Because of my aforementioned fondness for inflicting terrible things on myself, I watched a bunch of Outsourced so I could say dreadful things about it with authority in yesterday’s post about The Infidel. The show is, in fact, not good. It doesn’t do nearly enough to undermine the stereotypes it sets up as the basis of its humor. Rajiv is a tremendous creep in a way that totally undermines the fact that he’s right about Todd’s cultural imperialism. Charlie is the worst Ron Swanson knockoff ever, a veritable inverse of the Swanson pyramid of greatness. And Tonya has essentially no personality other than forwardness.

But even though all of those things would send me screaming for the hills or a cleansing dose of Deadwood, they’re not actually the thing that freaks me out most about this justly-canceled show. I’m, perhaps sort of cornily, invested in the idea that American culture can be great; that it can play a critically important role in showcasing the best of the America and exploring what it means when, as all too often happens, we abjectly fail to live up to it; and that there’s an audience for the good stuff (which can range from the conventional, well-executed, to the wildly experimental), even in an age of niche entertainment.

Outsourced is everything I’m pushing back against. It’s not just that the show is set in a call center where the employees sell the lowest of the low-brow artifacts of American culture, and the Americans they encounter on the phone tend to be frat boys and people who are excited by bird-feeders with deliberately stupid misspellings, although that doesn’t help. The bits of culture Todd ends up explaining to his workers are things like Cheesehead-dom. It’s not that rooting for the Packers is not a noble past-time, but there’s something really depressing about the prospect that the collected ephemera of a novelty catalogue is what passes for cultural diplomacy.

Then, there’s the function that Todd and Charlie play outside the office. Charlie’s socially offensive, awkward, and racist in an unintegrated way that suggests the writers just threw together a group of traits rather than trying to produce a coherent worldview. He harasses Indian women, offends his coworkers, and the only effort he makes to interact with Indians is when he plays laser tag with Manmeet and Gupta. When he recites America’s accomplishments, he throws in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue. Todd is marginally better at trying to learn about Indian culture, but he’s exporting things like knowledge of Hugh Hefner’s regular wardrobe, and falls for a new hire who drops Slinky references and makes “Smooth Operator” jokes. Jerry, Todd’s boss, gets Todd and Rajiv arrested for cow tipping, a joke that’s impressive in its cheapness and obviousness.

In other words, Outsourced is invested in the idea that we come together over the flimsiest, dopiest things in American popular culture, not the best. Maybe that’s true. Maybe the most popular things America produces are the most ridiculous. Maybe our export of David Hasselhoff to Germany is our legacy. But I kind of believe we do better than that. Even if we do produce a lot of junk along the way.

I tend to agree with Henry Blodget that no matter how painful Netflix’s woes have been this fall, and even if they’re not over yet, the company has a basically solid business model and that the hysteria over the company’s future seems at least a tad overblown. But I am curious as to what’s happened to one of the things that seemed smart about the quickly-ended Qwikster plan: the plan to offer video game rentals. Hastings has said it’s up in the air

If they’d been able to pull it off, it would have been smart and gone some way towards persuading customers not to give up the service or switch to competitors like Blockbuster, which does offer video game rentals. iTunes has become increasingly essential because it’s a one-stop shop. And if you could get most, if not all, of what you want in a bunch of categories, it becomes harder to leave a service that does that for multiple services that give you the equivalent amount of what you want or marginally more for the headache of managing multiple logins, bills, queues, etc. It might bring in new customers for products, too. Given my general level of incompetence at video games, I think I’d be more likely to try certain titles I knew I might be not be able to play all the way through just to get a taste of what they were like, but that I’m deterred from because of their cost.

So what’s the holdup? I imagine negotiating content deals with an industry where consumers are still willing to pay full-price for games is harder than it is with an industry where people are cutting cords, pirating movies, or gravitating towards free, ad-supported options like Hulu. But I assume that it’s still possible. And that even if it required charging users an add-on fee, people would still subscribe. So is Hastings just hedging his bets after a series of disastrously certain pronouncements? Or is he walking away from what could be a smart addition to the business? The former would make a certain amount of sense. The latter would have me worried about the company’s capacity to innovate.

The bridge is yours.

-If you’re in New York this weekend, you really should check out Pageturner, the third annual Asian American Literary Festival on Saturday. I wish I was going. If you do, report back!

-Are we at a tipping point for women in comics?

-Movies like this make me realize how weird it’s going to be to talk to kids who have grown up with the internet.

-bin Laden death movies for everyone!

-Jonathan Demme made a short movie about Occupy Wall Street:

After Holy Terror, this isn’t exactly surprising, but it’s still impressive that Frank Miller still doesn’t seem to have a sense of what he sounds like when he says things like “I can tell you squat about Islam. I don’t know anything about it. But I know a goddamn lot about al Qaeda and I want them all to burn in hell.”

First, Holy Terror suggests that Miller doesn’t actually know very much about al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden may have been Saudi, but that doesn’t mean a huge number of terrorists are hiding out in Saudi-sponsored New York City mosques. Al Qaeda is not actually a more impressive organization than those run by fictional supervillains: it’s a small group who has caused substantial damage, but whose greatest victory is goading us into undermining our own values.

And knowing the difference between Islam and al Qaeda actually does matter. You want to marginalize the latter? Find ways to productively integrate people who practice the former into all kinds of societies. Prove al Qaeda has a pathetic, deluded worldview. Avoid slandering all Muslims as terrorists. Miller’s views are antithetical to his stated goals. And as it turns out, they don’t make for particularly good storytelling. Nuanced clashes of worldviews are much more fascinating than badly-drawn images of indistinct heroes crunching terrorists.

I feel this weird compulsion to apologize for continuing to write about 2 Broke Girls. The show is the kind of thing that drives me absolutely insane: something that’s a massive hit despite the fact that it relies on heavily and genuinely offensive content and that doesn’t necessarily seem to be learning the lessons of its best episodes or best laugh lines. And yet, like Todd VanDerWerff, the good things about it strike me strongly enough at times that I just can’t walk away from it, in part because I believe that if it did get better, it would be a stark rebuke to the show’s early bad impulses, to the idea that terrible racial and ethnic humor and stupid scatology is what sells in 2011.

Which is why I’m glad to hear that Jennifer Coolidge is joining the show as Max and Caroline’s neighbor. Coolidge is spectacularly good at playing roles that are very, very funny precisely because in the hands of another actress, they’d be stupid stereotypes, but that she manages to turn into something far stranger and more specific. In Legally Blonde, her undereducated manicurist could easily be a dumb confidante for Elle, but she imbues the role with a specific rage, and her empowerment feels genuinely triumphant:

In Best in Show, she delivers a vicious parody of gold-digger self-justification—and then, of course, a very funny and unexpected riff on lesbian culture that’s totally unmalicious while still being very much on point:

And it’s not like she’s given a lot to do in the American Pie movies, but even then, the joke is more on people who took up MILFs and cougars as if they were a thing.

That combination of specificity and newness seems to me to be exactly what 2 Broke Girls needs. The problem the show has, across both its endemic racism and its dated hipster references, is a sense that the only way to use stereotypes for comedic effect is to reference. It’s a low order of humorous thinking, and not one that anyone mistakes for sophisticated. But you can riff on stereotypes, and you can puncture the people who rely on them rather than the people who are supposed to exemplify them. 2 Broke Girls could do something clever by having Han end up dating a hipster, for example, simultaneously humanizing them both and dramatically reducing the social capital Max and Caroline get out of demeaning their boss and their neighbors. Having Coolidge as a hard-working neighbor could inject some genuine weirdness into the show’s vision of Brooklyn, while also illustrating the long-term financial struggles Max and Caroline are both facing. I hope it works.

Foster Kamer points out an interesting statistic reported in the New York Times that half of families with incomes over $75,000 have used internet-capable mobile devices to download applications for their children, while just one of 8 families with incomes under $30,000 have. There’s always a tendency to assume when one set of people has or can afford something and other people can’t that the thing is important, and particularly so if it’s something that’s billed as good for childhood development. And I get that impulse — nobody wants their children to be deprived, whether of educational advantages or of pleasure.

But I think it’s pretty early to worry that an app gap is going to cause lasting educational deficiencies for poorer children. The American Academy of Pediatrics is clear about the lack of benefits of screen time for children under 2. And there doesn’t seem to be particularly definitive evidence that apps give children who use them an advantage in literacy or other kinds of learning. According to a white paper from the Arizona State University College of Teacher Education and Leadership:

It is difficult to gauge what is actually happening, because the little that is known about the effects of digital media on emergent literacy skills development comes from educational television and computer studies, as well as from a few studies of other media and surveys…Digital media may be transforming the language and cultural practices that enable the development of emergent literacy skills. A new generation of young children is experiencing a new kind of interconnectedness in the language they see, hear, and use.

It may be that the optimism of folks like GeekDad or app evangelists may be justified. But until it’s proved to be so, it’s probably not worth a panic. That doesn’t mean that it’s worth doing nothing, either — it would, of course, be too bad if it turns out apps are a critical development tool and a lot of kids had been missing out. But I wonder if the best way to go about it is for developers to think beyond the Apple App store. You’re not going to get everyone to come to Apple, nor should you. If we’re worried about a digital gap, we should meet people where they’re at. And more parents should probably be getting the Academy of Pediatrics warnings through their doctors. That only 14 percent of them are getting that information from their doctors may actually be a more worrying suggestion that medicine isn’t adapting to the digital age as well as we might wish.

Business Insider has a really depressing slideshow about the sheer number of times folks have tried to remake Charlie’s Angels that’s one of the best illustrations I’ve ever seen of the way Hollywood will glom on to a completely nonsensical idea and milk it for all that it’s worth. Because let’s be clear: Charlie’s Angels, a story about a group of women who work through traumatic pasts by taking jobs as detectives for a man they never meet, is a completely ludicrous premise. I’ve told this story before, but my grandfather mistook the original for a parody back in the day and was devastated when it turned out to be an actual thing. And with the exception of an attempt to spin off the show with Barbara Stanwyck as the head of a squad of dudes, which sounds like literally the best thing of all time, and is available on YouTube:

All of these ideas are really not very good. And that’s what’s so sad. Charlie’s Angels is not the single worst idea ever to make it to network television, but it’s hardly the best. It’s not a concept that lends itself to anything more substantive than underpants dancing and hot girls giggling and running around together. Which I understand is a profitable concept, but an all-female detective agency is not the only way that it’s possible to produce this outcome. It’s just a setup that produced that outcome once in the past, and so we’re stuck with it forever.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m just banging my head against the wall. Because yes, seriously, apparently Hollywood thinks that the way to have a serious conversation about race and sex in America is to remake Indecent Proposal so the rich businessman black, the woman in question of mixed race, and the husband is white. I would say this is the most audaciously absurd pitch I’ve heard, worse than NBC’s claim that The Playboy Club was all about women’s empowerment, but then they’ll insist that it’s a meaningful movie about the recession and I’ll spend the entire day in the corner weeping instead of writing blog posts.

The last time NBC tried to do a show that was primarily about non-white, non-Christian people, it ended up with Outsourced. By which I mean a show rooted in the idea that Indian people have funny names, Indian food is poison, Hinduism is pretty strange, and Indians either over- or under-adapt to American culture. To be fair, Outsourced is also about the fact that Americans have deeply terrible taste in novelties, inclining towards the racist, purile, violent, and drunken. But still. Not a victory for tolerance and mutual understanding.

Which makes the news that the struggling network’s taken the intriguing step developing a comedy based on The Infidel quite heartening. The original movie follows the misadventures of a moderately observant British Muslim, played by Omid Djalili (who has had a deal with the network in 2002 but never seen a project come through) who, on the eve of his son’s engagement to the stepdaughter of a radical imam and shortly after his mother’s death, discovers that he was adopted — and that he was born to observant Jewish parents. And to complicate matters further, his father is alive, but gravely ill, and being taken care of by a rabbi who won’t let the son his charge gave us see his father unless the son makes a serious study of Judaism. So he seeks out the tutelage of a depressed, divorced Jewish cabbie, played brilliantly by Richard Schiff.

A lot of the movie’s power is in its rawness. When Mahmud, the main character, first tells Lenny, the cabbie, that he’s Jewish, Lenny spits back, “I’m the shoe bomber. Pleasure to meet you.” In prepping Mahmud to go to his first bar mitzvah, Lenny goes through a checklist of things Mahmud probably shouldn’t bring up, including “Hitler. Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hitler. The fact that you’re actually a Muslim.” And in a raw showdown between Mahmud’s father’s rabbi and Mahmud, Lenny pits cultural Judaism against Jewish religious knowledge, telling the rabbi, “My friend has drunk my chicken soup. He’s danced like a Cossack in my living room, he told a funny story at a bar mitzvah and got a good laugh. I’m a Jew, and my friend is Jewish enough for me.” Jews aren’t the only ones with intra-faith tensions. “Give me one reason that can calm me down about inviting Arshad Al-fucking Stalin into my family!” Mahmud despairs as he grapples with how to reconcile his son’s happiness and the prospect of ending up permanently connected to a preacher of hatred. The show even has one of the funnier, more effective satire of British hate speech laws I’ve ever seen, complete with Jack Benny jokes.

The movie’s not perfect. It ends in a really profoundly stupid twist ending, which fortunately doesn’t invalidate any of the very funny work that comes before it. In a fall that’s felt divided between not particularly funny comedy and drama that’s excellent but that can be spiritually wearing (I love Homeland, but it does not make me feel very good about humanity), the prospect of a show that is extremely precisely irreverent is bracing. With faith, extremism, and terrorism in particular, when folks have gotten open about their feelings in American culture in recent years, it’s resulted in stuff like Holy Terror, art that’s dialogue-ending rather than continuing the conversation.

There are lots of questions here: whether NBC will be able to execute The Infidel with the same courage as the original; whether Richard Schiff can be peeled away from Criminal Minds to reprise his role; what the long-arc plot will be. But this is a worthy experiment. It shows signs of the genuine daring and ambition Bob Greenblatt demonstrated at Showtime. And while it doesn’t really make up for NBC’s cowardice regarding projects that involved Djalili in the aftermath of Sept. 11, it’s a small step in the right direction towards making good use of his talents, and for the cause of getting us toward a Muslim Cosby show.

In the comments thread in last week’s conversation, I confessed some ambivalence about the position that I’ve staked out here: that it makes more sense to set the standard for conversation about the death penalty that it should be abolished in all circumstances, even in the astonishingly unlikely chance that we achieve a perfectly just criminal justice system that has no clear disparate impact on people of any rage, gender, class, or creed. I say that not because I think we’re more likely to achieve a durable opposition to the death penalty by relaying on pragmatic arguments rather than moral ones — I think it may initially seem easier to bring people in with pragmatic arguments, but that may not achieve the depth of consensus we hope for. But rather, I confess some ambivalence because I have never been the victim of a violent crime, and I’ve had the good fortune that no one in my family has been touched by violent crime either. I’d like to believe that if such a thing were to come to pass, I would resist the urge to take another person’s life, but I’m afraid that I wouldn’t, that the better angels of my nature would be decisively scattered and I would want what I now profess to abhor. Which I suppose is as good an argument for total abolition as any: if we can’t trust ourselves in moments of extremism, perhaps some tools should be taken away from us.

But on to The Green Mile. It’s a fascinating — and very sentimental movie — and to a certain extent, it’s not particularly useful as a basis for a real-world conversation about the death penalty. People who perform executions may have the experience of helping to kill innocent people — we know some of them certainly have. But they’re deeply unlikely to execute people who are not only innocent but honest-to-god saintly miracle workers who absolve them on the way to the electric chair, telling them, as John tells Paul, “You tell God the father it was a kindness you done.” But the movie is an intermittently powerful allegory about responsibility, and the way we distance ourselves from culpability and full understanding of what we’re doing.

That distance is part of the way Paul explains his work to his elderly listener, and to himself. “Death row was usually called the Last Mile. We called ours the Green Mile,” he says. “The floor was the color of faded limes. We had the electric chair. Old Sparky, we called it.” These are cute names for terrible things, the wait for your death at the hands of the state, the instrument of your death, which even when it goes well, is an ugly, traumatic thing — and far worse when your death is sabotaged by a sadistic prison guard. But the characters struggle with the distance that lets them do their day-to-day jobs, and the need to honestly confront what they do when they take a man’s life. We know Percy is disgusting not just because he’s cruel, but because when he deliberately sabotages an execution in a way that makes the man’s death prolonged and hideously painful, he tries not to witness what he’s wrought. By contrast, we feel sympathy with, not disgust for, Paul when he hesitates to give the order to execute John because he’s meditated on the terrible work he’s about to perform. His sense of duty and his sense of right conflict. And when we learn Paul is living out a vastly extended life because “It’s my torment. It’s my punishment for letting John Coffey ride the light,” I can’t help but wonder if he’d be tormented in the same way if he’d executed anyone else.
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Commenter Greg Packnett, himself a legislative aide in the Wisconsin state Assembly, thinks so:

Leslie Knope is no saint. While she’s well-motivated, she’s still pretty corrupt. She regularly uses city resources to campaign, even going so far as to have the Parks & Rec Dept. give her an assistant in her official capacity so she can spend more time campaigning. I’m not conversant in Indiana law, but I’d be very surprised if that were legal.

Leslie Knope is a good representation of what corruption in public office looks like. Public officials using their official powers and resources to maintain office with the full knowledge and tacit approval and assistance of everyone around them because 1. everyone does it and 2. they believe in the causes and abilities of the officials in question.

That’s interesting, because Parks and Recreation has actually handled issues of public corruption before, and handled them with a certain amount of aplomb: when Tom goes overboard promoting Snake Juice, Chris makes him sell his shares in the Snakehole Lounge so he won’t be enriched by the event. Chris is very clear that Tom’s actions count as public corruption, and Tom, however reluctantly goes along, though he eventually chooses the private sector. And the show’s also presented Tom’s cozy relationship with the business community as ultimately kind of sketchy, even if it benefits the Parks Department on occasion.

I don’t really think that Leslie using her record in public service to run for office counts as public corruption. And the decision to hire Leslie an assistant was Ron’s, not Leslie’s — she didn’t even suggest it, the idea was entirely his. The question, I think, will be how she balances her continuing duties as an employee of the Parks Department and her campaign. And that’s a rich source of drama and comedy. Boss will pull out Hatch Act references in the next episode. Parks and Recreation could effectively satirize the tissue-thin walls politicians build between themselves and ethics violations — and it would be really useful to send up that hypocrisy and strive to do better instead of just wallowing in a perception that all politicians and public servants are hopelessly corrupt.

If Leslie Knope slips over into corruption, it would be a genuine tragedy. In her, pop culture’s created a genuinely unique character: a public servant and now a politician who really cares about the rules, for whom they aren’t just an impediment to the revolving door but a safeguard to a system she really loves.

The bridge is yours.

-Wonder Woman day expands, and sets new goals for domestic violence fundraising.

-Are Michael Moore and Jon Stewart essentially the same?

-If there is a whitewashed American remake of My Neighbor Totoro, I will quit popular culture. Or at least seriously contemplate it. Or write really angry blog posts about it.

-Zombie Bob Dylan.

As Homeland unfolds this fall, I’ve been watching Sleeper Cell, the network’s earlier show on the same subject, to keep me sated between episodes. And one thing that’s struck me forcefully about both shows is that even thought they’re portraying practitioners of Islam who are using — or may use, we don’t know on Homeland — their religion to justify terrorism, both shows consistently portray the act of prayer as beautiful, no matter who’s praying, or no matter what they’re getting out of it.

In Sleeper Cell, shots linger over cell members and anti-extremist preachers alike washing their hands and feet in preparation for prayer. When the cell members pray in the desert, they’re beautifully backlit. And when Darwyn takes a young wannabe-jihadist to a moderate mosque, the singing sounds good, and the joy of the worshippers is palpable. It’s hard to capture the sacred, especially because it’s something that mostly happens in people’s heads — we don’t really live in an era of special effects-friendly bushes burning in the desert. But repeating the ritual shows down a show that’s got plenty of sex and violence in it, it’s a tonal break, and it creates a sense that the people repeating that ritual are powerfully elsewhere when they perform it.

Homeland‘s taking a similar approach. In Brody’s memories, when he leaves his cell during his captivity, one of the first things he sees, the first shaft of light, falls on Muslim men at prayer. And when we see him praying for the first time after his return to the United States, the light that seeps under the garage door transforms a mundane suburban space into a house of worship. In Sunday’s episode, the show expands that ritual, showing Brody washing his hands in a beautiful vessel. And later, the show juxtaposes Carrie’s discovery of that silver bowl with shots of Brody at church with his family, the silence of the dish in contrast with the sound of a hymn.

I appreciate those conscious choices. Faith in popular culture is so often reduced to signifying ridiculousness or righteousness that it ignores what faith means to people inwardly in favor of a focus on what other people assume faith signifies externally. Making at least a gesture towards it, and in two charged shows about terrorism and national security, asserting that faith is bigger than its worst outcomes, is important, and all too rare.

I’m quite fond of Fran Kranz, who’s had extraordinarily bad luck in terms of being in projects that are critically acclaimed but canceled or vanish from the box office before anyone notices they’re there, so I was intrigued to hear that he’s part of a new movie project that’s seeking Kickstarter support. But the description of the movie itself, “Lust for Love is the story of an innocent guy (Fran Kranz) who wins the love of his childhood sweetheart (TBA), but since he’s been holding out for her his whole life, he’s so embarrassing that he’s quickly dumped. Convinced he needs more experience with women to win her back, he convinces the sweetheart’s girlfriend (Dichen Lachman) to teach him how to woo women,” has me feeling kind of exhausted. Maybe because Girls With Slingshots recently plumbed similar emotional territory, when Clarice found herself helping Tucker, a creepy guy she met in the library, learn how to talk to women.

What’s tiresome about these premises is that one of two assumptions is behind them. First, that men are too silly to know what to do with women, and need the instruction and hand-holding of a good woman so that another woman will benefit. Growing up isn’t easy, but there’s something odd about the boy-man trope that focuses on protagonists who need extensive instruction in social norms in order to interact properly. I understand that this is the source of drama for makeover comedies for both genders, but there’s a difference between narratives that convince women that they don’t actually need to reject stylish clothes and makeup to retain their inner selves and stories about men who haven’t rejected social conventions — they’re just totally unfamiliar with them.

And if it’s not that, then the assumption is that women, with their feminism and their romantic comedies and the contradictions between the two have made it too damn hard for reasonably intelligent men to figure out how they ought to go about courtship. There’s a resentful streak there, as if trading formal rituals for a bit more honesty and flexibility, and a bit more gender equality in relationships wasn’t actually a good trade. Having to do a bit more work to get to clarity and keep romance alive isn’t oppressive, nor is it a burden that’s unevenly divided. And sexual and romantic relationships aren’t that wildly different from other social interactions — we’re just a bit funny about the stakes.

Adam Carolla, master of subtlety and complexity, is sort of on to something in complaining about celebrities who make an enormous amount of money even while claiming solidarity with the poor, but as usual, misses the point:

“These bigger name guys, they go out and do corporate gigs, they do casinos and theaters, they make 200 grand a pop,” says Carolla, whose own ideology defies simple labels. “Then, they come back to their pulpit and talk about Joe Sixpack and how times are tight.”

“They never talk about the money they make… and you pretend you’re one of them? Bullshit,” he says.
Carolla isn’t shy about telling tales of woe from first class flights or how he feels uncomfortable around his nanny. Nor does he mind being in a cutthroat entertainment business, one that cast him aside in 2009 for failing to live up to Howard Stern’s ratings legacy on the FM dial.

It’s not actually more attractive to complain about your first world problems than it is to reach for solidarity, however clumsily, with people who have fewer resources than you do. But that doesn’t mean it’s not useful for rich people who want to support everyone else to recognize that they aren’t coming from the same place as someone who, say, is losing their home, or experiencing a prolonged period of joblessness. Kathy Bates’ desire to see Obama go after the “rat bastards” on Wall Street does not actually spring from an identical place as someone who is crushed under the weight of student loans, or whose mortgage was part of a complex financial transaction.

And that’s actually a good thing. It’s critically important to illustrate that there are large constituencies for issues like financial system reform, or for student loan forgiveness. And it’s important to draw connections between issues that people will argue are separate to avoid regulation. Bernie Madoff’s fraud was different from the rise of mortgage-backed securities, in terms of both how they were carried out and legal culpability, but they’re both part of a culture that valued profits over accountability. It would be useful to have wealthy victims of Madoff’s fraud, like Larry King and Kevin Bacon, come out in favor of much higher regulatory standards for the financial industry as a whole. You don’t actually have to establish credibility as a member of the working class to be a useful ally to the working class. But it is useful to know which one you are before you start acting as an advocate.

Both Susana Polo and Graeme McMillain raise an interesting question: is Star Trek too tonally inconsistent, and too averse to long-arc plots to make it on television today? As McMillan writes:

All of the Treks – with the possible exception of Enterprise – had a wonderful schizophrenia about their tone that is very rare on television today; you would never really know, tuning in, whether you were going to see a drama or a comedy, or whether the drama was going to be of the “This is an allegory for a real-world situation and we shall all be making a Very Serious Point” variety, or the “We’re trying to make a suspenseful thriller, so expect long looks punctuated with stirring soundtrack strings” one, or even the “Want an action movie in less than an hour? We’ll do our best, but don’t judge us too harshly” attempts. What was weirdly wonderful about Trek was the play-of-the-week nature of the show, even when there were longer-running continuities running through episodes, and television – especially genre television – has lost that variety; normally shows stake out their tone early on and stay there, hoping to ensure loyalty through stability and knowing exactly what you’ll get when you switch on.

I think they’re generally right about tonal consistency, though something like Community does veer from being entirely goofy and surreal to fairly grounded and human, so it’s not entirely impossible. And I think with Star Trek, it’s easy enough to solve: have each season revolve around a long-arc mission and all of the things that happen along the way, some of which will be serious, some of which will be goofy, all of which will offer opportunities for different tones and different points — in other words, make the show like Buffy. But I actually wonder if the Very Serious Point bit, the optimism about a progressive, secular, interconnected vision of the future might actually be the bigger challenge for networks that are either skittish about politics or committed to a gritty, pessimistic take on them. I would love to see a network show (as opposed to a cable network like Showtime or SyFy) have a major character on a show who is a rehabilitated extremist.

I really would like television to integrate abortion into its conversations about sex and reproduction. And I think Dr. George Tiller is a hero and a martyr. But given the way True Blood’s handled hot-button social issues this season, particularly the disgraceful way it’s handled race and the show’s general unsubtlety on gender, I have grave concerns about the prospect of Alan Ball doing an HBO show based on Tiller’s life, which is apparently his next project for HBO.

Ball and his problems aside, I’m trying to decide how I feel about approaching abortion through drama as opposed to comedy, and the idea of a show where it’s the focus as opposed to part of the scenery. It’s relatively easy to think what the plots for a drama might be like: the doctor is stalked, the doctor is attacked, the doctor tries to keep his staff’s morale up as they are harassed going about their business, doctor has all sorts of interactions with patients, patients’ relatives, etc. But I worry about how much a show like that would give credence to anti-abortion arguments in the name of appearing even-handed, or make the doctor a morally ambiguous character like Walter White or Tony Soprano, rather than wholeheartedly embracing the idea the preserving access to abortion under tremendously trying circumstances is a heroic act.

And I think part of the problem is that a show like this keeps abortion separate from the rest of our discourse about sex, from American life. Which of course it’s not. A show like Mindy Kaling’s OB/GYN comedy, if it manages to integrate abortion into a larger ongoing conversation about reproductive health and American sexual life, would push back against that. Abortions are not weird, freakish things that happen only to Fallen Women or in Back Alleys. They are rational, regularly-performed medical procedures. And while I do think it’s important to be honest about the fact that they are a medical procedure women aren’t always happy to have performed, shifting the debate towards normalization is critical. That’s a tremendously complex needle to thread. And I think I trust Mindy Kaling to do it more than I trust Alan Ball.

I still can’t quite believe this thing is real, but I guess it is. And newly-out Sean Maher is talking about the decision Joss Whedon made to cast him as Don John in his Much Ado About Nothing adaptation — and to turn the character into a serious ladies’ man:

It’s so funny because I had talked to Joss about my choice to come out – he was so supportive. He just wanted me for this because he saw me in this role of a villain. A very mean-spirited, mischievous, manipulative villain. What Joss did was write don John’s associate, who is a man in the play, as a woman – and we have some very promiscuous sexually-charged scenes together. So during this whole coming out process, with all the press asking me if I could ever be seen as a heterosexual man on screen again, I so badly wanted to say, “well, Joss Whedon just cast me as the guy in between Riki Lindhome’s legs.” But he asked me to keep it a secret, which I did.

I said, somewhat flippantly yesterday, that Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing remains the gold standard for me, and as much as I love Whedon, I’ll want to see how he approaches the material. And now that we’ve heard about this, I’ll be curious to see what other changes he’s made to the plot — Keanu Reeves didn’t have to have a love interest written into Branagh’s adaptation to evince a strong sense of sexual danger around him.

But all of that aside, it’s nice to see Whedon continuing his commitment not just to writing good, non-stereotypical gay characters, but to making casting decisions that challenge stupid stereotypes about whether good actors can sell good characters no matter who they are in real life. And I hope that his Much Ado About Nothing gets a release wide enough to be seen by people other than the core Whedon fandom, who I think are largely on board with both of the messages I hear about here. One of the reasons I’m sorry to have seen The Playboy Club be so bad and fall apart so fast is because I think it’ll be important not just to see gay actors nailing straight roles, but to see them go back and forth between gay and straight roles. It’d be a good thing for mass audiences to have a chance to see Sean Maher playing a gay political leader and a gay man with an active love life on network television and to see him steam up multiplexes with a woman. And it would be good to see Neil Patrick Harris break up his string of hetero lotharios with a gay character. Bad actors won’t be able to sell much beyond things they’ve experienced themselves. Good ones can inhabit multitudes, no matter who they are or where and what they come from.

Considering Boss, and the electoral subplots on Parks and Recreation, Modern Family, and Glee in the Atlantic this week, I was struck by a question: why does pop culture swing between depicting politicians as grotesques or saints when the reality is so vastly more entertaining? Boss swings between really good subplots and moments that seem funny and scary precisely because they’re plausible, and things that seem more like unchecked impulses:

The show succeeds when those gods and monsters are mired in procedure, as Kane and Miller often are. The site of an incumbent governor lofting an iPad into a marsh in a fit of pique and then ordering an aide after it is both very funny and a nice reference to Primary Colors, the satire of the Clinton administration that increasingly looks like the gold standard for explorations of political darkness. Where Boss goes off the rails, though, is when it mistakes luridness with meaningfulness.

A twist on a political sex scandal that leaves an up-and-comer getting it on with his lover in increasingly public places is one of the more genuinely egregious use of cable’s license to depict sex I’ve seen in quite some time. Kane’s daughter, apparently a priest, a doctor, and an addict, checks so many urban-politics boxes at once that her personality disappears under the weight. While there’s no question that Aldermanic debates can be brutal, it feels showy and crude to have Kane tell the City Council, during a contentious debate, “Let the streets run with shit.”

It would be easy to say that our tendency to lionize or demonize politicians is a product of partisanship, but that doesn’t really explain why political pop culture invents wildly baroque scenarios for politicians on television and in movies who are forever knocking up interns and the teenaged daughters of their friends, or unleashing wild chains of vengeance. The emotions involved in politicians’ indiscretions may be difficult to fathom, especially for people in the public eye, unless they’re explained away as the product of self-destructive impulses. But the means of their downfalls are usually fairly prosaic, a Direct Message gone wrong, a hooker and a hotel room and an assumption of invincibility.

And I think, instead, our pop culture politicians vacillate between poisonous and saintly not necessarily because we hate people in the other party, but because we’re let down by our own side, betrayed by our own unrealistic expectations. We want Andrew Shepherd as he is in The American President and we get Jack Stanton from Primary Colors. In pop culture, if they’re saints or rat bastards, we know from the beginning or close enough to it, and any changes are of degree rather than of nature. There are no redemptions. But there are no shocking disappointments, either.