This post discusses episodes 15 and 16 of the first season of Veronica Mars.

After a crackerjack pair of episodes in our previous outing in the Veronica Mars Television Club, I thought this week’s were a bit of a downshift, creativity-wise. But that’s okay, given where they got us emotionally. Much of Veronica Mars is about long-standing emotional commitment, whether Veronica is searching for her mother, unable to let go of the question of who killed her friend Lilly, or carrying a torch for Duncan. And these two episodes did a nice job of looking at what it means to sacrifice something for someone you love, or to stand by someone who’s behaved in a way you find reprehensible, but who is still bound to you, or simply to do something you think is silly for someone who means a great deal to you.

First, there’s Veronica’s relationship with Logan. I joked on Twitter earlier today that there’s an extent to which Logan is the Jaime Lannister of Neptune High School, and the more I think about that comparison, the more I think it’s true. Logan is a privileged guy who does enormous damage to the people around him, inspired in part by the treatment he receives from his emotionally detached, image-obsessed father, and who resists efforts to understand him better, even when such efforts might rehabilitate his reputation. And “Ruskie Business” has a lot of emotion parallels with Jaime’s journey on this season of Game of Thrones, with Veronica playing Brienne of Tarth, minus the need to fight an actual bear.

Over the course of this season, we’ve gotten to know Logan primarily through two losses: the death of Lilly Kane, his on-again-off-again girlfriend, and the presumptive suicide of his mother, inspired by his father’s philandering. The lost of Lilly is in the past, and he and Veronica first team up to honor her real memory, rather than the white-washed image Lilly’s parents prefer to present to the community. But the loss of Logan’s mother is fresher and more immediate, and the power of that wound inspires him to seek out Veronica to try to track her down.
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Last week, I wrote about how the owner of Washington’s National Football League team promised to never change that team’s derogatory name, and that the only thing that may cause change is a trademark lawsuit that could make calling a team the “Redskins” far too costly to tolerate. A new study, however, suggests that Snyder may already be costing himself money by not changing the name.

The arguments in favor of keeping the name “Redskins” stem from tradition and nostalgia — the team has been the Redskins since 1933, when it still played in Boston. It would make sense for Snyder to worry, then, that changing it would have negative economic consequences. Team names are brand markers, and changing up the brand isn’t usually a recipe for financial success — estimates say the cost of changing the brand for an NFL team could be as high as $10 million to $20 million.

In the case of mascots that utilize Native American imagery, though, reshaping the brand identity may actually be good for business, according to research from sports marketing experts at Emory University. Emory’s Mike Lewis and Manish Tripathi studied the economics of college teams that dropped Native American imagery — either team names or actual mascots — and found that the negative effects are muted, limited to only a one- or two-year time frame. After that, the costs subside — and may even turn into benefits:

In terms of financial impact, the model results suggest that school’s experience a very short (1 or 2 years) negative impact and then quickly recover. The results also suggest that in the long-term the shift away from a Native American mascot yields positive financial returns. As a follow up, we used the brand equity measures created here as a dependent variable and regressed this value against the previously defined variables related to the school’s use of a Native American mascot. In this analysis we found NO significant effects. The key implication is that switching away from a Native American mascot has no long-term negative effect on brand equity.

Lewis and Tripathi caution that the study isn’t perfect: they had to predict revenues based on winning percentages and other variables, so there’s a fair amount of guesswork involved. And men’s college basketball and professional football aren’t a perfect comparison, as they note, because football teams are more likely to be identified primarily by their mascot (“the Cowboys” or “the Redskins”) while colleges are identified by school name (“Maryland” or “Oklahoma State”).

Still, they’re confident that their “findings have a great deal of face validity.” As they wrote: “While some fans may complain, it is not clear that these fans actually change their behavior or their shopping habits. It might also be that merchandise sales become more appealing to segments that did not like the previous Native American mascot.” So even if the biggest estimates are right, the losses could be temporary, and dropping the name Redskins could ultimately cost Dan Snyder less than any number of bad contracts he’s handed out in recent years.

Far be it from me to praise, in general, Maxim’s Hot 100 list, which in its 2013 edition, as always, is overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly extremely young, and overwhelmingly homogenous in the body shapes of the women it celebrates. Not to mention that there’s something exceptionally depressing about the declaration of pop singer Miley Cyrus, this year’s holder of the number one slot that, “It’s every woman’s fantasy to be told she’s No.1 on Maxim’s Hot 100! So crazy!”

But the inclusions of two women on this year’s Hot 100, and the reactions they’ve provoked, are revealing, both of ways that Maxim might want to expand its brand, and of the limits its placed on itself by teaching men to see women in certain and very specific ways. First, there’s the inclusion of Kamala Harris, the California Attorney General who Maxim manages to compliment in a way that’s actually less condescending than President Obama’s remark that Harris was “the best-looking attorney general in the country,” a comment that foregrounded her looks rather than her expertise. “The current Attorney General of California cracks down on hate and financial crime like a bawss and created the Environmental Justice Unit in San Francisco,” Maxim wrote, next to a portrait of Harris in a smart pantsuit. “She makes following the law super sexy!” Then, there’s Hoda Kotb, the anchor who runs a tipsy, entertaining morning segment on Today, of whom Maxim wrote: “Ms. Kotb brightens our everyday and occasionally puts up with our fearless leader, Dan Bova, on Today. We’ll always want a morning cocktail with the Egyptian goddess!”

It’s all well and good to see Maxim acknowledging some older women, and writing up nominations that acknowledge that a woman’s expertise and her personality, rather than simply her inert body, can contribute to making her extraordinarily attractive. But apparently, not all of Maxim’s readers are on board for a more expansive definition of beauty. Breitbart columnist Ben Shapiro, in the course of making the legitimate complaint that the inclusion of Kotb and Harris tilts the list left—someone like the substantive Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who’s a rising star in the larger Fox organization, might have been a good choice—defaulted to juvenile complaints about their looks.

“As if Maxim’s Hot 100 wasn’t already bizarre enough this year – Miley Cyrus at #1? Really, Maxim? – clocking in at #79 is Hoda Kotb of the Today Show (she is 48 years old) and at #54 is Kamala Harris, attorney general of the state of California and President Obama favorite. Maxim ranks Kotb above Alice Eve (#84, a former Maxim cover girl) and Rebecca Mader (LOST), among others,” Shapiro wrote. “As for Harris, she absurdly ranks above Rachel McAdams (The Notebook, #55), Emmy Rossum (Phantom of the Opera, #56), Eva Mendes (#57), and Brooklyn Decker (#59).”

As much as its ludicrous to watch Shapiro bluster as if there’s some sort of objective, codified standard for women’s looks that Maxim has failed to uphold, his complaints actually make a valid point about the world that Maxim and its fellow American lad-mag derivations have wrought. Kotb and Harris do genuinely stand out on the Hot 100 list because the roster of women is otherwise so consistent. If you spend years teaching your readers that to be attractive, a woman has to fall within a very narrow range of waist-to-hip ratios, pick from a very small selection of hairstyles that have been deemed acceptable in advance, and present herself in a range of ways that suggest that her primary characteristic is sexual availability, of course some of them are going to be surprised when you tell them that everything they’ve learned over the years is incomplete. I’d never venture to suggest that giving over 2 percent of the Hot 100 to different kinds of women indicates that Maxim is on some sort of substantial maturity kick. But if the magazine were to decide it wants to serve readers’ brains as well as their salivary glands, Maxim might need to give them, and itself, a rather gentle learning curve.

The bridge is yours.

-Matt Zoller Seitz throws down a powerful argument for television as directors’ medium.

-The Associated Press just lost both of its film critics.

-Cee-Lo Green is going to be on TBS.

-How Iron Man 3 did that barrel of monkeys scene.

-Put July 12 on your calendars, because Fruitvale Station comes out then:

It’s television upfronts this week, the time every year when the broadcast networks announce which lucky shows have earned subsequent seasons, which unfortunates are getting cancelled, and most importantly, which of the many new projects in development will be going forward—and then try to convince advertisers that they should be excited to buy ad spots in these new and returning shows, and to be part of a new, rearranged schedule.

The enthusiasm the network executives will display at their presentations to advertisers, and the amusing site of actors like Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman dressing up as their dueling liberal and libertarian characters from Parks and Recreation to do schedule announcements, is deceptive. Many of the shows that are being presented as the next great thing will prove to be creative or commercial failures: NBC, for example, cancelled almost all of the shiny new shows it offered up to advertisers and to viewers with such great hope last fall, and is starting over with shows like a sitcom from Michael J. Fox and a drama starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Dracula. And the fancy presentations and celebratory air at the upfronts disguises that the process by which the networks select which new shows they’re moving forward with is hugely expensive and exhausting. The networks may put as many as 100 shows into development, going through the process of writing the pilots, casting actors for them, pulling together sets and wardrobes for those actors to work with (or investing in special effects), shooting said pilots, testing them extensively in front of audiences, and then making their choices. It costs an awful lot of money, and leaves a lot of people waiting a long time to learn if they’ll have jobs.

Last week, when I spoke with Kevin Spacey, who stars as villainous Democratic Majority Whip Frank Underwood in Netflix’s adaptation of the British series House of Cards, one of the reasons he mentioned for wanting to work with Netflix rather than another outlet was the way Netflix approached the development process.

“What was great that they were the only network that said ‘You don’t have to do a pilot,’” he said. “Because David Fincher and I really didn’t want to do a pilot, because when you do a pilot, you’re kind of obligated to spend 45 minutes establishing all of the characters. And we didn’t want to do that. We just wanted to get on with telling a story, and tell a story over a long period of time. And they said ‘We believe in you, we believe in David, we love this series from Britain. How many do you want to do?’ And we were like, ‘Um, two seasons?’ And they were like ‘Okay!’ It was a risk on their part, but they’ve been great partners.”
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From the first teaser ABC has released for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the show about the humans who work with the superheros Marvel is telling stories about in its feature films, like the Iron Man series and the forthcoming The Avengers 2, it’s clear the network wants you to know two things about its new drama. First, there’s a lot of punching people in the face, which makes sense, given that the characters are regular human beings rather than superpowered ones, and Marvel’s profits aside, it would be extremely expensive to do the kind of special effects that mark the action in the movies for the small screen every week.

Second, Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), one of the best creations of the franchise, who showed up as a dorky but insistent civil servant in Iron Man, taking on the thankless job of tracking down emerging superheroes, and who was thought to have been killed by super-villain Loki in The Avengers is actually alive and in charge. Simply from a character development perspective, putting Coulson at the heart of the show is a good sign. He was a really terrific original addition to the superhuman universe, a patient, surprisingly funny, likable liaison to a strange new world, and it’ll be good to see him get to wrangle S.H.I.E.L.D. agents without needing to put up with the whims of a Tony Stark or live under the shadow of S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (the scenery-chomping Samuel L. Jackson). Maybe there will be some subtlety amidst the punchings:

But as enthusiasm for this project kicks off, it’s also worth looking at Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a story about corporate interdependence. ABC, which has substantially built its brand on shows that appeal to women, like the nighttime soaps Revenge and Nashville, has Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on its roster because it and Marvel have the same parent company in Disney. One of the logical main characters in the show should have been Maria Hill, Fury’s subordinate, and a S.H.I.E.L.D. with a rich backstory in Marvel comics who was played by Cobie Smulders in The Avengers. Especially given some of the scenes of Hill disagreeing with actions made by her superiors that were cut from The Avengers, it would have been particularly interesting to see Hill have a larger role in the show, and potentially to see her pursue those rifts between herself and Fury, and her doubts about her own actions in the battle against an alien invasion that was the centerpiece of that movie. But Smulders isn’t available because CBS renewed How I Met Your Mother, the hit romcom sitcom that she’s has starred in since 2005, even though this was expected to be the last season of that show. In other words, this may be a show that a lot of us are excited to get. But it’s not necessarily the show that would have been made in perfectly independent conditions, for a partner network that has experience with action, and with the real freedom to integrate characters from the Marvel universe.

This post discusses plot points from the May 12 episode of Game of Thrones.

The third novel in George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire is titled A Storm Of Swords, but through much of this third season of Game of Thrones, the battles have happened off-screen or between the wooden troop markers on Robb Stark’s map and in his mind. Instead, the game of thrones is being played in a more literal sense, as the great lords and ladies of Westeros negotiate who will sit not just in the great chairs of the realm, but beside the people who occupy those chairs—in other words, through marital alliances. It’s only fitting, then, that Game of Thrones should spend an episode grappling with marriage and sex, with the very real difficulties of people who get to choose who they love, as well as with the fears of those who have no choice at all, and with the question of bonds between men and women outside of marriage in a society where friendship across gender lines is almost inconceivable.

The last episode of Game of Thrones, “The Climb,” ended with a transcendently romantic embrace between Jon and Ygritte after they survived a harrowing ascent of the Wall. It was a nasty little tease for a show where no one gets much in the way of happiness, a dare to the audience to continue believing in true love after an episode that brutally eviscerated the possibility of hope. So it’s fitting that their moment of joy immediately comes into question as Jon and Ygritte move from her country beyond the Wall into his in Westeros, and Jon’s choice whether or not to be “loyal to his woman” or to the vows of his that remain to him comes closer and closer.

“Is that how you lot do your fighting? You march down a road banging drums and waving banners?” Ygritte teases him about his country, which seems impossibly civilized to her. “You mean right foot left foot right foot left foot. You lot can’t remember that?” But even though Ygritte pretends not to be impressed by Westeros, her inexperience with civilization is clear. “Is that a palace?” she asks Jon of the first windmill they pass on their trek. “Who built it? Some king?…They must have been great builders, to stack the stones so high.” “If you were impressed by a windmill, you’d be swooning if you saw the great keep at Winterfell,” Jon teases her back. Their banter is a negotiation. Jon is still coming to terms with his liaison with a woman who tells him things like “Why would a girl see blood and collapse?…Girls see more blood than boys.” And Ygritte, for all she sees the wilding in Jon, is still unsure of the solidity of their relationship. “I know that you’re beautiful, and fierce, and wild. I’ll be good to you,” a painfully Jealous Orrell tells her. “You love him? Cause he’s pretty, that it? You like his pretty hair and his pretty eyes? You think pretty’s going to make you happy? You won’t love him so much when you find out what he really is.” And he’s not wrong. “I know it. If you attack the Wall, you’ll die. All of you,” Jon warns Ygritte on the road, unwilling to tell her the full truth of his continued allegiance to the Night’s Watch, but hoping to dissuade her from a mission he sees as suicidal. “All of us,” Ygritte tells him in a declaration that’s also a question. Ultimately, they delay their reckoning. “You’re mine,” Ygritte tells Jon. “And I’m yours. If we die, we die. But first we’ll live.”
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