assessments from underneath it. When Stan returns home, his wife is concerned less about Reagan’s shooting than with how they’re doing. “I thought we were going to get a chance to know each other again, living in the same house,” she explains. “You never talk to me. Why is it so hard?” Stan’s forced to confess that his stint underground, referred to memorably in the pilot of The Americans is still affecting him—he hasn’t been totally able to resurface. “I was living with psycho militants for too long. I don’t know, okay?” he tells her. “It just doesn’t feel like it did before.” Elizabeth may be unable to gage American politics because of the experiences of her childhood, while Stan’s increasingly unable to fit smoothly back into the American life from whence he came because of what he saw of his own country. What makes America different may be scarier than Elizabeth believes, or that Phillip has been able to see.