Happy news! Park and Recreation, the last pillar of NBC’s Thursday night comedy block, appears to have earned a sixth season from the network, at least according to Alan Sepinwall’s reporting. In honor of this victory of quality over mediocrity—or at least in honor of the fact that the collapse of the network television model is keeping alive shows that otherwise might never have drawn breath, I want to consider what it is that makes Parks and Recreation so unique.

The show has always been notable for its optimistic argument that government, portrayed as a wretched hive of ineffectiveness and villainy almost everywhere else in popular culture, employs competent, enthusiastic people, and can be a significant force for good. But as I’ve been thinking over the last year we spent in Pawnee, Indiana, I realized that Parks and Recreation has actually been doing something more striking and sophisticated, which culminated in the season finale, “Are You Better Off?” The show hasn’t just trusted viewers to enjoy the ping-pong match between Leslie Knope’s optimistic liberalism and Ron Swanson’s pessimistic, self-reliant libertarianism and to side with Leslie, but, having accepted that government can be effective, to walk through an extended debate about what government’s capacities should be used for.

As Leslie kicked off her first year on the City Council, she pursued an agenda that was rooted in the idea that the role of government is to remedy failures in the market, even when the failures are a matter of public pleasure and intellectual life, rather than of health, safety, and public welfare. Her initiatives tended to fall into one of two categories: projects that were good for Pawneeans, whether they liked it or not, and projects that enriched their lives, even if they weren’t ponying up enough to support them.

Leslie’s work in the first category prompted the campaign to recall her that ended the first season. She took on the all-male Sanitation Department, who told her at the time that their sole female employee was “the best secretary we got. Except for Dan. Dan’s awesome,” and proved that women were more than capable of picking up Pawnee’s refuse. Later, the men she’d quibbled with would complain about what their lives had been like “Ever since you stripped us of our freedoms by making us hire women.” Inspired by the testimony of citizens like the one who told Leslie “My husband started drinking those giant sodas and he gained 100 pounds in three months. Consequently, we haven’t had sex in ten years,” Leslie pulled a Mayor Bloomberg and cracked down on drink serving sizes in Pawnee, an action that lead the Sweetums corporation to put a target on her back. “You convinced the school board that napkins were a vegetable!” Leslie protested when the company lead the drive to recall her. “They’re made from plants!” a Sweetums executive insisted cheerfully.
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EA Sports designed virtual players in college sports video games to look and play like their real life counterparts, according to testimony from a former company executive obtained by AL.com. The games didn’t, and couldn’t, use the names of those players under NCAA rules, the same rules that let EA Sports and other companies profit off of those athletes without paying them a dime.

Former EA producer Jeremy Strauser and EA executive vice president Joel Linzner both testified in December as part of former University of California-Los Angeles basketball star Ed O’Bannon’s lawsuit against EA Sports and the NCAA. The suit claims that both violated antitrust law by using the images and likenesses of former college athletes without compensation. Both Strauser and Linzner testified that EA Sports, which is trying to get out of the case, designed players to resemble the actual players they were meant to depict, AL.com reports:

Jeremy Strauser, who worked at EA from 1995 until 2011, testified last December that computer-game avatars were linked to specific player identifying numbers and biographical information, such as team depth charts, was used to make the game realistic.

“We generally tried to make the players perform as their real life counterparts, short of their name and likeness,” Strauser testified. [...]

Linzner said the video game’s purpose is to “evoke or create the impression that these are the real life counterparts, and the heights and weights are sometimes accurate and sometimes not.”

Well, of course they did. Anyone who has ever played any of the EA Sports games based on college athletics knows that the players in the game, from position to number to height and weight to skin color to skill level, are based off their real-life counterparts (notice how much this guy looks like this guy?). That’s why EA Sports comes out with a new game each year, because nobody wants to play with USC or Alabama’s rosters from last year when they can have a more realistic experience by playing with their rosters from this year. If it wasn’t (some dude who looks like) Matt Barkley throwing the football to (two dudes who look like) Robert Woods and Marqise Lee, well, EA Sports would almost surely sell a lot fewer games. At the least, they’d have to market the games as far less realistic experiences.

It isn’t just video games: Nike and the University of Kentucky didn’t spend all of 2012 selling #23 basketball jerseys at random. They sold #23 jerseys because UK’s star player, Anthony Davis, wore #23. College bookstores around the country, and retailers who sell college merchandise, do the exact same thing, and they do it because nobody wants the walk-on’s jersey.

The NCAA argues that none of this matters because they aren’t using the players’ names or images, and thus they aren’t exploiting actual people. But of course they are, and everyone knows it. Because if they weren’t using the likenesses of actual people, they wouldn’t be making nearly as much money by using them in broadcasts, selling merchandise based off of them, or selling their rights to video game manufacturers. That’s precisely what makes the entire system such a sham, and precisely what makes the O’Bannon case so promising: it has a chance to bring the entire sham to light, one admission of the obvious at a time.

None of that means that O’Bannon is going to win the lawsuit, which is still far from over. The next step is a hearing in June that will determine if the case can be certified as a class-action complaint, which would allow current college athletes to join the case. If that happens, the O’Bannon case won’t just serve as a valuable exposé of the absurdity of college athletics. Rather, it would have the chance to bring the entire system crumbling down.

Last week found tech titan Peter Thiel complaining about the depiction of technology in popular culture, arguing that movies with the message that “technology is going to kill you,” were slowing down interest in tech jobs, the tech industry, and the skills necessary to achieve in both. Yesterday, it was Sen. Jay Rockefeller who, during a hearing on immigration reform, suggested that what the United States needs to get back on top in the new economy is pop culture. “If, and I’m just positing, that if we lift the whole subject of sophisticated education, STEM, to a very much more visible level,” he mused. “We didn’t have TV programs called Law & Order, we had TV programs called Science and Engineering and Math and Technology, that’s a stretch, I think it really comes down to some of those human factors. What is it that holds us back?”

The witness to whom Rockefeller was speaking, Jeffrey Bussgang, who has the kind of amazing title of senior lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School, gave an answer that both endorsed Rockefeller’s suggestion that pop culture is a powerful tool to get audiences interested in science, and that underscored how strange both Thiel and Rockefeller’s suggestions are. “Being a geek,” Bussgang said, “is more cool than it’s ever been.”

As I wrote when Thiel first filed his grievance, he has a point in the long term. There are an awful lot of post-apocalypses happening on movie screens because our stewardship of technology has failed in some way, whether through our lax management of technology, or because we wanted too much from it. But nerds are everywhere in popular culture right now, and as they’ve moved to the center of the screen from their peripheral roles as supporting characters, they’ve come to be presented as aspirational figures, not just professionally.
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There are many problems with Joel Stein’s cover story about Millennials—people born between 1980 and 2000. The most glaring substantive one is probably that, in his discussion of my generation’s relatively slow start and disappointment in employment, he finds plenty of time to talk about the widespread availability of social technologies, and none whatsoever to talk about the dramatic contraction of economic opportunity that has made it harder for Millennials to find jobs, and more dependent on their parents’ financial help and health insurance as a fallback, rather than as a lifestyle choice. I can believe that Stein would make that omission, but it’s difficult to believe that his editors let the piece into print that way.

But one thing I think is useful and clarifying about the article, even as I find it frustrating, isn’t in the text at all. It’s the way that it’s being sold to the public: namely, with a picture of a well-dressed young woman, gazing into her iPhone, seemingly taking a picture of herself:

Stein’s piece wisely acknowledges that the condemnation of Millennials that’s a common trope these days, and that makes his piece feel like trolling, is only the latest iteration of a generational cycle. And what might have made the article interesting rather than repetitive is a discussion of the way this cycle is different from the ones that came before.

One avenue the choice of cover suggested is that there might be a gendered component to the irritation with Millennials. Dependence, interiority, and the careful construction of fantasy lives aren’t solely the provenance of girls and women of course, but they’re traits that are coded as feminine. And technology and economics have made those traits much more visible when men and women display them. If a scrapbook was something you kept for yourself to archive your memories, Instagram is that scrapbook, except shared with everyone. If you kept one of those inspiration boards with ribbons sewn into fabric stretched over a board in your dorm room or your childhood bedroom, you’re probably doing the same thing on Pinterest. And where your parents might have paid your first and last month’s rent as a deposit—or if you were spectacularly lucky, bought you an apartment—a version of support that wasn’t necessarily obvious, though it could be deduced by a reasonably intelligent observer, their reduced circumstances and yours might leave you living at home, a much more visible sign of your economic interdependence with your family.

Neither Stein’s article, nor anything else I’ve read about generational research suggests that women are exhibiting the traits he calls out as negative out in greater numbers. If anything, Millennial men and women are coming into alignment in certain ways, whether it’s wanting equal flexibility in work so both men and women can balance their careers and family responsibilities, or using social networking tools (though men and women tend to gravitate to different services). If what irritates non-Millennials about the current generation of young adults, male and female alike, isn’t just that they’re self-absorbed, or entitled, or dependent, but self-absorbed, entitled, and dependent in feminine ways, that’s telling.

And it says a lot about the second half of Stein’s thesis, which is ostensibly about how Millennials could save us all. If what Millennials have to offer is lessons about genuine introspection, more reasonable expectations of work-life balance, and the need for a fair social safety net and reasonable return on the investment of getting a college education, that seems like a genuinely valuable conversation. It’s just too bad that it’s one implied by Time’s cover, rather than discussed in Stein’s article.

The bridge is yours.

-For those of you anxious about getting hit with plot points for things you haven’t seen on Twitter, there’s now an app for that.

-I am even more excited to see Chris Meloni doing a comedy on Fox than I am to see Andy Samberg doing the same.

-Why we should be excited for Kanye’s new album if we weren’t already.

-Apparently Joss Whedon is the person responsible for those wonky seasons in Westeros.

-Tom Hanks is going to fight some pirates. Gotta say I’m not really sure about this portrayal of Somalis yet:

I have a long-standing fondness for folk music such that I would have been happy to watch a feature-length version of the Greenwich Village section of I’m Not There, so I’m curious to see how the Joel and Ethan Coen’s movie about the same period, Inside Llewyn Davis, tracking the career of fictional folksinger of the same name, looks in its entirety:

Watching this trailer, I was particularly struck by Carey Mulligan’s character, who maybe is Davis’ girlfriend, current or former, but at minimum is a frustrated truth-teller who is acutely aware of Davis’s weaknesses. This clip reminded me of something Emily Nussbaum wrote earlier this year about “a time when the legendary wildness of male New York intellectuals and artists was made possible by middle-class girlfriends who paid the rent and absorbed hipness from the kitchen. As Joyce Johnson, Jack Kerouac’s onetime girlfriend, observed in her scathing memoir Minor Characters, an account of kohl-eyed Barnard coeds fleeing to Greenwich Village, ‘Even a very young woman can achieve old-ladyhood, become the mainstay of someone else’s self-destructive genius.’”

Elizabeth Olsen is playing another character like this in Kill Your Darlings, the account of Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lucien Carr at Columbia, leading up to the period when Carr killed David Kammerer. She’s Edie Parker, who eventually married Jack Kerouac, also a character in the movie, for a brief period while he was imprisoned. And while she’s less angry than Mulligan’s character appears to be, she embodies the awfulness of standing by while people who think they’re geniuses self-indulge and self-destruct. It’s irritating to constantly put women in the position of having to be the in-text reminders to the audience that what male characters think is badass is not necessarily so. But better that, I suppose, than a straight-forward lionization of self-absorption. And at least Mulligan’s character gets to be an artist, too.

I am not particularly on board with schlock director Uwe Boll’s sensibility or the idea in his forthcoming movie Assault On Wall Street that people who work in finance are worthy targets of vigilante justice:

But I do think there’s something interesting about the way the movie is being marketed, as an “excoriating look at the American financial system that is sure to stir up plenty of Occupy-esque sentiment” (that description comes from Rotten Tomatoes but reads an awful lot like press release copy).

Now, obviously Boll’s main characters’ actions have zip to do with the actual functionality or existence of Occupy Wall Street or any aspect of the 99 Percent movement. Taking up an individual crusade of assassinating bankers is not the same thing as starting up a People’s Library. A gun your main character is buying “for fun” is not the same innovative instrument as the People’s Mic. And perhaps most to the point, an individualistic crusade to recoup your losses on investments is not even close to the same thing as a broad-based movement aimed at exposing society-wide inequality. Tower Heist, Brett Ratner’s surprisingly fun 2011 movie about the employees of a luxury apartment building who rob the Bernie Madoff-like swindler who ripped off their pension fund, at least had the sense to make it the theft an attempt at reasonable and collective redistribution.

But where the aesthetics and tactics of Occupy Wall Street itself were probably never going to be particularly attractive to Hollywood, there’s one way in which the movement is tailor-made for Hollywood. As Kelefah Sannaeh put it in a long review of anthropology professor and anarchist thinker David Graeber’s new book The Democracy Project in this week’s New Yorker: “What’s striking about this formulation, though, is what’s missing: any explicit reference to the one per cent. It was a self-reflexive slogan for a self-reflexive movement, one that came to be known more for its internal politics than for its critique of the outside world.”

A void that needs a face? Hollywood is on it. In Margin Call, we’ve had Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons as sophisticated men made amoral by numbers. Tower Heist gave us Alan Alda as a kindly-visaged, deeply arrogant investor whose kindliness towards his employees curdles into contempt when they dare to question his handling of their money. Assault On Wall Street offers up John Heard as a callous creep who doesn’t care who he rips off. Arbitrage presented Richard Gere as an entitled master of the universe who couldn’t believe the market wouldn’t cooperate to hedge his best, both personal and professional. Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps even offered up a repentant Gordon Gekko. The lords of finance have gotten middle-aged, pasty, and if not outright evil, foolish. Hollywood’s collective portrayal of Wall Street may not have been able to muster a consensus vote from Occupy Wall Street or anywhere else, but in trying to bandwagon on the sentiments of the movement, it’s taken a sledgehammer to the finance industry’s cultural capital—and an image Hollywood helped create in the first place.