I was looking for something fun to watch while crunching a lot of numbers yesterday, so I watched the first six episodes of Cagney & Lacey. While it’s not remotely challenging in terms of format or dynamics — the show’s an entirely conventional slightly melodramatic New York police procedural, and even though the two cops are both women (that is kind of revolutionary — you can have two men or a man and a woman, but not two women) they’ve got a similar dynamic to a standard pairing, one tougher than the other — it’s so awesomely, naturalistically feminist I’m not surprised it was canceled and retooled. And it offers a good look at what the Prime Suspect remake should try to do if it’s going to move away from a caustic depiction of sexism in the police department.

First, on Cagney & Lacey, the cops who are sexists are also people, rather than just creeps who wander around talking about a “beef trust,” a phrase that makes me feel pretty physically disgusted, as they were in the Prime Suspect pilot. Some of the sexism is occupational, like the fact that the characters get put on an assignment where they have to go under cover as hookers to catch a murderer. “You see, when you’re doing a man’s job, you don’t want anyone to think you’ve lost your femininity,” Cagney jokes. And some of it’s personal. When Marcus Petrie, the African-American vegetarian cop they work with is having a baby shower for his wife, you’d think his female colleagues would be logical invitees. But Petrie doesn’t invite them, out of fear that the cop’s wives will be uncomfortable and suspicious about the fact that the male cops have attractive female coworkers. It’s hurtful, and it illustrates the critically important fact that well-meaning guys can do hurtful things.

Second, there are actual debates between women. When Cagney is chasing a dangerous assignment too hard, Lacey tells her partner “I’m a mother-wife cop, emphasis on mother-wife. I’m not going to go looking for trouble.” Neither of them is right—they just have different preferences informed by the different places they’re coming from. The show also isn’t afraid to throw in a duty guarding a notorious anti-feminist spokeswoman, a kind of Phyllis Schlafly, and to show that both women hate it. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” complains Lacey. “I could be out finding Harvey our anniversary present.” “Helen would love that,” Cagney quips back at her. Feminism isn’t just an issue between women and men — it’s between women and women, too, and it would be too bad to leave Jane hanging by herself without a female counterpart in the department or outside of it in Prime Suspect.

Third, don’t be afraid to show the characters having setbacks, especially those that relate to gender. Whether it’s Jane realizing she might have offended by her boss by asking for a dead colleague’s job too soon after his passing, or Lacey complaining that a date’s gone badly, telling Cagney, “Check me out. See any hickeys? Any beard burn? Nothing…We had this little argument about the criminal justice system. I might have ruffled his feathers,” the path to victory’s boring if it’s smooth. There needs to be actual debate, discussion, and mistakes on both sides for this to seem real.

As a first-generation Kindle adopter, my beloved e-reader is nearing its last legs (OK, it doesn’t help that I threw it when Bad Things Happened to a Character I Love in A Song of Ice and Fire). So I’ve been eagerly awaiting the details of Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet so my smart tech-reporter friends can help me figure out which device I should get as a replacement for my little white-and-gray box. At Wired, Friend of the Blog Tim Carmody writes that the Kindle Fire tears the levees — high-priced technology that keeps folks from adopting certain methods of getting content — down:

The Kindle Fire, tablet, though, is the star of this show, because it leverages everything Amazon offers, from its multimedia sales to Amazon Prime streaming video service and free two-day shipping and Amazon’s industry-standard cloud infrastructure.

Quick hardware specs for the Kindle Fire: 14.6 ounces, dual-core processor, 7″ multi-touch IPS (i.e. infrared) LCD screen. What it’s missing: camera, GPS, 3G. It also has only 8 gigabytes of storage. But that’s a moot point: It’s a cloud-driven tablet…

Video isn’t the only draw of Kindle Fire over the mainstream e-readers. It also has Silk, a web browser leveraged by Amazon’s EC2 cloud processing power. Bezos calls it “a split browser.” It promises to use that extra computation power to do all of the DNS, TCP/IP, interactions, etc., on the back-end to make Silk much, much faster than competing mobile browsers. It also stores, reformats and compresses common instances of over-sized media designed for the desktop for faster mobile delivery. An Amazon engineer calls it “a limitless cache” to optimize the last-mile delivery between the web and the tablet.

At GigaOm, Darrell Etherington says the Fire isn’t an iPad killer:

The problem is that Amazon hasn’t really unveiled much with the Fire besides a fairly barebones delivery method for sales of its digital offerings. Limited storage means Amazon’s cloud services are almost a necessity for buyers, and yet the lack of 3G means that accessing content when you’re away from home will be difficult. The lack of both camera and microphone also mean that people can’t easily use this for taking or sharing mobile photos, or as a phone replacement with VoIP apps. The new Silk browser tech that does much of the processing work on Amazon’s EC2 servers is also interesting, but again severely limited by Wi-Fi-only network access. Amazon also didn’t talk about battery life, and a decision not to talk about it could mean it doesn’t compare favorably to the iPad’s all-day power.

So, tech-smart folks in the audience, what do you think, especially given the following things: I’m likely to pony up for a mobile hotspot shortly, so the 3G thing is not decisive; I do almost all of my job in a browser, so I don’t need anything fancy, but I would like the ability to bluetooth a portable keyboard to the device, which I’m gathering the Fire will not; I, uh, obviously watch a lot of media. Either way, I don’t really think the idea that the Fire won’t be a phone replacement is a killer. Of all the things the iPad can do, that never struck me as persuasive. And I do think Amazon is smart to realize that the main point of these devices for most customers is consuming media, not all of the other jazzy stuff Apple tells me the iPad can do in its television ads.

The Parents Television Council has to be one of the smartest outfits in Washington. They’re incredibly good at identifying winning controversies, even if they’re not necessarily right on the merits. And it looks like their latest scalp might end up being NBC’s The Playboy Club. PTC’s been targeting the show for months, and now they’ve announced that seven advertisers have pulled out of The Playboy Club, theoretically in response to PTC’s call for a boycott. There’s no question that such a move would make sense given the show’s dismal ratings. And while PTC is right that the show has, in the words of PTC’s president, Tim Winter, been “a commercial disaster,” I think he’s wrong to call the show a “degrading and sexualizing program.”

I don’t think that being a Playboy Bunny was inherently liberating, and I think it was a mistake for the network and the show’s creators to sell it that way over the summer. It was a ridiculous claim, and easy for the show’s opponents to debunk. But showing women being super-empowered all of the time isn’t the only way to make a feminist show. And while The Playboy Club has some contradictory elements and mixed messages, I think that on balance, the show does more to display the evils of sexism than it does to promote them.

There’s no question that, at least in the pilot, The Playboy Club was still trying to sell the idea that being a Playboy Bunny was, well, the Hef’s pajamas—glamorous and liberating all at once. Voiceovers from Hugh Hefner in that episode insisted that the Bunnies were super-liberated, even as the actual events of the show insisted, they were still quite vulnerable. In the world of the show, whatever the Bunnies might have believed about their jobs, they were still vulnerable to clients who assumed they were prostitutes, powerful figures who sexually harassed or assaulted them on the job, men who didn’t want to promote them, and rigid standards for their self-presentation enforced by other women. And outside the club, the characters have boyfriends who want them to quit, abusive ex-husbands they’re in hiding from, or sham marriages to help them hide their sexual orientation. The Bunnies may get excited about the chance to be on the cover of Playboy, but the $2,000 that comes with the career opportunity is also a big deal. They may live in a swanky dorm, but they’re still grown women who can’t afford or aren’t allowed to have their own apartments.

This, as with The House Bunny, a charming Anna Faris vehicle about a former Playboy Bunny from 2008, doesn’t really do much to make the case that it was awesome to be one of Hef’s girls, now or then. Maybe being harassed was worth it if the money let you hide from a husband you couldn’t divorce. Maybe selling your sex appeal was worth the chance to become the first person in your family to own property in a gentrified Chicago neighborhood. In its clumsy way, The Playboy Club has made these dilemmas clear. The show isn’t good. With the ratings it’s getting it’s probably going to be cancelled. And the PTC will be able to claim a huge scalp out of it. But when The Playboy Club dies it’ll be because it’s a not very well-written, and often badly-acted television show, not because it glamorizes Bunnydom, or because it’s sexist.

The bridge is yours.

-Figuring out the extent of the damage to the Washington Monument.

-A 7-year-old on Starfire.

-Really wish Grey’s Anatomy wasn’t going to punish Cristina for having an abortion.

-Five medical lessons from medical dramas.

-Not going to lie: I don’t care how bad this movie is. I will go see it.

When I first wrote about Deena Pilgrim last week, commenter Seth D. Michaels wrote that “I have a weird, hard-to-shake emotional reaction to depictions of police brutality, particularly as carried out by female characters” like Deena, or Kima Greggs from The Wire. Now that I’m done with the second volume of the hardcover edition of Powers, I wanted to dig into that a little more, especially after Deena acknowledged to Christian that she’d killed Johnny Royalle and almost beat Harvey Goodman to a pulp.

Superficially, the book seems to defend Deena’s actions, particularly in the scene where Christian asks her to work with him again and apologizes for judging her for the murder. “In my day, I had to—decisions had to be made that I would rather not have questioned,” Walker says. “I, of all people, should not have moralized on you. I don’t care what happened to Johnny Royale…the guy clearly gave up his membership card in the human race a long time before we had anything to do with him.” But I think Powers pretty forcefully establishes that the reason Walker is okay with what Deena did, the only reason we’re supposed to be semi-okay with her beating Harvey Goodman to a pulp in custody, calling her “Cop killer! Hero killer! I’ve got two words for you—pain management,” and warning her “You think I’m fucking around? You think I won’t kill you right here?” is that the system is irretrievably broken.

Harvey may be a fanatic, and I’m not sure she’s right that superheroism is going to lead to environmental degredation, but she is pretty much right that “Every one of these so-called superheroes inflicts his own brand of justice and morality on our society without any understanding of the ripple effect.” I sympathize with Diana Shutz (whose Dark Horse Coffee I assume is a riff on the comics label), the character who tells “Powers That Be” that:

We have created a society where we freely allow men and women to take the law into their own hands. Cape or no cape—brightly colored logo or not—a superhero is a vigilante who is taking the law into his own hands. We root for who we decided is the good guy, and we boo for the person we decide is the bad guy. And we never consider that just the idea that we allow these people to put the law into their own ahnds, that we let one person make a moral decision for another person, is wrong.

Deena’s actions are only excusable in a world where morality has entirely broken down. And in beating Harvey, she’s seeking a narrow factual truth, but denying a larger one — that the heroes she protects blur her own authority. It’s the inverse of all those television shows that suggest that cops who beat up pedophiles and murderers are letting a larger truth leak through — that we’d all like to exact retribution on criminals — they’re just supposed to restrain themselves where we couldn’t necessarily. That’s complex, but it’s a powerful indictment.

I hate to think this about a show that Kat Dennings is involved with. But after last night’s nigh-inexcusable episode of 2 Broke Girls, it’s hard to escape that the show is relying heavily, and unattractively, on clumsy and unfunny racial humor.

It’s not just the diner manager, though he’s pretty bad. His name appears to be changing from episode to episode, though whose mangling of the English language seems likely to persist until Michael Patrick King doesn’t think they’re funny any more. Nobody thinks that producing a nametag for an employee means “you’re killing it.” And making jokes about said Asian boss like, “You can’t tell an Asian he made a mistake. He’ll go in back and throw himself on a sword,” isn’t funny, it’s just gross and stereotypical and treats Asia as if it’s a single country without distinct national lines and cultures. Then there’s the cashier, Earl, an older African-American gentleman, who sits around saying things like, “That’s the exact same sentence that got me hooked on cocaine,” or making horrible jokes about rape at Duke. There are some relationships where I suppose it might be okay for a younger white woman to say to an older black man that she’s making cupcakes that are made with “Delicious dark chocolate the ladies can’t help but love. I’m calling it the Earl.” But in the context of a show that hasn’t even reached the 30-minute mark between its two episodes, that just reads as kind of gross.

Then, there’s the show’s propensity to treat Brooklyn as if it’s full of alternately charming and distasteful ethnics (and the borough as if it smells bad). Caroline complains that the diner is “Three blocks and fifteen ‘Hola, chica!’s away” from the apartment she’s sharing with Max. When she complains that it’s noisy outside, Max explains that “that’s Puerto Rican noise. You’ll get used to it.” Caroline dramatically overpronounces “Juan” and “Javier,” as if it’s supposed to be hilarious, and she and Max make fun of a countergirl named Nabulungi.

I mean, seriously? A major television network saw this cut and decided, yes, what we desperately need in an already super-white television season is two milk-white chicks making fun of non-white people? It’s not as if ethnic and racial humor is impossible to do well, even if you’re not operating at Louis C.K.’s level, but this is just disgraceful. The show can contrast Caroline and Max’s backgrounds all it wants, but it’s increasingly obvious that King and the other folks working on the show are the ones who need etiquette and basic humanity classes.

So, I’ve been trying to reserve judgment on Tom Morello’s “part Suicide Girl and part Joan of Arc” comic, Orchid, until I actually got a look at it, because I have some doubts about the whole badass-sex-worker enterprise as executed by dudes, but Morello has generally good politics. That main character doesn’t show up yet in the preview Dark Horse has released, but that sample did kind of hit on one of my pet peeves: science fiction that’s immediately scientifically ridiculous.

The book starts with the line, repeated elsewhere, that “When the seas rose, genetic codes were smashed.” I realize this is nitpicky as hell, but you know what? Global warming is probably not going to create an alternative to DNA, or human beings wouldn’t be running around in their present form. It’s interesting enough to suggest that dramatic global warming and rising sea levels, say, made the return of giant marine reptiles possible, depending how far we’re supposed to be in the future. And the fight over high ground happening along class lines also makes sense as an interesting global warming-related conflict. I’m sure that not everyone, or even most of the folks reading Orchid will care that the book starts with something that patently silly. But it’s a distracting invention. The real consequences of climate change are terrifying enough. I wish they’d saved the wild inventions for changes in human society.

The New York Times has a decent-sized story about the impact of Keith Olbermann’s departure on MSNBC and another one today on the larger challenges the channel faces. The piece describes two core problems for the network: the fact that it’s getting beat by competitors between 8 and 11, and the fact that it’s getting beat on news. But is Keith Olbermann the real problem for MSNBC?

Even before his defenestration from MSNBC and his move to Current, Olbermann’s ratings were falling. In 2010, Olbermann drew an average of 1 million adults and 268,000 adults aged 25-45 during the 8PM hour (that first number was down 11 percent from 2009, the second, down 25 percent in the same time period).

Olbermann wasn’t alone in his woes at MSNBC, though his numbers were slightly worse than some of his colleagues. Rachel Maddow’s numbers fell between 2009 and 2010, too, down 6 percent overall and 14 percent in that coveted demographic of younger viewers. And MSNBC saw its viewers between 8 and 11PM go down 9 percent overall and 18 percent in the demographic. In the same time period, for the same viewing hours, Fox News saw a slight but slower decline, falling 5 percent overall and 6 percent in the demographic. And CNN, which is now challenging MSNBC for that third-place, looked like it was in free-fall. Its number of overall viewers in the 8-11 hour was down 36 percent, and its number of young viewers was down 37 percent, to 184,000.

But this September, MSNBC pulled in 269,000 viewers ages 25-45 in the prime-time block, up modestly from an average of 249,000 in 2010. But CNN’s made a dramatic improvement, lifting its young viewers from an average of 184,000 for the primetime block in 2010 to an average of 257,000 in September 2011. The Times piece from which I’m drawing those numbers doesn’t break out Fox’s numbers for the full month of September, but looking at day-by-day data on TV By the Numbers, they appear relatively consistent with the figures the network pulled in 2010, when it averaged 2.4 million people total and 612,000 younger viewers in primetime.

So Olbermann’s numbers and MSNBC’s were declining at the time he left. And even in the context of Current’s smaller viewership, he’s continued his downward slide. MSNBC is available in 78 million households in the U.S., while Current is available in 60 million. But absent the network profile of MSNBC, Olbermann’s ratings initially fell more than the 23 percent that might have been the difference between the two networks and have continued downward. The week of Olbermann’s launch on Current, an average of 354,000 people total and 131,000 in the demo tuned in. The next week, after the novelty wore off, it was down to an average of 253,000 total and 93,000 in the demo. By August 1-5, those numbers had fallen to an average of 208,000 and 85,000 in the demo.

With all this context, it’s not totally clear to me that Olbermann, even if he’d stayed, would have reversed his ratings trend—and the network’s. Olbermann’s departure was messy and public. But while the resulting vacancy may have prompted CNN to shake up its lineup, it wasn’t the only thing affecting MSNBC’s viewership. How to get the network growing significantly in prime time is a question that’s much more complicated than one hour, and one anchor.

A good post from Nikki, in response to some of my writing, saying that it’s not enough to want more women writing and directing television episodes. She writes:

If we suggest that increasing the number of women ON television might increase the number of women BEHIND television, thereby effecting a change in how sexist or feminist television shows might be, we excuse men from the process entirely, except as Upholders of the Status Quo. Set aside the question about women behind the scenes and focus on the men behind the scenes, who are definitely still in power in the media and it’s that power structure that should be held accountable for the current portrayal of women on TV.

Amen. I’m a pretty firm believer in the carrot-and-stick thing, though, because it’s relatively easy for male creators to clap their hands over their ears when they’re being criticized for not giving us wonderful, developed female characters and just not listen. And it’s much easier to get people to listen when you’re praising, and for other people to see that praise and think “I want that!” So without further ado and in no particular order, 10 fantastic female characters on television who were created by men.

1. Trixie, Deadwood, David Milch: I know this list isn’t in order, but if it was, I’d still put it at the top. Milch’s prostitute-turned-accountant, pimp’s-trick-turned-Jewish-businessman’s-girlfriend would still be at the top. We meet Trixie at the beginning of the show when she’s been accused of murder, and watch her help another woman beat a drug addiction even when it means defying her employer’s orders; seek out an education no one ever gave her so she can have more options in life; stand up for her friends when they get married and grieve for them when they bury their children; and develop a new relationship. She’s always making choices. And when she takes steps backwards, we understand why, at the gut level. She’s empowered, but the show doesn’t fall prey to the trap that strong female characters created by men often do — that women’s liberation is purely a matter of will, not circumstance.

2. Alice Morgan, Luther, Neil Cross: Alice, who enters the scene when she murders her parents, melts down the gun, and feeds the remaining parts to her dog, is a certified crazy person, but she’s not a victim. Her attraction to John Luther doesn’t make her a nymphomaniac. And her decision to work cases comes out of a clearly defined alternate morality and worldview. Rather than setting her up to be judged by the audience, she’s a compelling — and sometimes very scary — way to see the universe.
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Twenty-eight minutes into Terra Nova‘s two-hour premiere, what had been advertised as an ambitious science fiction epic had neatly reduced itself so the only really epic thing about it was that it manages to be both a cop show and a medical drama at the same time. And that’s before we get to Terra Nova and limitations on how much hot water solar cells can heat reignite Classic Family Drama about who stole all the shower water. This is a show that appears to have spent its budget for actors on Stephen Lang, and its budget for ideas on a dinosaur fight choreographer.

I really wanted to like Terra Nova, but I can’t shake the feeling that the much more interesting parts of this setup are back in the polluted, rotting world that our characters are leaving along. There’s a bit of Ender’s Game-like family planning, a clearly punitive legal system, chokingly unbreathable air that a few elite families escape by living in domed cities, and odd implications for what the plan is for Terra Nova. But it’s pretty hard to have a sinister conspiracy when information only travels in one direction, unless everyone planned it beforehand and people involved in it are coming through in waves. Which given the different rates of travel through the rift and the rates of mortality by dinosaur and random disease seems like a dicey proposition.

From what we’ve seen of Terra Nova, the camp’s leaders aren’t really doing that much to try to change the course of human history by organizing human society differently, unless letting teenagers live in a group house and drink in the woods counts as social engineering. It’s sort of annoying to hear Lang’s character, a military man named Taylor, intone, “The world you left behind fell victim to some of the baser instincts of our species…we blew it. We destroyed our home. But we have been entrusted with a second chance. A chance to start over. A chance to get it right,” when Terra Nova looks almost entirely like the universe of characters we see on your average American drama.

Mira, the doctor, says things like, “I didn’t want that for my children…I think they deserve a chance to be part of something real. Something new. Something that has a future.” But what she really seems to want is a chance to hit the reset button personally so her children will grow up in an unspoiled world where they can grow up in clean air. That’s a nice idea, but not a revolutionary one. Similarly, it would be interesting if, like Ender’s parents, Jim and Mira had decided to have a third child out of some sort of conviction, but Jim just says, “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” which is both a weak line of dialogue and a totally vacant justification for an enormously risky act.

The only interesting people here are the Sixers, who are initially described as sinister because “They had an agenda.” But an agenda seems like a pretty reasonable thing to have if you’re going to travel back 85 MILLION YEARS IN THE PAST TO DINOTOPIA. It’s totally bizarre that the show treats the Sixer leader’s declaration that “Control the past. Control the future. These are the key. To everything,” as if it’s some sort of sinister statement. It makes no sense to go back in time without a plan. I don’t doubt that there are sinister conspiracies afoot, maybe even Taylor’s son off leading a gang of Others in the woods or something. But it would be such a boring dodge to have the portal be magic. We need fiction that will help us figure out a whole new world, but not the Aladdin variety.

I don’t know that I’ve ever sat through an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear from readers that in the second episode of this season of the show, Sandra Oh’s character, Cristina Yang, had an abortion — and not because she got pregnant and it was inconvenient, or because she was raped, or because she’s broke and desperate — but because she doesn’t want to have children. Which is one of those things that people feel, but still gets treated as if it’s a risky thing to say unless you’re Helen Mirren.

So I watched the episode, and I actually thought they did a pretty nice job with it — particularly with this scene, which I thought was a good illustration of how stressful it must be to terminate a pregnancy without the support of your partner:

Grey‘s is a soap opera, but it’s a soap opera that reached an average of 11.41 million people per episode last season. So this is big, even if it’s a one-off.

Then, there’s also the news that Mindy Kaling is developing a show for NBC where she plays an ob/gyn, a character she’s basing on her mother who, as her brother puts it in the profile of Kaling that recently ran in the New York Times, is “a professional gossip who does Pap smears.” I really, really hope that there’s a way for the show to handle abortion at some point. It would get ridiculous fairly quickly for an ob/gyn to only ever has patients who are overjoyed about their pregnancies and to never have a patient who doesn’t want to be pregnant, or can’t — for whatever reason — stay pregnant. At minimum, there have to be conversations about birth control and sexual and reproductive health, and the mere possibility of something like that being on network television every week makes me so joyous my heart runs the risk of exploding.

The fact that we live in a world where women making vagina jokes on networks is enough to send some dude-critics to the fainting couch illustrates how necessary something like Kaling’s show is, how necessary Grey‘s decision was. These shows don’t have to end the conversation, but they’re a vital acknowledgment that lady business isn’t just that.

The bridge is yours.

-Why Superman’s first appearance in the 1978 movie that bears his name is so cool.

-Cultural broadcasting and privacy.

-Competition for Netflix doesn’t really seem like it’s going to benefit consumers that much at home, or abroad, for a while.

-You get a lot more out of being a Hollywood conservative than you do out of being a Hollywood liberal.

-Joan Jett. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s on:

Maybe? Because it sounds like we’re about to get a whole bunch of government-centered shows. It’s not clear whether it’s the run-up to the election, or the entertainment industry’s obsession with Scandanavia, but non-law enforcement government-themed shows suddenly seem to be a thing!

First, there’s CBS’s show about a one-term president who goes home to work at a law firm that will let him take only legal cases that resonate deeply with him. Sounds like some network has an idea for what a certain law-professor-turned-senator-turned-recession-cursed president should do with himself in January 2013! In all seriousness, though, ex-presidents are the one set of public figures that pop culture has never really figured out. There’s My Fellow Americans, which essentially says that it’s probably a good thing more former Commanders in Chief don’t go the George W. Bush brush-clearing-memoir-writing route because otherwise things can only end in wacky road-trip hijinks. Also, tears. Folks like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have given us the sense that presidents who leave office fairly young should do worthy things, but it’s hard to structure a relatable show about peace negotiations or running the Clinton Foundation, and brush-clearing, is, let’s face it, relatively dull to watch on-screen (though accidentally shooting your hunting partner in the face has comedic potential in an era where we like to consume other people’s pain). So apparently, running a law office it is. I really hope said president at some point joins forces with Leslie Knope, decides to put her in the path of his former campaign manager, and the rest is history.

Second, NBC, which really should have pursued the former show so that crossover can actually happen, is adapting Denmark’s Government, the trailer of which sounds exactly like one of the voiceovers in the German television shows Liz Lemon was supposed to watch and summarize for Jack on 30 Rock:

In between this and HBO’s Veep, we’ve got a nice little crop of female-politician shows. My one concern is that rather than serving the valuable purpose of showing us smart, competent women holding extremely important government positions, these shows will have dippy women who in vastly over their well-coiffed little heads and mine a lot of comedy from that proposition. Which I am…not so excited about. In all likelihood, Leslie Knope will just remain the Best At Everything.

It would be so, so fantastic if a woman finally got the chance to direct a superhero movie, particularly a superhero movie where the superhero is a guy, and even more particularly a superhero movie with feminist, if underdeveloped, female characters. I refer, of course, to the rumors that Patty Jenkins might be in the running for the job of directing the sequel to Thor.

I haven’t seen Monster, the Aileen Wuornos biopic for which Jenkins is best known. But it suggests she’s pretty fiercely engaged with female complexity. And whatever you think of how the show went after, she did a fantastic job directing the pilot of The Killing, particularly in capturing the spiky dynamic between Linden and Holder without resorting to cliches that would have portrayed Linden as ball-busting or humorless and Holder as cocky. Can you imagine how much fun it would be to have Thor and Sif rocking a slightly competitive, mutually supportive relationship? Not to mention how great it would be to have more attention paid to a superheroine who is not just clothed, but armored, and super-competent? I’d hope they’d hold off on having Sif and Jane compete for Thor’s attentions because yawn, who needs to see that again, and I’d much rather have some characters just be friends in one of these things. But there are a lot of possibilities.

Even if those don’t choose Jenkins, though I hope they do, I’m glad to see that Marvel’s committed to at least considering unusual directorial choices. Kenneth Branagh was a good experiment even if it didn’t quite take, I appreciate that it didn’t scare them off. Getting a woman’s perspective in the director’s chair on one of these things is probably more important, in any case, than bringing in the Shakespearean grandeur. And hey, if this works, maybe we can get Kathryn Bigelow doing a superhero movie some day.

I really liked Tracie Eagan Morrison’s essay last year on Patti Stanger, the titular Millionaire Matchmaker of Bravo’s dating show. She argues, I think persuasively, that more than simply setting up her wealthy clients with the kind of people that they’d like to date and perhaps settle down with, that Stanger’s real strength is brutally assessing the people who come to her and identifying the flaws that have prevented them from having successful relationships. She can go too far, but the show, rather than a testament to love, is a pretty strong argument that if your only priority is to find a long-term relationship quickly rather than organically, you’re going to have to mold your personality and make big compromises in order for that to happen. It’s an aggressive indictment of romantic comedy.

But this stuff? Not so much:

I feel like Stanger is aiming for Dan Savage territory in talking about gay men and monogamy and overshooting, landing…somewhere else. Bravo walks an incredibly fine line with its branding. It’s supposed to be higher-end than its competitors, but its reality shows are no less invasive, and even rich people can have ugly, bad things happen in their lives. And a self- and network-appointed truth teller like Patti Stanger may tip over into a giant vat of crazy, especially in a setting like Bravo programming head Andy Cohen’s live talk show where the guests and the audience drink and everyone’s supposed to be kind of outrageous.

I’m really liking The Adventures of Athena Wheatley, Or, Warp & Weft, a new graphic novel that’s publishing an installment every Wednesday. The story isn’t very far along yet, but I just appreciate the basic premise: a black woman, who from the autonomy she seems to have I assume is free, in Baltimore in 1841 becomes a time traveler. It’s a lot of fun to see that extremely familiar premise (time-travel) from a new perspective, whether Athena’s wondering in her journal if she’s becoming a prophetess because of her strange dreams, or skipping a rock through a force field to see if it’s safe to escape through, only to see it transformed to something else entirely. One of the easiest ways to refresh an old concept or scenario is to show how someone with a different set of background assumptions and experiences would react to it rather than trying to convince an audience that a tweak to the scenario itself is radically new and inventive.

A quick note: I’m not caught up on the first season of Boardwalk Empire yet, though I hope to be by next week. So please excuse any errors, omissions, generalized confusion, etc. I’ll be up and running soon, I swear! This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the second season of Boardwalk Empire.

As a first time Boardwalk Empire watcher, one of the things that struck me most strongly about the show is the extent to which it feels like reading a Little Orphan Annie comic strip. Everything’s a bit of a cartoon, whether it’s the Commodore dashing about his living room with a spear, Jimmy’s mother’s cartoonishly poisonous sweetness towards his new wife, or the show’s racial politics, even when they’re relatively good.

One thing I thought the show did very effectively in that early scene when the Klan attacks Chalky’s operation was to communicate the simultaneous menace and goofiness of the Klan. “Purity, sobriety, and the white Christians’ Jesus,” is a stupid-sounding phrase even within the context of the time. But uttered by a man who’s just shot your warehouse full of holes with primitive automatic weapons, the conviction of that ridiculous phrase actually makes the people uttering it more terrifying. They’re driven to all of this by a flimsy, incoherent cant.

It’s also interesting to see Michael K. Williams, who played the ultimate loner as Omar, have a constituency as Chalky. And even more interesting to see him carve out the best of multiple bad options in what’s essentially a no-win scenario.”I got four boys dead in that warehouse. Half a dozen wounded. Including a woman,” he tells Nucky, sick to death of Nucky’s promises to take care of yet another problem that for Nucky is a business impediment, and for Chalky is a matter of life or death. “How’m I supposed to know that?…I’m done with this shit. I got my family and I got my people…The ten thousand black folks who make this city home, busboys, porters…you go school these crackers less you all find out…You ready for what happens here? I turn up on the end of a rope?” He’s offering himself up as a firewall, a sort of flawed martyr. Chalky can hold back the black community in Atlantic City for a while, but what he’s promises Nucky is sort of an inverse of the crucifixion. White Atlantic City residents essentially have to take the bet that if they hang Chalky, their city won’t explode.
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I’m going to need some time to figure out how I feel about a medical show starring a ghost, even if said ghost is All-Time Alyssa Rosenberg Favorite Jennifer Ehle. But I have to say, I was really impressed by the extent to which the pilot episode of A Gifted Man took on the impact of inadequate health care from multiple dimensions.

First, there’s the challenge of clinic staffing. “I need your help,” Anna’s ghost begs her ex-husband. “A lot of people depended on me. And I was stupid. I didn’t train anybody. I’m sure my staff are completely derailed. If they can get into my computer, they’ll figure it out. I need you to go there and open my files.” I do think it’s something of a problem that the clinic staff are portrayed as totally inexperienced and unknowledgeable; there need to be some potential heroes here for our doctor, Michael, to work with, but it’s a point well-made that it’s very hard to build a sustainable infrastructure that relies on charismatic leaders. Not everyone gets to come back and prod their new director into doing the right thing.

Then, there’s the way the show treats Michael’s first clinic patient. He can’t resist intervening when he hears a clinic staffer planning to send a seizure patient to the emergency room. “The ER’s going to make her wait like 10 hours and then they won’t take her because she doesn’t have insurance,” he says, feeling as if he’s done his good deed for the day. “The kid had a seizure. He needs an MRI. Send her to an imaging center.” And here’s where the show had what I think was its smartest point when the mother of the kid asks how to get to Michael’s hospital on the bus. It’s not enough to figure out what you need, and who will take your insurance to do it. You have to be able to get there without missing so much work that you get laid off, in a way that lets you take care of all of your other obligations. There are so many ways it’s hard to get the right medical care, so many things that can cause pain, including too-tight shoes.

And I really appreciate Michael’s assistant, the always wonderful Margo Martindale speaking this blunt truth. “Are these your children, Michael?” she asks him, as he cares for the family he rescued from the clinic. “I’m just trying to figure out why we’re suddenly running this place like a free clinic.” Health care is a tiered proposition in this country. It’s profoundly useful for a television show to state that clearly, to show us both sides of that proposition, and to insist that rescuing one patient or one family at a time isn’t enough. Even if it doesn’t beat the drum on health care reform, A Gifted Man is still doing something useful by laying out that framework.

Tom Junod’s profile of Jon Stewart in this month’s Esquire is an incredible piece of cultural criticism. First, there’s the indictment of Stewart’s comedy as vastly less revolutionary than it seems, a critique that essentially reaffirms that the country is an okay place and things that are not uniquely worse now than they were in the past and don’t require extraordinary remedies:

Kids who couldn’t sleep at night worrying that their president was a bad guy and that their country was doing bad things could now rest easy knowing that their president was just a dick, and that their country, while stupid, was still essentially innocent. It was like you could get upset about what was going on but still live your life, because there was Jon Stewart right before bedtime, showing you how to get upset entertainingly, how to give a shit without having to do anything about it. He denied having a message — admitting to a “point of view” but not an “agenda” — but of course he did, and it was this: that life goes on, and that politics may change but stupid always stays the same.

Then, there’s the way Stewart’s set himself up as someone who gets all the benefits of being powerful without any of the responsibility:

Invulnerable. Unassailable. Unimpeachable. The most sacred of liberalism’s sacred cows. The man whom a certain percentage of the country doesn’t just agree with but agrees on, more than they agree on anything, more than they agree on health care or President Obama. He protests, often, that he “doesn’t have a constituency”; what he does have, though, is a consensus, a presumption of unanimity anytime he walks into a room, unless that room is the greenroom at Fox News. Bill Maher is an atheist; Jon Stewart is a humanist, and by his humanism he’s become the strangest of things, the influential comedian, the admired comedian, the eminent comedian, the comedian who feels it necessary, always, to disavow his power. He’s been saying for ten years that he’s just a guy in the back of the classroom throwing spitballs; but he never gets spitballs thrown at him in return. [...]

Fox gives Stewart a reason to exist, and he’s been obsessed with Roger Ailes ever since he went to O’Reilly’s studio and was summoned into Ailes’s office. He stayed an hour and came out a freaked-out admirer, like the crazy newscaster in Network once Ned Beatty got through with him. It wasn’t just that Ailes asked him, right off the bat, “How are your kids?” and then berated him for hating conservatives; it wasn’t even that both men are intensely concerned about what people think of them and have no qualms about trying to influence how they’re portrayed. It’s that Ailes is all about power and so has accepted the obligation that Stewart has proudly refused. You want to know the difference between the Left and the Right in America? The Right has Roger Ailes, and the Left has Jon Stewart; the Right has an evil genius, while the Left contents itself with a genius of perceived non-evil.

I don’t tend to think that you should judge the success of a work of art by whether or not it inspires someone to action (though I always think it’s really interesting when such works do). But what about if the implicit premise of a work of political art is that we’re okay? That the best thing to do is not do anything? Or opt out? Or treat the system like it’s ridiculous and invest instead in a parody of it? I don’t think Jon Stewart is evil, or anything, and I think The Daily Show can be very, very funny. But Junod is right that there’s something odd about the limbo Stewart’s been able to maintain between art and public life, and something is distasteful about Stewart denying that he plays a larger role than simply as a comedian.

A note from your blogmistress: Since four of the six shows you most wanted recaps of happen on Sundays, I’ve asked my good friend and Good Wife maven Kate Linnea Welsh to help out with that show. If you’ve got questions or observations about the recaps, send ‘em to me, and I’ll pass your emails on to her. This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the third season of The Good Wife.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

Season two of The Good Wife ended with a newly separated Alicia disappearing into a hotel room with her college friend and now boss Will, but when season three picks up, such private concerns are put on the back burner as Lockhart/Gardner is thrust into a hot-button case: a prominent Muslim client asks them to defend a Palestinian student accused of starting a fight between Palestinian and Jewish students at a local college’s interfaith event. A Jewish student was murdered the same night, and Cary, now working for Peter, manages to manipulate Alicia and the defendant into exchanging the riot-related charge for a murder charge. The questions raised at trial revolve around the location of bias: Do we assume that the victims were attacked because they were Jewish, or that the defendant was arrested because he was Muslim? Or both? The controversial, high-profile nature of the case leads the lawyers to bring up a potpourri of other issues, as they discuss everything from cross racial identification to the relationship between violent video games and real-life predilections to whether a professor’s radical political views can be used against his student.

Of course, the case ends up not being about religion or politics at all. One of the defendant’s roommates was the real killer: he was in love with the victim, and this was actually a crime of passion made to look like a hate crime. While I suppose this ending was useful as a reminder that people generally act as individuals, not as representatives of a demographic group, I was frustrated that the resolution neatly allowed the show to get out of really dealing with the any of questions it had raised. It did, however, allow Eli Gold to give this funny-but-true summary of what a case like this wound up meaning for groups whose fundraising is dependent on public perception of these issues: “Is it good for the Jewish League Fund? I don’t know. A Muslim was the killer, but he was also gay and sleeping with our guy, so I would call that a classic mixed message.”
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