Red Widow, which follows Radha Mitchell as Marta Walraven, a woman who grew up in the Russian Mob in Marin County, only to find herself pulled back into the world of crime she tried to leave behind after the murder of her husband, premiered on ABC last Sunday. At the Television Critics Association press tour in January, I spoke with Melissa Rosenberg, who created Red Widow fresh off her stints writing the Twilight franchise, about what mothers are allowed to do on television, what parts of sex can and can’t get past Standards and Practices, and what it’s going to take for women to succeed in Hollywood. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you decide that Red Widow was going to be about the Russian mob?

Well my first decision was where I was going to set it. The original is set just outside Amsterdam, and had this sort of suburban community versus in-town, so I was looking for that. And because I’m from Marin County, in NOrthern California, that was a natural place. You’ve got Marin County and you cross the bridge into San Francisco, which has become emblematic of the bridging of two worlds. And so I began to look at what was the organized crime situation in San Francisco. While the Russian mob isn’t the largest group in San Francisco, it’s one of the top three. So then we were fortunate enough to find the former head of the FBI organized crime branch for the Russian mob in San Francisco and he became our technical consultant…So everything we do is checked with him. We do a lot of research on the internet obviously and everywhere we can. But we’re always conferring with him as well.

In terms of that sort of mob tradition, one of the things I’m curious about in that context is how the mob culture interacts with the way that Marta and Evan are raising their children? I thought that sequence in the pilot where Evan tells their son to kick his brother, he gives his daughter the money for the paints, he’s very sort of emotional and undisciplined and she wants to set boundaries. I was curious how that interacts with the larger mob story and the larger mob culture.

What’s interesting is, you know, having come from Marin County, and we all have these experiences growing up. You think you are raised in, you think that is everyone’s reality. And when you finally leave that nest, you realize, oh, the Marin County way of thinking and being is completely different from the rest of the country. It’s a sort of rude awakening. But there’s part of it that’s always living with you. Things that seem very odd to the rest of the world are just the norm to me. I mean, I htink that’s very much the case with Marta. A lot of people would think that having your husband exporting pot, it would be “Are you frickin’ kidding me?” But for her, it’s in the realm of “I don’t love this, I’d rather you didn’t do this.” But it’s not this huge moral violation in the way it would be for anyone else in the world who had a different background than her. So it’s always exploring the line for her, it’s an unclear line, and it’s different from what a lot of other people’s experiences might have been.

I wonder if we’ve had so many of these anti-heroes who are fathers because of TV tropes about men as bumbling dads, they’re not really involved, so their betrayal of responsibility to their kids doesn’t hit as hard?

There is definitely a much higher standard for characters who are mothers. There are a couple of things you don’t do. You don’t kill a dog. You don’t have a mother betray her children. You’ve lost your audience on either of those two fronts. And it’s just something embedded in our culture that we are less forgiving. And that’s always the line we’re going to be riding with her. She’s never intentionally betraying them. She’s never intentionally putting them in danger. She’s doing the very, very best she can. As we all are!

I love the sex scene in the pilot, and I am consistently cranky about sex on television. This looked like people who were having intercourse like real people. Can you talk a little bit about the process of writing that scene—and was there anything Standards and Practices wanted you to cut or change?

There’s always a few grinds and pumping, I can’t remember the word—

Thrusts?

You can’t thrust! When we shot that scene, it was one of the most intense shooting days of our pilot, because those two have amazing chemistry. You really felt that you were stepping into a very intimate relationship. We had a very closed set. These two actors, both of them, have a lack of vanity, and will just fling themselves into something. There’s a lot of footage that will never be scene, 95 percent of it, because it’s just so outrageous in an incredibly fantastic way. What it got pared down to, you still get, it’s a very sexy scene, it’s not pretend, it’s not “And now we’re doing this for the cameras because it looks really hot.” It’s two actors as directed by Mark Pellington, who’s a very real director, who basically let the room disappear for them and immersed themselves in this moment.
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The bridge is yours.

-Batman has apparently relocated to the U.K.

-Guardians of the Galaxy won’t be set on Earth.

-Jesse L. Martin will play Marvin Gaye.

-Don Draper is such a wet blanket:

For the last three years Vida, a non-profit dedicated to women in literature and associated literary arts like poetry, has published a census that tracks the number of women writing for significant literary publications like the Boston Review, Harper’s, and the New Republic, the number of women writing reviews, and the number of women whose work is reviewed by those publications. The purpose of those numbers is simple: to expose how significant the byline gap between male and female reviewers is, and to make clear the differing levels of attention that literary work by men and women receive by the publications where a good review can make a significant difference in an author’s reputation or sales. But the hope is more ambitious: that by forcing editors to see the results of their commissions and subject selections in the aggregate, they’ll change their practices.

But when the third set of results was published yesterday, the news was discouraging. In 2012, the Boston Review, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Times Literary Supplement all published reviews by fewer women than they had in 2009. Of the publications that published more women in 2012 than in 2009, Granta, The New York Review Of Books, and The New York Times Book Review, published fewer women in 2012 than they had in 2011. Gains were followed by reversals, proof that gains were ephemeral rather than systemic, more likely the result of a random fluctuation than a renewed commitment to bring a diversity of ideas in the door by diversifying the authors who would offer them up.

The numbers invite some discouraging potential conclusions. Is listing numbers of women authors published and reviewed—or the number of women writing and directing and producing episodes of television and movies—a pointless enterprise because the people who run literary magazines and studios and television networks are unshameable? “Three years is enough time to create change, even if it’s a little change. I’m tired of conversations. What else is there to say? Editors don’t give enough of a damn to change the status quo,” wrote the fiction writer Roxanne Gay. “There’s nothing to really say at this point. The gender (and racial) inequity exists. It is stark. Counting is useful for reminding us.” When editors like the New Yorker’s David Remnick, who wrote the Forward’s Elissa Strauss “You are right. It’s certainly been a concern for a long time among the editors here, but we’ve got to do better — it’s as simple and as stark as that,” do they not actually mean it? Or do they not know where to look for women to commission? Because if the latter, I’m sure the Collected Wisdom Of The Internet could drum up some suggestions.

My guess would be that the problem is less malign, but more insidious. I’d be willing to bet that every editor of every publication on this list is, in theory at least, committed to the principals of gender equity. But I’d also be comfortable laying money on the idea that they’re equally convinced that their subconscious biases, reliance on familiar authors, and processes to sort submissions and identify new contributors are sound and don’t in any way work to produce byline inequality. They’re probably uncomfortable with the idea of quotas and target numbers, in part because they want to have faith in their own processes. In other words, they can acknowledge a problem without thinking that it’s their problem. And making that connection is what’s important.

I don’t think Vida should stop its count any more than I think Martha Lautzen should stop measuring how many women are making film and television. And I certainly plan to keep writing about those numbers, if only so any time someone is upset about one person or another getting or not getting an opportunity they can say they didn’t know there was a larger context at work here. But for those numbers to break through to the people who have the power to change them, we apparently need something more than those figures. It may not take a Ladies Home Journal-style sit-in, but maybe we could at least start with some specific asks for editors. Do we want parity by a set date? A goal of a certain percentage change per year? I’m open to all suggestions. Because three years of stagnation is a sign that we need different tactics.

At the end of the second season of Enlightened, HBO’s strange, precise show about Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a former corporate drone who has an awakening and decides she has to bring her employer, Abaddon Industries to justice, Amy finds herself in shock after she is caught stealing corporate documents and turning them over to Jeff (Dermot Mulroney), a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. “They just fired me,” she tells him on the phone, clearly frightened despite her show of bravado to the company’s president. “They said they were going to sue me.” “Well,” said Jeff, who had been putting up some pretense of dating her to enhance their emotional bond while she continued to feed him documents, “we knew that was going to happen.” “We did?” Amy asked him. “Amy, this story is going to shift the paradigm, man,” Jeff tried to reassure her, appealing to her rather grandiose ego and desire to be an “agent of change” on a massive scale. “They can’t stop it, okay? It’s all worth it.” When Amy told him “We’ll see,” she sounded more sobered, and more realistic, than she has at any other point at the show, even at the moment of her biggest triumph.

Enlightened is a beautiful, wonderful, extraordinarily difficult show on any number of levels—I find it so hard to watch even though I think it’s remarkable that I marathoned the entire second season yesterday so I could enjoy and get it over with at once. And Mike White’s long and quietly been doing critically important work about how hard it is to live out your principals in America, whether he was writing about Dewey Finn (Jack Black) finding another way to make a career out of his love of music in School of Rock or showing Amy crumple in the first season as she learned that the salary for her dream job at a non-profit would leave her bobbing around the poverty line. But even though Enlightened had a semi-triumphant finale, it made one of the most painful points White’s ever gotten across: that you can be right on the merits, you can even win a major political or social battle, and still be treated like a pariah, fired, sued, or jailed. Winning doesn’t save you from consequences—in fact, your continued suffering may be the price of your victory.

This is a point that—with the exception of martyr stories like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X—is often significantly absent from our popular understanding of history and our mass culture. We remember Harriet Tubman’s heroic work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and never bother to learn that she had her arm broken by a train conductor while white passengers called for her to be thrown off the train, that she didn’t receive a pension for her Civil War service until 1899, and that she was the victim of a kind of prototypical 419 confidence fraud. After Frank Kameny was fired from the U.S. Army Map Service after his arrest in Lafayette Park for cruising, he was never employed again, friends and family supported him as he pursued activism, and it wasn’t until 2009 that Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry apologized to Kameny on behalf of the government and gave him the Theodore Roosevelt Award.

Seeing the gap between the public impact of activism and the private consequences for activists unfold in Enlightened hit me in a particularly painful way because I watched the show’s second season on the same day that the New Yorker put Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Aaron Swartz, the activist and programmer who committed suicide in January, online, and the day after The Atlantic published Swartz’s former partner Quinn Norton’s account of her involvement in the federal case against him for downloading documents from JSTOR. I would never compare Swartz to Amy Jellicoe as activists on the whole, because Amy’s talents and understanding of political systems are so nascent, and because she fundamentally lacks the talent for making friends that Swartz, in my and many others’ experiences, possessed. But in that lack of full cognizance of the consequences of their actions, they seemed to have something in common. MacFarquhar writes:
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After the Daily Caller came under fire for publishing a story about potential Kentucky Senate Ashley Judd, Alex Pappas, a politics reporter for that site, tweeted: “Our entertainment writers write stories to entertain people. That’s all. Hilarious how you try to analyze those.” It’s a classic attempt to evade responsibility for media sexism by pleading pranksterism, but it raises a question that might be even more difficult for the Caller to answer. Calling your coverage entertainment doesn’t actually mean it’s entertaining. And Pappas’s claim seems like bald-faced dishonesty about the Caller’s actual intentions, given how in-line the publication’s coverage of Judd is with larger political attacks against her.

If you accept Pappas’ argument and analyze the Daily Caller’s Entertainment section as entertainment, it’s pretty thin gruel. Slower than gossip sites like TMZ or Perez Hilton, leavened by a lower cute-animal-slideshow density (and without the substantive content that’s subsidized by it) of Buzzfeed, without either the bravado of Maxim or the suavity of Esquire when it comes to objectifying actresses, and minus even the reviews and Q&As that makes a site like Big Hollywood a window into actual right-wing thought about culture, the Daily Caller imitates many outlets, but masters no one else’s approach, and has no original schtick of its own to offer. It’s desultory clickbait dedicated to concern-trolling figures like Morrissey, Bono, Lindsay Lohan and to appease the family values folks, clucking at Kim Kardashian and Kanye West for sexy photo shoots. There’s good, valid, thoughtful cultural analysis to be done from the right, but that the Caller itself thinks its purpose in entertainment writing is merely to generate clicks and cheap chuckles, rather than expose itself to serious engagement by publishing serious writing, is revealing. I’m sure this might be financially profitable—though the amount of AP filler in the section calls that into question. But profits and quality are not the same. And the revelation that Ashley Judd has taken off her clothes would be horribly mundane entertainment journalism even if there wasn’t the possibility that she might run for Senate in Kentucky.

But the tittering assertion that the Caller’s stories about Judd’s entertainment career are just for Monday afternoon giggles is an idea belied by the Daily Caller’s very site structure, which is using stories about the fact that she’s done on-screen nudity and dated Michael Bolton to drive coverage to more substantive—though I hesitate to dignify it with that term—reporting about Judd’s political positioning for a potential race. And the act of covering Judd as entertainment, particularly when you’re not actually reporting developing news about her acting career, but digging up old tidbits from her life, is in and of itself a canny political act. The clear line of attack on Judd is that she’s a celebrity, a station in American life that is meant to indicate you’re unserious—and it’s an idea John McCain tried to use against Barack Obama in 2008 too, even though Obama doesn’t have a SAG card:

Writing about her having been naked on film is an attempt to suggest that she’s done things that make it impermissible for her to appear in public life, even as my podcast partner Asawin Suebsaeng points out, former public officials like Scott Brown, Jesse Ventura, and Arnold Swarzenegger all stripped for the camera at some point and appear not to have had their abilities to campaign or to govern with a modicum of competence irreparably damaged as a result. And the Caller’s ludicrous Judd pieces are of a part of a larger trend chronicled by Sarah Jaffe in the Columbia Journalism Review that push women in public life and women’s issues to the style section rather than covering them with the respect and serious tone that placement in the news well commands.

The Daily Caller’s always wanted respect when it suits them to get access to White House press conferences or for news stories to be taken seriously, but the publication has a tendency to evade responsibility when answering questions and criticism would become inconvenient. I’ll accept Pappas’ explanation of the publication’s Judd coverage when he’s ready to concede that the rest of the publication, with its focus on style over substance, is a poorly-executed amusement, too.