This Saturday at 9PM, BBC America debuts its second original series, Orphan Black. A science fiction thriller, Orphan Black follows a young woman named Sarah (Tatiana Maslany), who is returning home after ten months away to try to reclaim custody of her daughter, who is being raised by Sarah’s own foster mother, when she witnesses another young woman, Beth, commit suicide at a train station. If that wasn’t unsettling enough, the other woman shares Sarah’s face. And as Sarah, desperate for cash, appropriates the dead woman’s identity, apartment—and as it turns out, the police department review she’s under for an unjustified shooting of a civilian—she learns that she doesn’t just have a twin: there are a disturbing number of other women wearing Sarah’s face.

I spoke to Maslany about the challenge of playing multiple characters in a single show, how viewers relate to unsympathetic female characters, and how science fiction depicts the near future and handles class. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In Orphan Black, you’ve got a core role playing Sarah, but you have to portray a number of other women as well. Was that one of the things that drew you to the series?

Absolutely…They’re all compelling, they’re all complex, they’re all very different. Sarah was definitely my entry point into the series. What fascianted me about her so much was her extreme flaws that were right out there, her behavior that was completely immoral and self-absorbed, always defending herself. What’s fascinating to me is she’s got that beautiful heart as well. She completely wants to be a mother to her daughter, and every part of her upbringing is saying she can’t do that, and she’s not worthy of that. It’s a really nice tension to play. And to get into all the other characters, each has a different worldview, and that’s how I approached them. How do they see the world? Is it a fearful place? is it fascinating? Do they love people?

Was part of the appeal the opportunity to build audience sympathy for an unlikeable female character? Men get to be anti-heroes far more often.

Yeah, that’s what I love about it. I think, for me, it was unlike any character I’d seen on screeen, any female character especially. She’s not immediately likable. She’s not good or bad. She’s very much an animal of impulse and instinct, of self-preservation and survival. People can relate to that. There’s something glamorous abou people on Breaking Bad or whatever, because I think it tapes into the darker parts of ourselves that we don’t get to experience on a day to day basis, or that society tells us is bad. And I think that’s what’s so compelling about Sarah. We’re all so flawed. we’re all like that. We’re all bad people sometime. It’s a matter of circumstance, it’s a matter of our rsesponse to the world and what it’s told us about who we can be and who we are. She’s really grown up in a world of hostility and violence. I’m happy that she gets to be the protagonist, that her action saren’t condemned.
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On February 15 of this year, Robbie Rogers, a former member of the U.S. Men’s National soccer team and a professional player in both Europe and the United States, posted on a personal blog that he was gay. Rogers would have been the first openly gay player in major American professional sports, but he announced his retirement in the same post. In a New York Times article today, Rogers didn’t rule out a return to the pitch but said he had no choice but to retire. “I need to be a little selfish about this,” Rogers told the New York Times.

This week, rumors swirled that a National Football League player was contemplating coming out as gay in the near future. That prompted Seattle Seahawks defensive end Chris Clemons to tweet that a player coming out would be a “selfish act” that would “immediately separate a lockerroom and divide a team.”

That makes for an odd juxtaposition, the now openly gay former athlete thinking he’s selfish for coming out in his own way and the straight athlete who thinks it would be selfish for a player to come out at all. Clemons, who later tweeted that he had no problem with gay athletes but thinks they should leave their love life at home, could learn from the story of Rogers, who lived as a gay man in secret for years. Until last year, Rogers hadn’t told his family, his friends, or his teammates. He didn’t go to gay bars or date other men. It was, he told the Times, a terribly unhealthy way to live, though coming out has enabled him to find peace:

“I’m a Catholic, I’m a conservative, I’m a footballer and I’m gay,” he said, trying to describe his fear. “Imagine living all that time with just a cramp in your stomach. I kept thinking, I hope I don’t do something that makes people wonder, is Robbie gay?”

He added: “I was never close to coming out before. Never. I never went to any gay bars, never hooked up with a guy. It was so unhealthy and so bad that I felt this way. Two years ago, I would have thought that I would never come out during my entire life.” [...]

About a year and a half ago, he said, his fear turned into frustration. He realized he had never been able to feel complete happiness or joy because he always felt that he was hypocritical; as an example, he recalled, he felt little desire to celebrate after winning the M.L.S. championship with Columbus in 2008.

By January of this year, Rogers began telling close friends. Sacha Kljestan, a midfielder on the United States team who plays professionally in Belgium, visited Rogers in London a few weeks ago — the pair went to a pub to watch the Tottenham-Arsenal match together — and Kljestan said he had never seen Rogers more at ease.

Seeking that happiness and comfort in your own life isn’t selfish. Nor is it selfish for Rogers to step away from the game to seek out that peace without the media spotlight that would come from being an openly gay athlete in major male professional sports at a time when there aren’t any others. What is selfish is that someone like Clemens would put his own personal discomfort and insecurity at being next to a gay man in the lockerroom ahead of that person’s health, well-being, and ability to live an open and happy life as the person they are. What is selfish is that Clemons doesn’t understand what people like Rogers go through on a daily basis, and worse, doesn’t seem to care about understanding their struggle.

Millions of LGBT people are struggling with the same decision Rogers made, and an untold number of them are athletes. There are gay men in the NFL, perhaps even in Clemons’ lockerroom, who are having that same struggle, who live in the same closet in which Rogers spent 25 years, living a lie and unable to both embrace themselves and be embraced for who they are. I would love to see Robbie Rogers continue his career by carrying the banner for LGBT rights in sports. But it isn’t selfish of him to choose not to. But one day, a gay athlete is going to pick that banner up and take on that fight. If that person separates a team and divides a lockerroom, it won’t be because he is the selfish one.

The bridge is yours.

-Why Tyler Perry’s name is in the titles of all his movies.

-Martin Scorsese wants to bring Gangs of New York to TV.

-Go write for the AV Club!

-People are idiots.

This review discusses minor plot points of the third season of Game of Thrones.

“The truth is always either terrible or boring,” Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) says in Game of Thrones‘ third season as she watches ships sail into and out of the port of King’s Landing. For two seasons now, Game of Thrones has laid out the terrible truths of Westeros, the fictional nation torn by war after the assassination of its king by his queen and initially created on the page by George R.R. Martin, and Essos, the continent across the sea where the woman who believes herself to be the exiled queen of Westeros is raising dragons and gathering supporters. While HBO’s fantasy series has always been an ambitious act of world-building and special effects work, Game of Thrones returns for its third season on Sunday as a more emotionally, intellectually, and visually audacious show than it was in the preceding two years. Whether Game of Thrones is expanding the roles of minor characters who previously were mostly on-screen as sex objects, articulating the growing threat posed by the White Walkers, long-lost zombie-like creatures who threaten Westeros’ human population, or staging a sword fight on a bridge that’s simultaneously playful and deadly, Game of Thrones is living up to the promise of its name, and staging a three-dimensional, and increasingly humane, chess match.

Three of Game of Thrones‘ preoccupations remain the same as they ever have: sex, violence, and sexual violence. But this season, they have a greater range, and an awareness of some of the show’s past failings, among them, the use of female nudity during scenes when characters are explaining ideas to each other. It’s a practice that’s handled with a healthy wink in the first episode of this season: when a sex workers asks Bronn (Jerome Flynn) “Don’t you want to leave something to the imagination?” he tells her “Trouble is, I’ve never had much imagination.”

Much of the first four episodes of the season, though, are concerned with longing and repressed desire, rather than consummated and displayed. While on the run through the Westeros countryside, Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) tries to bait his captor, the female knight Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) with rumors that she harbored desires for Renly Baratheon (Gethin Anthony), the aspirant to the throne of Westeros, who was assassinated last season. “I did not fancy him,” Brienne insists stiffly. “Gods, you did. Did you ever tell him?” Jamie nudges her, before becoming sympathetic, remembering his own incestuous relationship with his sister Cersei (Lena Heady), far away from him in King’s Landing. ” I don’t blame you, either. We don’t get to choose who we love.” In King’s Landing, Jamie’s son with Cersei, Joffrey (Jack Gleeson), is sitting on Westeros’ throne and preparing to marry Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), the daughter of a wealthy family, who was previously married to Renly. Knowing that he has a violent streak, and suspecting a sexually violent one as well, Margaery tries to tease out her future husband’s sexual interests as a means of channeling them. “I imagine it must be so exciting to squeeze your finger here and watch something die over there,” Margaery tells Joffrey, examining his new crossbow. “Do you think you could? Kill something?” Joffrey asks her excitedly, hunting a proxy for sex. “I don’t know, Your Grace. Do you think I could?” Margaery asks him. “Would you like to watch me?”
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During his tenure on his weekend show at MSNBC, Up With Chris Hayes, Hayes and his staff managed to book a roster of guests that was striking more diverse than the comparable shows on any other network. Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Ann Friedman asked Hayes how he’d achieved those numbers when so many other shows complain that it’s so difficult to break beyond the dominance of white men in political commentary. The answer? A strict quota system, and a reassessment of what kinds of perspectives were important to include in each debate:

But sometimes national politics is the hottest topic, and some argue that media can’t be held to a diversity standard when women and people of color are so drastically underrepresented in relevant spokesperson and leadership positions. Hayes acknowledges that, for shows like Meet the Press, there’s probably something to that excuse. But most news outlets aren’t only talking to senators and CEOs. There’s a wide range of perspectives that can be brought to bear on any number of political issues. And, without a quota, it’s easy to default to the same handful of big names.

“You have to say, ‘We give ourselves this rule,’ and that’s going to force us to just be more resourceful,” Hayes says. “Because I genuinely don’t think there’s another way to do it. If you don’t do that then the inertia and the tide are so strong, unless you are committed as a priority to actively fight against it, you’re going to end up reproducing what everyone else does.”

As he makes the transition to primetime, he plans to keep a quota system. “It’s going to be even harder to do at a daily level than it was at two shows a week,” he says. “But we’re a thousand percent committed to it.” After all, it’s part of what made his weekend show so successful. Hayes has heard from the audience that they appreciate the fresh faces and perspectives that this rule has forced him to cultivate.

I think this is a critical point. Newspaper and magazine columnists, people employed at various times by lobbying and consulting firms or political campaigns, and professional activists aren’t the only people who participate in—or are affected by—politics. A lawmaker may believe that, say, food stamps incentivize certain behavior, an academic who’s studied the question may have research to offer on the question, but someone who has actually had to live on food stamps for a period longer than the challenges lawmakers frequently take on has perspective to offer, too.

The idea of limiting the discussion to just one of those dimensions seems silly if it’s stated in those terms, or if you actually care about a real discussion. But there are people who have real interests in keeping political conversations circumscribed. Making those interests transparent rather than presenting them as an unfortunate result of the market is one of the reasons Hayes’ commitment to diversity is valuable. The whiteness of cable television is a choice, not a natural order.

For those of us who have watched the development of Jane Espenson and Brad Bell’s online sitcom Husbands, the story of a gay actor and a gay baseball player who wake up married in Vegas and decide to make a go of it, over the past several years, we’ve got some exciting news. After one season funded privately by Espenson, a second supported by a Kickstarter campaign, the CW has decided to pick up the existing episodes through distribution through its digital platforms, and to make more of the show:

After rolling out short-form comedy “Stupid Hype” and micro celeb newsmag “CelebTV,” CW is moving forward with a broad development slate that includes “Reno-911”-meets-”X-Files” comedy “P.E.T. Squad,” and migrating popular Web series “Husbands” over to the CW digital platforms. “‘Husbands’ has been a critically-acclaimed, user-friendly YouTube series for two seasons,” said Rick Haskins, exec veep of marketing and digital programs at CW. “By bringing that to the CW, we hope to bring new fans over to the network and to CW broadcast shows as well.”

A borrowed equity strategy like the one employed with “Husbands” is the name of Haskins’ game at the network. The CW understands that when building an online following, it must tap into pre-existing fan bases in order to transition viewers over to the digital platforms. “Stupid Hype,” the CW’s first show to be launched through CWD, cast “Hart of Dixie” star Wilson Bethel for the shorts, hoping to draw fans from his broadcast series over to CWTV.com. The net also offered on-air ad spots promoting “Stupid Hype” and “CelebTV,” encouraging viewers to hit the Web for digital content.

And there’s some discussion that successful online shows might become full-fledged programs for broadcast. It’s always made sense to me that broadcast television would begin using successful online shows as a development pool. It lets the networks spend less money on ideas that don’t go anywhere, and gives them a chance to see what kind of audience a concept can attract when it’s available to everyone, and advertised only by social media and word of mouth. The CW, given both its belief that online viewing is key to its business, and its ratings woes in broadcasts, is a fairly logical place to start. I’m just glad it’s gambling on Husbands, a kind of story that started online because networks weren’t ready for it.

The bridge is yours.

-Why Doctor Who‘s lack of women writers is a problem.

-The complete guide to how to kill a white walker.

-The Wachowskis are making a show for Netflix.

-Every wig worn on The Americans.

-We have a plot for the new Wes Anderson movie!

The Writers Guild of America West 2013 TV Staffing Brief, the organization’s analysis of who was hired to write American television shows during the 2011-2012 season, is out, and as usual, the results for women and people of color are not encouraging. Of 1722 writers who wrote for 190 shows, 519 or 30.5 percent of them were women, and 269 of them were people of color. For women, those numbers are up 5 percent from the 1999-2000 television season—as the report put it, “At this rate of increase, it would be another 42 years before women —roughly half of the U.S. population – reach proportionate representation in television staff employment.” And for people of color, the rate of increase is more mixed: the percentage of Asian and Latino writers has risen 2.9 percent since 1999-2000, but the number of African-American television writers has grown much more slowly in the same time period, rising from 5.8 percent to 6.5 percent of overall writers. If the percentage of African-American writers is going to rise just .063 percent, it will take 87 years for black television writers to reach proportional representation in their industry relative to their current presence in the U.S. population.

Part of the reason these numbers are so frustrating to see again and again is that it only takes a few shows to make a difference. As the report points out, “until the recent rise of multicultural dramas like ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal,”—both shows created by Shonda Rhimes— “there had been no successful television dramas that featured a critical mass of minority leading roles or writers.” If all of the 55 shows that hired no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season hired just one person of color to write for them, the representation of writers of color in television would rise three percent. And the examples of a few networks show that it’s not impossible to find women and people of color to hire for all kinds of positions. 50 percent of MTV’s executive producers, 43.5 of the CW’s executive producers, and 38.5 percent of ABC Family’s executive producers are women. 13.3 percent of the executive producers on ABC are people of color, a number likely significantly driven, again, by Shonda Rhimes. 55 percent of BET’s writers are women, and 95 percent of them are people of color. Clearly, there are women and people of color available and eager to work in television, if only someone would think to ask.

Or, as Marlo Thomas put it when I asked her how she found female writers for That Girl, back at a time when television was even more male and white, “Well, you looked for them. You called agents and said ‘What comedy writers do you have that are women? We’re looking for women to write for That Girl’ We’d go to the writers’ agents. Someone would see a name on somebody else’s show and say this stuff’s really good. But when you put out a call like that to agents, agents can’t wait to get jobs for their writers.”

It’s an instruction that the 19 shows that hired no women writers in the 2011-2012 season, and the 55 shows that hired no writers of color during that same time period might take to heart. It’s worth noting that these shows’ lack of diversity doesn’t define all of them. Mike White, who wrote all of the episodes of the first season of Enlightened himself, turned in one of the most complex, sympathetic portrayals of a woman anywhere on television. And Breaking Bad, which employed no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season, produced one of the most nuanced roles for a man of color to appear on screen in the last decade. But just because white men can get it right about women and people of color doesn’t render women and people of color irrelevant—it just means that the standards for white men who are writing female characters or characters of color should be higher. The list of shows that didn’t hire women writers or writers of color in the 2011-2012 season should provide a pretty clear guide to which writers are rising above their own life experiences—and which ones are badly in need of new perspectives in their writers’ rooms:

Television Shows That Hired No Women Writers During The 2011-2012 Season

America’s Funniest Home Videos
Big Time Rush
Californication
Comedy Bang! Bang!
Dancing With The Stars
Eagleheart
Enlightened (Creator Mike White wrote all the episodes)
Futurama
Geniuses
Gurland On Gurland
The Insider
Kickin’ It
Locke & Key
Magic City
Psych
Teen Wolf
Veep
Workaholics I
Workaholics II
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Before last night’s episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit aired, NBC was promoting the episodes by teasing that the headlines it would be ripping its storyline from were the ones made by former Rep. Todd Akin last year, when he claimed that women who were survivors of so-called “legitimate rape” couldn’t become pregnant. The episode did that, recasting Akin as a former Congressman and discredited obstetrician. But rather than stopping there, SVU did something even more effective and important, illustrating the consequences of “legitimate rape” claims not just for policymakers, but for survivors—particularly for what they mean for rapists’ ability to seek custody of the children born to women they’ve attacked.

The case Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) was investigating involved Avery, a sports reporter who brought rape charges against her cameraman, Rick (Homeland‘s David Marciano). When she became pregnant, Rick, who was defending himself, brought to the stand as an expert witness a former Congressman and practicing obstetrician who testified that “Many of my medical colleagues won’t admit it, but in my experience, it’s nearly impossible for a victim of legitimate rape to become pregnant.” The show used the character to illustrate the true insensitivity of that position from both a lawmaker and a doctor’s perspective: when Rick asked the Congressman what he’d do if a rape survivor came to him for medical treatment, the Congressman said, on the stand, “I would tell her, honey, if you need to lie to yourself or your family, okay. But don’t lie to Doc Showalter. Or the Lord.”

That’s not exactly subtle, but SVU did something smart with the episode, showing how Rick used the Congressman’s testimony to try to retcon not just consensual sex between himself and Avery, but a relationship with her. When Rick had Avery on the stand, he suggested that their conversations on the road as coworkers, her asking him for help with her bags, and the fact that she undressed after she thought he’d left the apartment were all evidence that she had somehow seduced him or consented. “I gave you the child you always wanted,” Rick told Avery in the courtroom, using the fact that she kept the baby because of prior difficulties getting pregnant as evidence of her emotional attachment to him. “How often have you seen an actual rape victim become pregnant and decide to keep the baby?” Rick asked Olivia when he was cross-examining her. Ultimately he’d be acquitted because one member of the jury believed the “legitimate rape” argument, a potent testimonial to the damage that even the limited spread of an idea like this can do.
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My friend, New York Magazine television critic Matt Zoller Seitz has a novel solution to the complaint that Game of Thrones makes gratuitous use of female nudity: get the guys naked more often. He argues:

Since its 2011 debut, Thrones has been attacked for “gratuitous” nudity and labeled sexist for stripping its women more often than its men. These are two different complaints, though; intertwining them muddies each. The first concerns the appropriateness of graphic sex and/or nudity; the second is about the show’s “gaze,” which is undeniably heterosexual and male. But it’s possible to enjoy sex and nudity without guilt or bluenosed justifications while simultaneously pointing out that the scales of spectatorship are out of whack. I’d like Game of Thrones to enlarge the scope of its fantasy­ — to show more same-sex couplings and male nudity — as Starz’s Spartacus series has done with such panache. For all its tough, complicated women characters, Thrones is rightly perceived as too much of a ­sausagefest. The producers could change that perception by adding more sausage.

I think he’s on the right track, but has arrived at the wrong destination. What Game of Thrones needs isn’t more anatomy of any variety—and, as I’ll discuss at greater length in my full review of the season, which will be up on Friday, I think the show has actually absorbed that criticism in a productive way and is stronger for it. Instead, it needs more consensual sex, preferably in situations where one partner isn’t paying the other. At its best, Game of Thrones can be a terrific story about sexual violence in wartime. But for the full weight of that argument to be felt, and for sexual violence to register with the horror it’s meant to elicit—particularly given the troubling use of rape as a way to generate drama on prestige television without thought to larger context—we need to see the alternative, to see some of the happiness and normality that gets destroyed by war. It may be harder to depict good sex than the embarrassment of bad sex or the numbing fear of sexual violence. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying, in part to remind those of us watching at home what kind of good world our friends in Westeros and beyond are fighting for.

I’m actually kind of impressed by the chutzpah it takes to roll out the trailer for White House Down, Roland Emmerich’s latest bit of disaster porn, with this particular quotation attributed—though not actually accurately—to Abraham Lincoln, a United States president who was actually repeatedly in danger, and whose assassins were tried in a military tribunal stacked to require fewer votes: “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

What’s grimly hilarious about this, of course, is given what happened when the Pentagon and two commercial buildings were attacked, America would probably go under martial law if the White House and the Capitol were both successfully destroyed. And Emmerich’s movies valorize extraordinary measures in the face of disaster and expansive use of executive power in the same way that would be used to justify major crackdowns after a more significant terrorist act than September 11.

Of course, there’s the whole separate issue that Channing Tatum’s character is an off-duty cop on a White House tour with his daughter when everything starts going down and he mysteriously becomes the only person available to protect the President of the United States, a scenario that probably gives White House Down the distinction of being the only movie to have its plot invalidated by the sequester. But I’m a lot more willing to forgive Channing Tatum-related ludicrousness than civil liberties chutzpah these days. If you’re going to quote Abraham Lincoln, you need to have more to offer up than a lot of helicopters and CGI flames to justify it.

The Wall Street Journal’s Dennis K. Berman wrote a piece this week comparing the basketball programs at the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville. Kentucky coach John Calipari, as Berman notes, built his program on the backs of players who spend one mandated year in college before jumping to the NBA. Louisville coach Rick Pitino, by contrast, built his with players who are more likely to stick around for the full four years. The implication from Berman is that Kentucky’s program is “hollow” like the Death Star, while Louisville’s is built in the manner that most fans and basketball observers would consider the “right way.”

My observation is quite different: to me, there is no college basketball program in America that epitomizes the problems with college sports better than the Louisville Cardinals.

Louisville’s basketball program is by far the richest in the nation. Thanks in large part to a beautiful new publicly-financed arena that has sent its revenues through the roof, the program hauled in more than $40 million in revenue last year. It made anywhere between $23 million to $28 million in profits, far more than any other school. The young men who helped generate those profits, who 21,000 fans pack the KFC Yum! Center to see play? They were paid nothing, even though a 2011 study calculated the market value of a Louisville basketball player at just short of $1 million.

It’s not that Louisville doesn’t have the money to compensate athletes. Pitino made $4.8 million this year; with bonuses, he made $7.5 million in 2011. The athletic department, bolstered in part by basketball revenue and in part by its successful football program, is expanding athletic facilities at rapid rates. In 2008, it relied on a $10 million donation and state financing to make a $72 million upgrade to its football stadium.

Louisville has perfected college basketball’s revenue-maximizing system, raking in millions of dollars in profits from advertisers, ticket and merchandise sales, and television deals, then paying out millions to coaches and administrators and pretending that what it is doing is somehow not a business but an educational mission. This isn’t just a Louisville problem: it’s what schools across the country are doing. Revenues are rising rapidly, and they are going to pay skyrocketing salaries for coaches and to build new facilities or upgrade those that already exist. At none of these schools is the athlete sharing in the system.

Kentucky (which is my alma mater) is no exception. Its $19.9 million in projected basketball profits tied it with Kansas and North Carolina as college basketball’s second-richest programs, and at $4.5 million a year, Calipari’s salary is roughly equal to Pitino’s. It has a sparkling $30 million practice facility and recently spent $6 million to upgrade the scoreboard and sound system in its football stadium. The market value of Kentucky players is more than $645,000. It, like Louisville and every other NCAA program, doesn’t pay its players either.

But here’s the thing about Kentucky: intentionally or not, it has blown a hole in the idea that college basketball is a virtuous educational endeavor pursued solely by amateurs who love the game. Calipari’s program more than any other takes advantage of the fact that college basketball is a minor league business for the NBA by understanding that the most talented basketball players are using college to get to the pros as fast as possible. If Kentucky’s players can’t share in the riches they generate for Kentucky, they’ll at least be getting paid for their work soon enough. That’s far from an ideal setup and hardly excuses Kentucky from scrutiny, but it at least halfway acknowledges and exploits the flaws in the argument that the top levels of college basketball are anything other than a business. Because it does that, the program is a slap in the face to purists, right way-ers, and the “amateurism and education crowd” that hasn’t updated its views to fit reality.

Major college sports operate in a perverse system that generates billions of dollars a year off the backs of free labor, and both Kentucky and Louisville are willing participants. But if no basketball program does a better job of making the system look ridiculous than Kentucky, perhaps no basketball program is right now doing a better job of epitomizing the lies on which that system is built than Louisville.

The bridge is yours.

-Captain America 2 sounds like it could be getting delightfully bonkers.

-Game of Thrones actors in and out of costume.

-Also, have a map of Westeros in Minecraft.

-All of Woody Allen’s on-screen stammers.

-I’m not a huge Michael Bay fan, but I am weirdly excited for Pain and Gain:

The meme that Superman, having arrived as a child from Krypton through the machinations of his parents, is in fact an undocumented immigrant has percolated a bit during this round of the immigration reform debate. But it took novelist Junot Diaz, who appeared on The Colbert Report earlier in the week, to take that idea and turn it into the perfect question for people who treat immigration reform as an abstraction:

What do you do with the isolated child in the fire engine red cape with nowhere else to go? What are in his best interests? Do you proceed under the most optimistic assumptions about what he might be able to bring to his new country? The worst? The point is not that Superman deserves an H-1B visa. It’s that immigrants deserve a chance to make contributions to the country they want to adopt, not simply to be treated as a drag on it.

Buzz Bissinger’s long, strange chronicle of his shopping addiction, particularly to Gucci, which was published yesterday in GQ makes the case for many things, including higher taxes on anyone who can afford to blow $638,412.97 on luxury clothes, mostly from Gucci, over a period of three years, and gag orders to keep parents from hopelessly embarrassing their children. But in between Bissinger’s tossed-off mentions of the medication he’s taking to treat bipolar disorder, his meandering and inconclusive discussions of his evolving sexuality (some of which seems shockingly at the expense of his wife), and his cluelessness about the extent to which his Gucci personal shopper must be having a high old time taking him for a very expensive ride, there’s a kernel of an interesting idea, particularly appearing in a magazine that does a lot to set the standards for men’s fashion.

Bissinger writes:

Some of the clothing is men’s. Some is women’s. I make no distinction. Men’s fashion is catching up, with high-end retailers such as Gucci and Burberry and Versace finally honoring us. But women’s fashion is still infinitely more interesting and has an unfair monopoly on feeling sexy, and if the clothing you wear makes you feel the way you want to feel, liberated and alive, then fucking wear it. The opposite, to repress yourself as I did for the first fifty-five years of my life, is the worst price of all to pay. The United States is a country that has raged against enlightenment since 1776; puritanism, the guiding lantern, has cast its withering judgment on anything outside the narrow societal mainstream. Think it’s easy to be different in America? Try something as benign as wearing stretch leather leggings or knee-high boots if you are a man.

Whether stretch leather leggings look good on Bissinger is one question. But the other, more relevant one, is how does men’s fashion relate to men’s bodies and men’s sense of their own sexual self-presentation? And how will men’s fashion and male body image issues change, particularly as men start to have an experience that’s been most squarely the provenance of women: being objectified?

There’s something fitting about the fact that Bissinger’s screed dropped the same day as these new Gillette spots which, in the interest of getting men to buy new shaving products, is encouraging men to start acting rather like women. Specifically, the company wants men to start worrying about how much of their body hair they can retain and still be sexually attractive to women like Kate Upton, who apparently doesn’t like back hair, New Girl’s Hannah Simone, who likes a smooth stomach, and a third lady who wants her gentleman friends to go completely bare:

This is a natural expansion of Gillette’s business, of course. Once you’ve got women removing as much hair as is humanely possible from their bodies, you’ve got to start targeting other people, and other body parts if you want to crete new markets.

These business interests have real consequences, of course. Hair removal is one thing—razor knicks and skin irritation aside, it’s not as if there are long-term health consequences to shaving your legs or chest, or a lot of Olympic swimmers would be in a fair bit of trouble. But what about steroids, or heavy lifting regimens among teenage boys who are still growing? Men’s sizing for things like suits is more nuanced than sizing for say, women’s dresses, but how will more off-the-rack sizing, and popular cuts of clothing, shift to accomodate new expectations of male body size?

Body image expectations and grooming requirements have long been more stringent for women than for men, but women and women’s fashion have responded with a great deal of innovation, and flair, and fun. Men seem to be at an earlier point in this cycle, when the standards are rising, but fashion norms haven’t yet broadened as dramatically as they are for women. Someone other than Buzz Bissinger will come up with something more insightful to say about what it means for men to get pulled more aggressively into an alternately enamored and antagonistic relationship with fashion and their bodies—and what it means for that relationship to expand to include men who aren’t worried about trying to fit into tight-fitting made-to-measure Italian suiting. But Bissinger is not wrong to argue that there’s powerful, unexplored territory out there when it comes to men, fashion, and the presentation of their sexuality. He’s just missing the fact that it’s not just his personal style, but powerful business interests, that are going to push that discussion forward—and in ways that he and other men might find as difficult and uncomfortable as women have for years.

With the Supreme Court hearing oral arguments in the case against California’s Proposition 8 yesterday, the consensus seems to be that deadline for politicians to come out in support of equal marriage rights and to get some sort of credit for it has passed. But beyond the field on which legal equality is adjudicated, stands for equality can still be interesting. And there’s something particularly telling about this Interview magazine conversation between rapper A$AP Rocky and Alexander Wang in which Rocky both speaks up for gay rights and outlines an important tipping point. He believes it’s now worse for hip-hop’s overall brand to appear homophobic than it once was for rappers to be perceived as gay-friendly:

So now that I’m here and I’ve got a microphone in my hand and about 6,000 people watching me, I need to tell them how I feel. For instance, one big issue in hip-hop is the gay thing. It’s 2013, and it’s a shame that, to this day, that topic still gets people all excited. It’s crazy. And it makes me upset that this topic even matters when it comes to hip-hop, because it makes it seem like everybody in hip-hop is small-minded or stupid—and that’s not the case. We’ve got people like Jay-Z. We’ve got people like Kanye. We’ve got people like me. We’re all prime examples of people who don’t think like that. I treat everybody equal, and so I want to be sure that my listeners and my followers do the same if they’re gonna represent me. And if I’m gonna represent them, then I also want to do it in a good way.

It’s preferable for people to be affirmatively welcoming because they truly want their lives to be full of different kinds of people and want the communities around them to be the same way. But even if they’re not, it’s one of the great victories of the gay rights movement to make an embrace of gay rights better for business than the alternative, both by articulating the size of the gay market itself, and by expanding that figure by adding in the market of straight allies, such that that combined buying power dwarfs that of anti-gay boycotters.

The full recognition of gay humanity and gay purchasing power for a wide range of products go hand-in-hand. Once you recognize that gay people are people who deserve rights, you will probably realize that gay folks are also not a monolithic block who listen only to house music, live only in New York and San Francisco, vacation only on Fire Island, and amuse themselves only with faaaabulous clothes. Like heterosexual people, it turns out that gay people live everywhere. They buy tickets to sporting events—and at those sporting events, buy beer, and hot dogs, and jerseys. They take out mortgages in places other than Chelsea, often for homes that require things like drywall, and gardening prodcuts. And they buy hip-hop records and hip-hop singles and tickets to hip-hop shows. There’s a more attractive order in which to recognize these things, and it’s the one that recognizes the diversity of the gay community first and its purchasing power second. But you can’t recognize one without being confronted with the other. Hip-hop may be slower than Home Depot to shift its brand. But it will be a relief when no homo, a phrase as lyrically lazy as it is intellectually cowardly, becomes an anachronism.

This post discusses plot points from the third and fourth episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

Noir is mannered, but I admit through the first several episodes of Veronica Mars, the show’s stylized nature was keeping me at a bit of a distance. That all changed with these two episodes of the show. It’s not so much that the cases got to me—I suspect that after the first two episodes, which used crimes to pull the basic cast of characters together, that Veronica’s clients will be a little more disposable. It’s that the, despite its use of private eye conventions, and in fact because of them, Veronica Mars became piercingly emotional in these two episodes, which focused substantially on the relationships between parents and children. In noir, everyone has secrets, but in Veronica Mars, the gap between public and private selves takes less time to unravel, or at least to become apparent. But that doesn’t mean that Veronica is free to send clients on her way faster than Sam Spade—instead, mysteries matter less than the consequences they open up.

In her first case, Veronica is employed by a boy named Justin to find his father—except that as far as Justin knows, his father is dead, and the gig is just an excuse for him to talk to Veronica and to give her mix CDs built around 311 releases. But instead of pulling off a successful ploy, Justin ends up discovering something that requires much more maturity from him than the quota that’s required to hit on a cool, older girl. His father’s transitioned and is living as a woman named Julia, played beautifully by Melissa Leo, who regularly patronizes the movie rental business where Justin works so she can have a chance to talk to him about film and take his recommendations. In one of the slyest, most impressive arguments for tolerance I’ve seen, she is clearly and deeply loved by the man she lived with. And Justin is in terrible pain not just because he’s discovered that his father abandoned him, but because his mother couldn’t trust him to react well to the truth.

“This is hard, I know. I wish I could have found a way to tell you,” Julia tells Justin. “This is something I had to do. This is who I am.” Justin is focused on the betrayal rather than the rare opportunity he has not just to be loved again, but to act like the kind of man Veronica would admire, until Veronica explains what it would mean to her to know that her mother wanted to visit her, even in disguise. “90 miles,” Veronica tells Justin. “That’s the distance your dad travels every week to see you for a few seconds. Look, my mom’s been missing, too, and I would give anything to feel that she cared enough about me to do that.” The case ends, and Justin’s resolution begins, with him tentatively calling his mother to tell her that the copy of Body Heat he recommended to her and special ordered for her has arrived—and giving her his regular schedule. The mystery matters far less than the emotional landscape that it opened up, noir’s secrets giving way to the complexities of contemporary life, which is difficult enough even before you introduce guns, gumshoes, and dames to die for into the mix.

As Julia’s taking the risk that Justin can love her as his mother, rather than his father, Keith Mars is confronting his daughter’s maturity, rather than his worries about her lack of it.
When he’s called into the principal’s office because she wants to tell him “We’ve noticed a dramatic change in [Veronica] over the last year. She’s late, a lot. She has attitude with certain teachers. She falls asleep in class. And socially she seems a bit isolated,” Keith downplays these changes. “I’d say Veronica is doing pretty well given the circumstances,” he tells the principal. “I can handle it, thank you.” But while he can manage Veronica’s behavior in limited ways, he can’t exactly arrest the forward march of time. When he asks Veronica about her first date with Troy, he’s rattled by her explanation that it was “Lousy conversation, but the sex was fantastic.” He gets territorial when the two keep seeing each other. “If he’s going to be kissing my daughter on my front porch for eight and a half minutes, I’m going to have to meet him,” Keith demands. “He’s taking up a lot of daddy-daughter time.” And Keith can even use his private-eye skills to put the kibosh on Veronica’s plans for homecoming. “You won’t mind, then, that I cancelled your reservation at the Four Seasons?” he tells Troy over Diet Cokes. But tracking down hotel registers one at time can only go so far—Keith’s business, in fact, depends on the idea that the world will stay richly supplied in venality. He can intimidate Troy out of sleeping with his daughter on one occasion, but he can’t predict her slipping out of her red dress and racing into the water in Lily Kane’s memory, can’t stop her from being exposed to hurt and seeking out new forms of joy.
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Last week, I wrote that HBO’s idea—I would not yet describe it as a plan—to let consumers buy HBO Go subscriptions from their internet service providers seemed like the most likely way to solve the problem of letting people buy stand-alone HBO Go without subscribing to HBO through a cable package: it would freak out cable companies and lead to retaliation against HBO before the streaming market was rigorous enough to support it. I was writing mostly from a consumer perspective then, but fortunately, friend of the blog Gabriel Rossman is here to write about what this adaptative mindset means for the way we conceive of our ability to freely access content that streams over the internet. He argues that it’s a short-term victory for access to certain content that’s a long-term defeat:

Suppose that your ISP isn’t happy with HBO’s offer to let it keep half the money from IP only HBO Go (which it would price at or above the price it charges tv customers) because it really wants to keep pushing you towards that “triple play” package its telemarketers keep harassing you with? Well, that ISP can just refuse to sell HBO GO to its broadband-only customers. And unlike Netflix, the ISP would actually be able to veto your purchase. It’s structurally very similar to car dealerships, where local brokers are terrified of (and can use their clout to prevent) translocal competition. This one is actually kind of scary. Imagine if you could only subscribe to the New York Times through your condo’s HOA, which would otherwise deny building access to the paperboy?

There are some ways in which this would still create problems for the cable operators, mostly in that it would undermine the two-part tariff aspect of their business model, but I think this is effectively obviated by the local veto aspect of the proposal. Moreover, cable operators are increasingly showing signs that they see the bundling aspect of their business model unraveling (mostly because carriage fees are out of control) and are willing to settle for a role of brokerage, without bundling. (Note that data caps, which don’t apply to content bought from your ISP, help enforce this brokerage role since they effectively let your ISP tax content bought on the open market).

This, of course, is all dependent on a world where high-speed internet access is something we purchase individually. If municipal wireless networks or municipal broadband ever really take off, or we move to the idea that high-speed internet access is a right rather than a commodity, then the broker role of internet service providers would be disrupted. But as long as we’re each paying to get online in the first place, even if we’re paying less money than we used to and for a higher-quality product, we’re in a position where we’ve accepted ISPs as toll-takers. That they’re going to make like Delaware and get every penny out of us for as long as they can shouldn’t come as any particular surprise.

Over at Buzzfeed, Adam B. Vary is absolutely right to suggest that, as the late-night television lineup seems poised for another reshuffle as NBC’s relationship with Jay Leno deteroirates, it would be awfully nice if the networks considered candidates for the positions about to be opened up who aren’t the interchangeable white men who have largely dominated those time slots since time immemorial, or at least since Johnny Carson. And I think it’s worth making a larger point in conjunction with his argument: it’s going to be disappointing if the spaces opened up by Leno’s canning and subsequent reshuffling produce not just the same faces, but the same formats, particularly given the waves of experimentation that have been taking place outside of the major networks for years.

There’s the political model, which started in its current incarnation over at Comedy Central. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert may not hail from exactly the same schools of comedy as David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, and Jay Leno, but they’re marked by the same general demographics. It’s what they’ve done behind the desks on their respective sets that’s different. While Stewart and Colbert take on a wide array of topics, they’re doing so not from a general interest perspective but from carefully honed political ones. Their business model aims for ferocious loyalty among a segment of the population they’ve chosen to pursue specifically, rather than pulling from across the political spectrum as a whole. It’s worldview, rather than schtick that’s the initial selling point, Stewart’s righteousness and Colbert’s gleeful satire rather than signature bits like David Letterman’s top ten lists or Jimmy Fallon’s rapport with his musical guests, though of course Stewart and Colbert sold those, too. FX has subsequently taken a step beyond the innovation that Colbert and Stewart represented with Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell, the intensely political African-American comic who honed his act in the Bay Area stand-up scene before moving to late-night, where he’s ditched the suits and the presumption of white dudeness, and brought along correspondents who don’t look much like the men in ties who largely dominate Stewart and Colbert’s shows, too, like lesbian comic Janine Brito.

And Bell isn’t the only person of color in late night in recent years, nor is Brito the only woman or only non-straight person. Vary called out George Lopez’s TBS show, cancelled when Conan O’Brien moved to the network, as an example of innovation both with hosts and format. T.J. Holmes is attempting to make a go of it on BET. And Arsenio Hall is rolling out a new late-night talk show that will be distributed through CBS syndication sometime later this fall. Wanda Skyes had her shot at late-night hosting in 2010. Chelsea Handler and Kathy Griffin have hosted late-night talk shows, if not the conventional late-night variety standards. And over at Bravo, Andy Cohen has built a successful franchise out of his Watch What Happens Live recap show, which features Bravo talent as well as other guests, and is known for a boozy, playful atmosphere—one of his bits of schtick is to have visitors play games with Cohen as a way of loosening them up. The fact that show has worked is one of the reasons we’ve seen things like The Talking Dead on AMC: as is the case with political shows, other niche late-night programming that lets fans process ideas they’re intensely interested in has become a viable alternative to the general interest show. But these alternative experiments in late night programming seem to be off in their own world, rather than acting as a farm team for the existing business model, which means that diversity of format as well as of hosts is off percolating elsewhere, rather than rising to the networks.

Laura Bennett is right, of course, that the internet and the possibility of content going viral has had an enormous influence on the way late night shows structure their bits—it’s almost a reverse response to Daniel Tosh’s clip shows, where the late night hosts want to manufacture the videos that go huge, rather than discuss and drive traffic to someone else’se work. Jimmy Fallon’s recruitment of The Roots was probably the biggest staffing innovation in recent years, a reason to come for the house band rather than just the host, and in keeping with Fallon’s determination to be a musical tastemaker, rather than simply responding to musical trends. It makes sense that late night hosts would want to be drivers of the culture, active aggregators and curators, rather than simply party hosts riding the hot new trend—you’ve got a better argument that audiences should tune in during the time slot if they might witness the emergence of Odd Future on the national stage, rather than if your’e going to interview Tyler The Creator six months after he emerges onto the national consciousness. But I’m curious to see what different kinds of hosts would choose to elevate if given the chance, and curious for someone who’s going to offer a new way to stage those debuts. Suits, desks, and white guys are all fine on their own. But they aren’t the only way to do things.

The bridge is yours.

-The person who stole a Breaking Bad script from Bryan Cranston’s car really does not care about spoilers.

-The wigs of Phil Spector, as portrayed by Al Pacino.

-Upworthy is a year old today!

-Beyonce is a queen even when she’s animated.

-More Iron Man 3.