The bridge is yours.

-Tig Notaro’s stand-up routine about her breast cancer is going to be on Louis C.K.’s site and in a book.

-If Disney villains won.

-Science fiction and the return of the epistolary novel.

-Rita Wilson made Girls promise not to make her get naked.

-I didn’t actually think I could hate Glee any more, but it doing “Celebrity Skin” to score a STUDENT COUNCIL ELECTION may have broken me:

I’ve gotten slightly tired of movies in which corporate executives or lawyers who have done dreadful things to people come to conscience, not because I don’t believe that scenario can’t be emotionally and artistically powerful as it was in something like Michael Clayton, but because I tend to think that corporations are generally forced to do things rather than having awakenings that make them change. But I’m intrigued by Matt Damon’s The Promised Land, a movie that grows out of his environmentalist work:

But what makes this movie different, and why I’m tempted by it, is that it’s a balance between Damon’s energy man and John Krasinski’s environmental organizer. If The Promised Land is a story that wrings drama from the actual efforts it takes to convince people to make long-term decisions from their communities, and to wrest the people in power away from their willful blindness, it could be much more interesting than the average exploration of a suit who has a change of heart, one of the more wishful bits of Hollywood liberal fantasy.

When I talked to Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, the stars of the sketch and standup show on Comedy Central that bears their name, in February, they were about to start airing for the first time, and they laid out their approach to everything from code switching, to Christianity, to Michelle Obama. Their second season begins tomorrow, and I checked back in with Key and Peele to talk about how meeting the President has changed their very funny sketches about Luther, Obama’s Anger Translator, what they think Giancarlo Esposito’s performances on Revolution and Breaking Bad mean for our understanding of race in America, and how to nail a potentially offensive joke without getting in trouble. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

As you say in the first episode of the new season, you met the president! What was your conversation with him like? And how has seeing him in person affected the Anger Translator sketches?

Jordan: One of the impresisons we had was that he was just very funny. That little bit you’re talking about, where he took a bottle of water form an aide when he had a cough in his throat, and he checked with the Secret Service jokingly, saying “We trust her?” We couldn’t believe that. He said, “I need Luther…He said to Keegan, I need Luther. I need him”. That was cool.

Keegan: I think also, it was more of a confirmation of things already assumed than it was anything else. I did have an impresison of him that he was more in real life than I expected him to be. He was taller, he was better looking. For as cool as he comes across, there was a very palpable warmth that he has about him that, frankly, I didn’t know that I was expecting. He’s right there, he’s with you, he’s talking to you. He has such a calming energy to him.

Jordan: That little sense of humor we’re talking about. You can tell it sneaks out now and then, even though he knows he needs to be the master and commander and dignified and together, so when it slips out and he says something funny, you can see him regather his posture a little. It felt like we hit [what] he may kind of be thinking on the head…I think he knows he can’t exactly align himself with the sentiments we explore. Whether or not it affects the comedy we do, our take on him has always been based on how we feel and what we feel are the unspoken truths that will get a laugh because they ring true. Nothing’s changed…we do a sketch where I play him back in college when he’s in Occidental College, and we do it as if it was found footage of him smoking weed, and more than smoking weed, but owning the party. And what if he brought his charisma and his people together to organize a party on the Occidental College campus. That was the premise of the scene. We felt a little bit rascally about it, especially having met him, to point out the fun side of Obama when he needs to bring his seriousness to a lot of the issues. It’s something that rings true and it’s funny. And at the end of the day…He brings that gravitas and that sense of American ideals to every little exchange.

Since your first season, FX has started airing Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, and BET has announced the launch of TJ Holmes’ late-night show. I’m curious what you think of this mini-boom in late-night shows built around African-American men, and where you think Key & Peele fits in this new landscape?

Keegan: I’m not aware of these programs. I think probably a lot of it has to do with we have our foot on the throttle right now because we’re coming so close to the premiere.

Jordan: I do think that this is sort of a continuation of the evolution of things from, with Obama as a catalyst, even four years ago. It was very interesting, the way African-Americans have been in culture in general. Sidney Poitier back in the day…When I was growing up, there was Denzel Washington, and the idea of a black president came around, Morgan Freeman was cast as a president all of a sudden. The ideas of African-Americans as a leading man has sort of conjealed. What’s fascinating to me is these characters like Giancarlo Esposito, his character in Revolution seems kind of allegorical to Obama. They’re trying to do that somehow. There’s this refined black man who is in charge and somehow mysterious, and he plays it as a good guy.
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I’m not normally sympathetic to movie critics who inherently have it in for superhero and big-budget action movies. But David Denby, in a long piece in The New Republic, has an argument that those of us who love movies in those genres should listen to. He thinks the things that have made action movies big are also making them a lot worse:

Consider a single scene from one of the most prominent artistic fiascos of recent years, Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor. Forget Ben Affleck’s refusal to sleep with Kate Beckinsale the night before going off to battle; forget the rest of the frightfully noble love story. Look at the action sequences in the movie, the scenes that many critics unaccountably praised. Here’s the moment: the Japanese have arrived, dropped their load, and gone back to their carriers. Admiral Kimmel (Colm Feore), the commander of the Pacific fleet, then rides through the harbor in an open boat, surveying the disaster. We have seen Kimmel earlier: not as a major character, but as a definite presence. Before December 7, he had intimations that an attack might be coming but not enough information to form a coherent picture. He did not act, and now he feels the deepest chagrin. Dressed in Navy whites, and surrounded by junior officers also dressed in white, he passes slowly through ships torn apart and still burning, ships whose crews, in some cases, remain trapped below the waterline.

Now, the admiral’s boat trip could have yielded a passage of bitterly eloquent movie poetry. Imagine what John Ford or David Lean would have done with it! We have just seen bodies blackened by fire, the men’s skin burned off. Intentionally or not, the spotless dress whites worn by the officers become an excruciating symbol of the Navy’s complacency before the attack. The whole meaning of Bay’s movie could have been captured in that one shot if it had been built into a sustained sequence. Yet this shot, to our amazement, lasts no more than a few seconds. After cutting away, Bay and his editors return to the scene, but this time from a different angle, and that shot doesn’t last, either. Bay and his team of editors abandon their own creation, just as, earlier in the movie, they jump away from an extraordinary shot of nurses being strafed as they run across an open plaza in front of the base hospital.

People who know how these movies are made told me that the film-makers could not have held those shots any longer, because audiences would have noticed that they were digital fakes. That point (if true) should tell you that something is seriously wrong. If you cannot sustain shots at the dramatic crux of your movie, why make violent spectacle at all? It turns out that fake-looking digital film-making can actually disable spectacle when it is supposed to be set in the real world. Increasingly, the solution has been to create more and more digitized cities, houses, castles, planets. Big films have lost touch with the photographed physical reality that provided so much greater enchantment than fantasy.

I can buy that argument: two of my action sequences in recent movies are the fight between Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and the foot chase that opens Casino Royale and the final battle in The Avengers. I can’t help but compare the former to the final fight between Batman and Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. The battle between Yeoh and Zhang was extended, shot from multiple angles, with the antagonists using multiple weapons. The whole point of it was to explore the characters’ capabilities as fighters and their personalities under extreme stress, and as a result, it couldn’t look fake, and it couldn’t be assembled from extremely short shots. The latter scene, by contrast, was shot extremely close, in part because the Batsuit didn’t leave Christian Bale much in the way of mobility, and its primary quality was brutality. What was supposed to be a titanic contest of wills between very different men came down to which one of them had spent more time recently with a personal trainer.

Both the Casino Royale chase and The Avengers battle are composed of discrete moments, Casino Royale as Bond moves from construction site or construction site or room to room in the building where much of the fight takes place, and The Avengers as it switches from superhero team-up to superhero team-up. In Casino Royale, the transitions matter: Bond’s opponent flys through a vent while Bond himself busts through a wall. The Avengers, by contrast, has a lot of sequences that are shot from far away, and that last only long enough for us to see which superheroes are fighting together and who they’re going up against. It’s a way to convey a sense of scale and to get a lot of information out there, most importantly that all of these people have learned to work together, but it also has the overall effect of making the characters look a little toy-like, of glimpsing struggle as it’s happening more than actually communicating the exhaustion of the fight. The action sequences have been bigger, but the people whose lives are at stake have become increasingly small.

Emily Nussbaum, the television critic at the New Yorker, writes in an even-handed review of David Simon’s HBO series about New Orleans, Treme, which was just renewed for a shortened fourth season, than an episode of the show “made me wonder if, rather than a novel or a movie, a TV show could be a poem.” It’s a perfect way of encapsulating why Treme is both important and sometimes infuriating: it’s a show that challenges our conception of what a television show can be, but that may end up reaffirming our basic demands of the form.

In another television show, if I wished the dialogue would stop so I could listen to a musician finish out a song, watch an artist stitch beads into a badge, or a cook plate a dish, that would be a grave sign of trouble for that show. Given the relative pedestrian nature of much television cinematography and music,Treme stands out for its the quality of its musical performances, its attention to the kinds of details of craft that don’t always drive plots, but that can give an audience profound and vicarious sensual pleasure. I could hang out in LaDonna’s (Khandi Alexander) bar for an entire afternoon watching Albert’s Mardi Gras Indians practice their routines, as they do this season, or at a music showcase watching Annie try out new songs as she prepares to record a studio album. In an episode in the middle of this season, Toni (Melissa Leo) and her daughter Sofia (India Ennenga) go to a performance of Waiting for Godot at the point where the levees were breached. As moving as it was to watch a man in the audience declare Godot isn’t coming, to see Toni tear up at his anger and pain, I almost would have rather been there with them in the audience, experiencing the play for myself. The art Treme puts on screen is almost enough for me to not need the plots and characterization that surround it.

Treme isn’t alone in playing with the potential of television. Breaking Bad, in particular, plays with cinematography much more aggressively than Treme. But that show’s dramatic color saturation, shot composition, and unnerving images are in service of the show’s clear moral throughlines. And Breaking Bad has always paired its striking cinematography with sleek, efficient storytelling. If Breaking Bad‘s A, B, and C storylines are hanks of hair being plaited together into a smooth braid, Treme‘s much larger cast are threads on a loom, showing occasional flashes of jewel color, but often just providing the supporting warp and weft to get us to one performance to the next.

That’s not to say that there aren’t engaging characters or moving moments in Treme outside of the musical performances. There’s joy to be had in watching Antoine Baptiste grousing about a cab fare he believes resulted from an inefficient route, telling the driver “It’s basic geometry, bro…You need to get with the hypotenuse. Don’t believe me, believe Pythagoras. He invented the sides of this shit,” or Ladonna seeking affirmation from a customer, asking him “What do you think about this here? This bar. My bar,” only to get back: “It’s here. And so am I.”

And the Treme is dense and smart on its core theme, how New Orleans alternately neglects and mythologizes itself, and how its most creative tendencies sometimes undermine its chances for success. In this week’s season three premiere, as Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) takes a group of tourists to what he’s trying to tell them are important sites in New Orleans musical history, they become progressively more disgusted with the disarray of the stops along the way. “You mean they can’t manage to clean up a park after two years?” one asks him. “Did you people ever actually preserve anything of note?” another wants to know. They’re not wrong. Meanwhile, Delmond Lambreaux (Rob Brown), who recorded a well-received album that combines jazz with his father’s Indian tribe, gets asked “Where in your imagination did all that come from?” by a purported fan who’s totally unfamiliar with the history of the music he’s enjoying. Next week, Antoine, now teaching music, tells a student “Jennifer, you sound good, girl. You got that real New Orleans riff.” But regretfully, he tells her to get back in synch with the other members of his marching band. “This here is about playing in unison,” he tells her. “When the time comes, you can let that rip.”

And that’s sort of Treme‘s problem. The show isn’t willing to shrug off narrative conventions entirely and spin off into sensory experience. But on the ground, it’s pulled in too many directions, and as a result characters have to tell what they don’t have time to show. Television may have dramatically expanded the emotional and moral weight it’s able to convey in the last decade and a half, and thanks to the widespread availability of cheap flatscreen televisions and prestige cable budgets, television productions are more visually ambitious than they’ve ever been. But Treme is a reminder that for all of these advances, television remains primarily a narrative medium, and we’re a long way from the show that’s really ready to let it rip and step out of line.

Ian Parker’s new profile of J.K. Rowling in the New Yorker is—with the exception of a weird and utterly egregious comment on her makeup—a fascinating ramble through literary analysis of the Harry Potter books, British press law, the extent to which Rowling may have exaggerated her own poverty, and the touchiness of celebrities who want to be left alone. It’s also one of the first hints we have at the core conflicts in Rowling’s upcoming first novel aimed primarily at adult readers than young ones, The Casual Vacancy. And to a certain extent (and to my excitement), it sounds like the novel has some of the same themes as Parks and Recreation. In keeping with some of Harry Potter‘s concerns, the central conflict is a class one:

Barry’s civic influence is revealed by his departure, rather as George Bailey’s is in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The story is driven by the long-standing frustration that some of Barry’s disagreeable and right-wing neighbors have about the town’s administrative connection to the Fields, an area of public housing and poverty on the edge of a larger, nearby town. Historically, children from the Fields have had the right to attend primary school in Pagford, a place of flower baskets and other middle-class comforts, and the town has also supported a drug-treatment clinic that serves the neighborhood. In the absence of Barry’s righteous influence, the anti-Fields faction sees an opportunity to rid Pagford of this burden. This is a story of class warfare set amid semi-rural poverty, heroin addiction, and teen-age perplexity and sexuality.

It’s tonally that I see the potential for a Parks and Recreation parallel:

“It’s been billed, slightly, as a black comedy, but to me it’s more of a comic tragedy,” she said. If the novel had precedents, “it would be sort of nineteenth-century: the anatomy and the analysis of a very small and closed society.” A local election was “a perfect way in,” she said. “It’s the smallest possible building block of democracy—this tiny atom on which everything rests.” One could say that national politics does not rest upon local politics, and that no modern British town is a closed society; some of Rowling’s characters may seem eccentric for the earnestness with which they regard a local election. She acknowledged that the scale of parish-council decision-making is “easy to laugh at” but said that “part of the point is that those decisions that are being made do dramatically affect people’s lives, up to life and death sometimes.”

We’re a ways from knowing whether The Casual Vacancy will be any good, though I’m looking forward to finding out. But learning more about the subject matter and tone has definitely more excited to give Rowling a shot.

I skipped out on watching the Emmys ceremony last night to watch the Ravens-Patriots game, which I think was the right decision for both the football and the spectacle. The game was a high-scoring brawl between teams who are developing a fantastic and eminently watchable East Coast rivalry. And towards the end of it, enraged by a series of decisions by the replacement referees, the game’s attendees provided some theater of their own, loudly and repeatedly calling out the officials.

Maybe the most striking thing about the game wasn’t that the fans booed the replacement referees over a series of blown calls, but that NBC aired their repeated chants of “bullshit,” without obscuring the sound. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ducked how to handle fleeting expletives on television, including this summer, when the Court refused to consider the First Amendment questions in Fox and ABC’s disputes with the FCC, though it said the agency had to give networks fair warning of what make them vulnerable to fines. The chants in the game happened after the end of primetime at 11 PM, so NBC may have considered itself less vulnerable to censure. But they also weren’t exactly fleeting: they went on for an extended period of time and served as a sonic backdrop to the announcers’ criticism of the replacement referees performance. In a sense, the decision not to obscure the chants or to turn the volume down on them was one of the gutsier editorial decisions NBC could have made, illustrating a clear consensus between the fans and the experts on the damage the replacements had done to the game.

At halftime, word came down that, after a Sunday devoted to negotiations between the referees’ union and the National Football League, there were still “substantial differences” between the parties and that no more negotiations were scheduled. It’ll be intriguing to see if this game changes the NFL’s sense of how long it can maintain its position in this particular standoff. I think NBC’s presentation of the game—and its announcers willing to criticize the replacement referees—are more likely to shake loose this particular standoff than to move the Supreme Court. But I’m glad to see them air a newsworthy reaction by fans, especially after the Justice Department dropped its pursuit of Fox, which had refused to pay an FCC fine over an episode of television that depicted strippers. If the Supreme Court isn’t going to make itself clear, the networks should push for as much latitude as they can get.

The bridge is yours.

-SEK is now tackling the first season of Game of Thrones. Take note.

-James Poniewozik gets the Emmys right.

-Why 2000 AD comics matter so much.

-I love reading Andy Greenwald on NBC’s Thursday night comedies.

Last week, I went long on the future of popular culture about gay people and a pet peeve of mine: the treatment of homosexuality as primarly a source of problems instead of joy, whether it’s in the historical pop portrayal of gay people as deviant, miserable, and damned, or of homophobia as the primary dramatic story engine for gay characters. As is always the case on this subject, my writing was informed by conversations with friends and writers like Tyler Lewis, who writes better on the specific experiences of black gay men than anyone I know, and Slate critic June Thomas. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to sit down with June and tape our conversations for a new Bloggingheads episode:

It was a conversation that helped mentally crystallize for me the extent to which non-straight characters are written for the enjoyment of and in deference to the perspectives of straight people. Shows and movies that aren’t made specifically for gay people, like both iterations of Queer as Folk, are allowed to have one gay person or gay couple. We don’t get to see gay people in gay communities, to see gay men who are friends with lesbians (though that seems like it could change on The New Normal, where creator Ryan Murphy has announced plans to introduce a gay couple) because shows with gay characters are so often about gay characters’ relationships to a straight-dominated world, or more often, about straight people’s relationships to gay people, no matter whether or not straight people are the gay characters. Cultural signaling, like a man’s interest in fashion or a woman’s interest in sports, or is less about fleshing out the personalities and interests of the characters who possess them than in signaling to straight audiences about story developments: Kurt’s clothes on Glee mean there will be bullying, parental difficulty, a change of wardrobe, a revitalization of his confidence, and an eventual journey to the big city. Homophobia is something for gay characters to overcome, but also for straight characters to learn from, for straight viewers to use as a self-congratulatory benchmark, assuring themselves that they’d never behave so badly.

I’m being harsh here. I know that. The process of straight people learning and appreciating, rather than demonizing, gay people’s lives and challenges and gay cultures, such as they exist, is not an irrelevant process. But I’m tired of the constant need for accommodation. I’m tired of the idea that straight people are going to be most interested in stories about themselves than in stories about gay people even if the execution of say, an excellent love story about two men like Keep the Lights On is richer and deeper than so much romantic comedy claptrap. I’m tired, similarly, of the idea that stories about men are the default, that both men and women will turn into them, and that stories about women are somehow niche, that men won’t tune into them. In both of these areas, people who limit themselves to stories about themselves are both denying themselves great pleasure and beauty. And they’re defaulting to the privileged position of being able to expect that Hollywood will continue providing them stories about people whose lives are a heightened version of their own. At the end of the day, if people want to cut themselves off from stories that could move them, that’s their loss. It’s just frustrating to me when someone else’s lack of curiosity reaffirms Hollywood’s own, and limits what options are available to the rest of us.

This post contains spoilers for The Master, in so much as an essentially non-narrative movie can be spoiled.

The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s gorgeous, confounding, and sometimes irritating new movie, has been assumed to be about the history of Scientology almost since the project’s existence became public. Movie fans buzzed. Harvey Weinstein hired extra security for the premiere to protect the movie from protest. But anyone who went to the movie expecting a searing expose was disappointed. The Master, which follows Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a deeply alienated Navy veteran who finds his way into the guidance of a charismatic fraud (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in the wake of World War II has very little to say about Scientology. But it is a dense, powerful movie about worship, sacrament, and what we take from belief.

We first meet Freddie on a Navy ship, awash in both the baptismal font of the ocean and a rush of religious imagery. General Douglas MacArthur prays “That God will preserve it always” in a broadcast about America and the end of the second World War, and by extension, the demobilization of the system that’s given Freddie both structure and an identity. A lecturer speaking to him and other men who, by implication, are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, tells them “You men are blessed with the rejuvenating power of youth.” In a session with a therapist, the man asks Freddie “According to the history here, it says you saw a vision of your mother.” Freddie skitters away from the implication of contact with divine—or insanity—cautioning “It wasn’t a vision. It was a dream.” Back on land, Irving Berlin’s “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan” plays as Freddie takes department store photographs as static as Russian Orthodox icons. When, on the run from the Salinas fields where he was picking cabbage, Freddie stows away on a pleasure boat, the one he hops is called Alethia, the ancient Greek word for truth, and the term Martin Heidegger used to mean “unconcealedness,” the revelation of the contours of the world. As the Aletheia sails off into the sunset, and towards the Panama Canal and its ultimate destination of New York, its masts are twin white crosses against the night sky.

Freddie isn’t capable of reading, much less noticing the existence of such signs when we meet him, but much of what’s compelling about the early scenes of The Master is the way the movie captures the larger context those signs give meaning to: the way we evade and disguise the needs we desperately hope will be fulfilled, be they spiritual or bodily. Freddie, a desperately lonely man, finds a way to be part of his fellow sailors’ playful day on the beach when he pretends to have sex with a woman they’ve built out of the sand. But while the joke is his means of participation, his need is real: Freddie masturbates on the beach, ends up curled up next to the figure in the sand as the other sailors slip away. But when he finds himself in proximity to connection, Freddie can’t help but treat the practices of the people around him as a bit of a joke, a tool to get what he wants without actually having to make commitments or risk vulnerability. When he joins the acolytes of Lancaster Dodd, the man who was dancing with his wife on the deck of the Alethia when Freddie decided to stow away, at a table where they’re taking notes on a series of recordings, Freddie passes a note to one of them asking “Do you want to fuck?” even as the voice on the tape tells him “You are not ruled by your emotions.” When Freddie trails in Lancaster’s wake to New York, he pockets a statue of a reclining nude woman that he finds in the house of one of the Cause’s benefactors, only to put it back.

Dodd gives Freddie both the structure to restrain and channel his behavior, and a sanctification of his talents for both violence—and for the first half of the movie more significantly—brewing bizarre cocktails made with everything from photographic chemicals to paint thinner. The first person Freddie tries to share his potions with is a pretty department store clerk who sips, coughs, and is dismayed when the sacrament, rather than bringing them into closer communion, makes Freddie fall asleep on a restaurant banquette. After fleeing the store and his job as a portrait photographer, Freddie works as a farm laborer, where he doles out drinks of his next batch fretfully, warning the Filipino pickers who work with him not to drink too much. This time, the results are worse than a lost shot at a relationship: one of Freddie’s coworkers dies. “I didn’t poison him,” Freddie insists. “I didn’t do anything wrong. He took the drink himself.” The thing that connects Freddie to other people ends up polluting his relationships to them.

That is, until he meets Lancaster Dodd, who tells Freddie that “I sampled it and ended up drinking it all,” in a less-than-subtle foreshadowing of how deeply Freddie will imbibe Dodd’s improvisational theology. Dodd is himself a bit of a symbol, speaking for Freddie to the first time in a red dressing gown that, combined with his pale hair, conspire to make him look like Santa Claus, and at a wedding dinner, making himself out to be Saint George with a story of a defeat of a dragon: “I wrestle, wrestle, wrestle him to the ground. I say sit, dragon sits. I say stay, dragon stays.” Fittingly, the exchange between Freddie and Dodd is a ritualized exchange over Freddie’s liquors. “I have no idea of the contents of this remarkable potion. What’s in it?” Lancaster asks Freddie. “Secrets,” his protege promises. Dodd is intrigued by both the effects of Freddie’s potion and his encounter with a bullshit artist who may not have Dodd’s own flair with a concept, but whose work produces more immediate results on the appropriate converts. He asks Freddie to cook up another batch, which Freddie does, tapping powders into glass vessels, streaming chemicals through bread, adding a stand-in for the Body to his version of the Blood. But Dodd, unlike Freddie, has the sense to check one last time on what he’s imbibing before he commits fully. “Is this booze you make poison?” he asks Freddie, mixing the question in with a series of other queries during the interrogations Dodd refers to as “processing” and that make up a fundamental part of the Cause. “Not if you drink it smart,” Freddie swears to him. Dodd’s approach to Freddie’s hooch will prove to be more meticulous and self-preserving than Freddie’s fevered quaffing of the elixir Dodd offers him.
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Homeland‘s complete domination of the drama Emmy Awards last night—Claire Danes and Damian Lewis won for their lead performances, and the show took home awards for writing for a drama series and for best drama series—was a surprise for many of us watching at home, whether we doing so for personal or professional reasons (or in my case, watching football while following along on Twitter). It’s possible to quibble with some of the awards. Breaking Bad, in particular, had an extremely strong season, and I might have gone with Bryan Cranston over Lewis just for the sheer range he was required to deploy. But on the whole, I’m very happy with the drama awards (vastly less so with comedy, but that’s another story). And there’s something exciting to me about watching the enthusiasm for Homeland on display last night.

On Twitter, a number of critics I care for dearly and admire were quick to declare Mad Men a vastly superior show to Homeland, which in the final analysis of history, may prove correct. But there’s something brave and bracing to me about the way Homeland has tackled the issues and environment of our own time, rather than reaching back into our history to explore the psychological contours of debates that are essentially settled, and settled for the better. Mad Men explores a broader universe through the lens of its advertising agency (and its much larger core cast) than Homeland does from within the intelligence community, but it sometimes does so with less courage. It’s a show that’s much more interested in exploring Don Draper’s reaction to having to put up with a token black employee than with the experiences of Dawn, SCDP’s African-American pioneer, herself. The show tells us that sexism is damaging to both men and women, and than white men could be shocked when their obliviousness was breached. These are things I think we know, gussied up in beautiful clothes and gilded with performances that are sometimes exceptional.

Homeland, by contrast, is concerned with the urgent present rather than the weight of history. At a moment when President Obama’s drone program raises profoundly difficult questions about how to regulate the president’s right to kill, Homeland has charged into the debate with an exploration of the impact of the people who are killed because they are in the way of drone strikes, and how those strikes can be used to powerfully shift opinion against the United States. At a time when large numbers of Americans persist, against all evidence and reason, in believing that our president is a foreigner and a secret Muslim so they won’t have to accept that their nation actually chose a black man to occupy its highest office, Homeland has given us a sensitive, even tender portrait of a convert to Islam, presenting the practice of his faith as beautiful and sanctified, who hides his religion (something that will become an issue in the second season premiere next Sunday). And in Carrie Mathison, Homeland‘s given us a female lead who is damaged less by history than by the things that make her brilliant. These are narrower concerns than the broad societal forces Mad Men explores, but that specificity doesn’t make the show less bold: instead, it makes it more painful and immediate.
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We’ve been on hiatus for a while, but I’ve had a couple of requests to bring the book club back for Michael Chabon’s latest novel, Telegraph Avenue, and since I want to read it myself, I think it’s worth doing. Let’s do Part I for next Friday.

Well, this is discouraging. Lady Gaga’s label has apparently decided that, rather than ordering costumes for the singer’s tour that suit her body, or letting her decide what she looks good and comfortable in, the pop singer needs to lose weight:

Executives at Universal Music Group saw recent pictures of the singer bulging out of her too-tight clothes and were forced to order a better-fitting wardrobe for the remainder her of her world tour, according to a RadarOnline report. “The tight, skimpy outfits weren’t doing anything for Gaga’s new fuller figure, so Universal ordered more flattering and better fitting costumes for the rest of the tour,” a source told the gossip site.

They allegedly told the “Born This Way” singer to lay off her favorite high-calorie foods, pizza and pasta. “Gaga has an incredible appetite for Italian food, which stems largely from her roots. It’s very easy on tour to get hooked on a diet of pizza and pasta because they are comfort foods—and when you are away from home you always long for something that reminds you of where you came from,” the source said. “She loves to eat, but because of her tiny frame it shows if she doesn’t work out as much as normal. Executives told her to quit gorging on her favorite foods.”

Did they like her better when Gaga was talking about being on the so-called Drunk Diet promoted by her then-boyfriend Luc Carl? Are some of the stranger things she’s worn during her time in the public eye actually less attractive than the sight of her with curves? There’s something pretty depressing about an environment where it’s easier for a woman to get away with wearing a dress made of raw meat than a body mass index that’s outside what the corporate definition of acceptable.

End of Watch, Training Day writer David Ayer’s third directorial effort after Harsh Times and Street Kings, is being advertised as a violent, aggressive movie that pits cops against cartels. To a certain extent, it is that: forks are shoved in eyes, cops go toe to toe with gang-bangers, and gold-plated guns are confiscated from vehicles. But those elements of the movie exist mostly to sell a much more subtle and interesting picture, a story about an exceedingly close friendship between two cops that also helps shift police dramas away from the monochromatic relationship between black cops and white cops and between white cops and black communities.

The cops in question are Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña), who we meet shortly after they’re cleared in a shooting incident and return to their work patrolling the streets of South Central Los Angeles. Rather than being detectives or the leaders of special squads, Brian and Mike are beat cops, a designation that means most of what they have to do is mosey around in their police cruiser in between minor bouts of community management and small acts of heroism—Mike fights a cantankerous older gang banger who’s been harassing his mailman to get the man to stop and charges into a burning building to rescue two young children, with Brian right behind him. Their stops in various Los Angeles homes veer between humor and horror, from the fisticuffs to the discovery of illegal immigrants locked in a back room. But their conversations, frequently about women, are the best part of the movie.

Mike is married to Gabby, his high school girlfriend, who he credits with marching him off to the police academy in the first place. And while he jokes with Brian that what Brian really needs is to find someone who will cook and won’t sleep with his friends and occasionally makes fun of Brian for complaining about being single and sexually successful, Mike clearly loves his wife, telling Brian “I don’t want to be with anyone else.” Brian has more direction and education than his partner does: a former Marine, when we meet him, he’s taking an elective film class as part of his pre-law courses. And his discontent with his dating life stems from a desire for a real connection. “First date: dinner and a respectful kiss,” Brian tells Mike. “Second date: dinner and full carnal knowledge. Third date: dinner and awkward silences when I try to talk about anything of merit.” End of Watch may be a tough-guy movie, but it’s one that argues that strength and tenderness aren’t incompatible, and that really loving a woman is more fun and more honorable than suffering through the company of one you couldn’t possibly respect.
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Normally, I would pay absolutely no attention to anything Paris Hilton says, except that her anti-gay meltdown yesterday and her apology today are a perfect example of how the media’s learned to process offense. The hotel heiress found herself in headlines again after a New York taxi driver clandestinely taped her speaking with a friend in a cab, in itself a totally gross thing to do, no matter how gross whatever he captured is. And the exchange between Hilton and her friend is both unattractive and ignorant:

“Say I log into Grindr, someone that’s on Grindr can be in that building and it tells you all the locations of where they are and you can be like, ‘Yo, you wanna fuck?’ and he might be on like, the sixth floor,” the friend explains. “Ewww. Eww. To get fucked?” Hilton replies. “Gay guys are the horniest people in the world. They’re disgusting. Dude, most of them probably have AIDS.” “I would be so scared if I were a gay guy,” she adds. “You’ll like, die of AIDS.”

Of course, she’s apologized immediately, releasing a statement through GLAAD:

As anyone close to me knows, I always have been and always will be a huge supporter of the gay community. I am so sorry and so upset that I caused pain to my gay friends, fans and their families with the comments heard this morning. I was having this private conversation with a friend of mine who is gay and our conversation was in no way towards the entire gay community. It is the last thing that I would ever want to do and I cannot put into words how much I wish I could take back every word.HIV/AIDS can hurt anyone, gay and straight, men and women. It’s something I take very seriously and should not have been thrown around in conversation. Gay people are the strongest and most inspiring people I know.

Everyone involved here benefits. Hilton gets herself back in the headlines, and doing something that makes her look comparatively classy: apologizing and praising the resiliency of gay people is an upgrade from getting thrown out of Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium for smoking pot, or turned away from Japan for drug convictions. GLAAD gets its position as the arbiter of publicly (or in this case, privacy-violated ) expressed speech about LGBT people and its role as a redemption engine reaffirmed. And anyone who falls into the category of people who still care about Paris Hilton’s opinion and felt harmed by her speech gets reassured she doesn’t actually mean it. I suppose it’s a good thing that these mechanisms exist. I just wish the standards for making amends were higher, and produced more meaningful results than publicist-brokered apology statements. If we’re going to make famous people go through the motions of bringing their attitudes in line with what’s publicly acceptable, we might as well get more meaningful commitments or donations of time and energy out of them than that.

This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the fifth season of Parks and Recreation.

Parks and Recreation, for two seasons in a row, has made significant transitions. First, the show moved into campaign mode last season, getting Leslie on the stump and out of the Parks Department. Now, she’s working out of City Council, but we haven’t seen her there yet. First, she’s stopping in Washington, getting a sense of what it means to be a small, Pawneean fish in the big pond of Washington, DC, and Ron, left at home in Pawnee, is figuring out what it means to lead the Parks Department without Leslie there to act as a buffer for him. And in both cases, they have to confront their fears of inadequacy.

Leslie’s initially enthusiastic about visting the Nation’s Capitol. “Romantic reunions! Government meetings! Self-guided museum tours! Am I living the dream? I don’t know. Did I mention that I just walked past a food truck and bought myself a waffle sundae?” she declares cheerily as she and Andy begin their sight-seeing tour. But she quickly becomes anxious when confronted with her relative position in Washington. First, the federal official Leslie planned to meet with about funding to clean up Pawnee’s river isn’t available to talk to her, and there’s a huge stack of applications that have arrived ahead of hers. “There’s a CD inside that plays the sound of a babbling river and I was going to play that while I gave my presentation,” she tells his secretary mournfully. The woman promises to make sure Leslie’s application gets special attention—once Leslie reminds her which Pawnee she represents.

But it gets worse when she sees how easily Ben has adjusted to Washington. He’s got hot female friends who work for the Pentagon and Senators, and who tell Leslie things like “Local government is so important. My grandmother’s on the city council in her town. Gives her a reason to leave the house.” Whether he’s being polite or professional, Ben introduces Leslie to Barbara Boxer and Olympia Snowe as “my friend,” rather than “as my girlfriend.” He means it to be kind, telling Leslie later “I thought you’d enjoy meetings numbers 4 and 26 on Leslie’s list of amazing women.” But Leslie’s rattled, undermining herself with the Senators, apologizing for boring them, telling the women Pawnee’s “got tons of problems. We’re overrun with raccoons and obese toddlers.” One of the things that’s always been fun about Pawnee is its slight absurdity, from its cults to its gay penguins. But that eccentricity seems petty in Washington, and Leslie is worried about how she’ll keep her boyfriend’s interest when “Ben’s life is full of senators and briefings and super-PACs. I can’t even get a meeting with some bureaucrat.” Washington may be a stupid swamp town, but it’s a stupid swamp town where Leslie’s hopes and dreams rest, and it’s hard to watch her feel so small.

And back home, it’s hard to watch Ron try to compete with the memory of Leslie as he takes over the employee appreciation barbecue. With her absent, Ron’s relapsing into the kind of rigidity and antagonism that characterized him at the beginning of the series. Not only does he eliminate all the things that his employees love the most about the barbecue, including Leslie’s Parks and Dolls “one-woman show about Parks rules and regulations,” and the gazpacho-off in favor of reorienting the barbecue towards meat, he brings a pig whose “given Christian name” is Tom to the event and intends to slaughter it. “Not enough people have looked their dinner in the eye and considered the circle of life,” he declares.

But rather than bringing around everyone to his point of view, Ron gets increasingly frustrated by the Parks Department’s skepticism of his worldview. Rather than being excited, Chris’s face falls when he realizes what Ron intends to do to Tom the Pig. A park ranger rejects the permit Ron wrote for himself, telling him killing Tom is “against three laws and like a dozen health codes.” Ron’s voice strains dangerously when he tells the Parks staff to water down the beer he brought for the picnic so children can drink it. Ron’s gotten the best of Chris recently, especially when he took home the women’s studies professor Chris had a crush on. But it falls to Chris here to explain to Ron what he’s done wrong at the barbecue. “The point of the barbecue was to thank the department,” he says, not unkindly. “You chose to stay here, which is fine. But if you’re going to lead the department, you occasionally have to lead the department. And I say this as one of your closest colleagues and dearest friends.”

After both their bad days, Leslie and Ron find different ways to step up to the plate. Leslie realizes that she can use the city that overwhelms her to her advantage back home, promising before a press gaggle to make weekly cleanups of the river her office hours. And Ron roasts up Tom the Pig, but not before telling Jerry and his other staffers “Your work is appreciated. Have some corn.” Leslie’s facing challenges bigger than Ron is. But Ron still has a lot of adapting to do with her gone.

Awards are always a terribly flawed way of determining what makes for good popular culture. Limits on the number of nominees lock deserving contenders out of their categories. Differences between the people who watch television shows or movies and the people in the pool assigned to judge them can produce some truly baffling biases and decisions. And winning doesn’t automatically transform a show’s prospects of staying on the air or an actor’s chance of getting good work in the future. But all of those caveats aside, it can be hugely satisfying to see a small show get the recognition you assume it’ll be denied, or an actor break barriers. And if you want better television, here are the shows and performances you should root for get whatever boost it’s possible to wring out of the Emmys on Sunday.

COMEDY SERIES
Who’s Nominated:
The Big Bang Theory
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Girls
Modern Family
30 Rock
Veep

Who Should Win: Girls

Why: There are a lot of legacy shows on this list, and some very notable omissions, particularly Parks and Recreation, which had a much stronger season than its network counterpart 30 Rock. Given that, I have to root for Girls, one of the few comedies to arrive on television knowing exactly what it was and what its strengths were, even if during its run, creator Lena Dunham had to confront some of its more notable weaknesses and absences, particularly when it came to race. Flawed though it may be, those of us rooting for more personal, low-budget shows—and who would like to see folks of color get the opportunities Dunham and Louis C.K. have—should hope for Girls to take home the statuette over more commercial favorites like The Big Bang Theory.

COMEDY ACTOR
Who’s Nominated:
Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory
Larry David as Himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm
Don Cheadle as Marty Kaan in House of Lies
Louis C.K. as Louie in Louie
Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock
Jon Cryer as Alan Harper in Two and a Half Men

Who Should Win: Louis C.K. or Don Cheadle

Why: It’s impossible to compare C.K.’s exploration of wounded and uncertain middle-aged masculinity and Cheadle’s turn as a hyped-up management consultant struggling to raise his potentially transgender son with tenderness and consideration. House of Lies is an inconsistent mess in comparison to the jewel-like Louie. But C.K. isn’t exactly lacking in recognition. And Cheadle’s playing a character who’s more distant from his real self than C.K. Plus, a black actor hasn’t won the Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Emmy since Robert Guillaume for Benson in 1985.

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I’ve mentioned this on Twitter, though perhaps not on the blog: Asawin Suebsaeng, Mother Jones’ movie guy and I, are now doing a weekly podcast. Fittingly, because we spend a lot of time violently disagreeing, it’s called A Movie And An Argument With Alyssa and Swin. This week, because I was off Rosh Hashanah-ing rather than going to the critics’ screening of The Master, I’m offering up Swin’s disappointment as a placeholder for my feelings, which I will attempt to ascertain, along with my feelings about Dredd, this weekend. Also, for those of you who have been wondering how I feel about this season of Boardwalk Empire, details therein:

The idea that shape-shifting lizards from Alpha Draconis are secretly controlling humanity is not precisely a new conspiracy theory, or even new to American politics. Louis C.K. once asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to confirm or deny that he was actually a lizard:

A ballot in the Senate race between now-Sen. Al Franken and then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman was challenged when the man who cast it, Lucas Davenport, wrote in “Lizard People” as a candidate. But it’s one that gains new resonance with the word that Jamie Weinstein, a senior editor at the conservative website the Daily Caller and his colleague Will Rahn, the DC deputy editor, are publishing The Lizard King: The Shocking Inside Account of Obama’s True Intergalactic Ambitions by an Anonymous White House Staffer.

If it was written by anyone else, the idea that President Obama is actually a 12-foot tall reptile would be a genius satire of the conspiracies theories that argue Obama is everything from a secret Muslim to an obvious socialist driven by an anti-colonialist agenda. It may be easier to suggest the latter than to prove that Obama is not actually human (maybe he’s a Skrull instead), but possessing either theory says vastly more about the person who is desperate to see Obama as a deceptive enemy of the American public than Obama himself. But instead, The Lizard King will be coming to us people from a publication that’s consistently peddled misinformation about the Obama administration, even if they were never sufficiently possessed of the chutzpah and tabloid drive to sales to suggest that the president is an alien from outer space. That’s really too bad, because a killer satire of those conspiracies would be a real tonic for our current political climate. Maybe Weinstein and Rahn will rise to the occasion. But this seems more like a jab the people who, rightly, deny that Obama is a conspiratorial enemy of freedom, than the people who spin wild fantasies about him.

Someone knows how to get my attention with a meme:

That said, the entire Tumblr this poster is from, RomCom 2012, is brilliant both as a deconstruction of Romney’s troubles on the campaign trail and of romantic comedies. Romney’s essential unlikability is the core liability of his campaign in the same way that romantic comedies always start with a man and a woman who dislike each other for some reason. In screwball comedies, it’s often because the guy is a sap, like beer heir in The Lady Eve, or the naive movie producer in Sullivan’s Travels. In contemporary romantic comedies, it’s often because the guy is a man-child, as in Apatown movies like Knocked Up or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, or hiding his essential decency behind a facade of distaste for women like the misogynistic radio hosts epitomized by Gerard Butler in The Ugly Truth. The movie turns when the woman involved discovers that the sap is sweet, the man-boy is capable of growing up, the woman-hater is wounded. In Definitely, Maybe, a man who switches identities along with girlfriends figures out what kind of man he wants to be, and which woman he wants to be with. That’s a dilemma that should land with analysts who have watched Romney run for president over the last two cycles.

And Mitt Romney’s problems reveal both the problem with his candidacy and the weakness of romantic comedies. Some guys are never going to shuck off the nerdy professor aura and be miraculously attractive to women. Some man-boys are not going to be suddenly inspired, and find it easy to assume a semblance of adulthood. Some guys genuinely hate women. And some candidates are genuinely stiff rich guys who, at 65, are not going to spontaneously develop a capacity for empathy or an understanding of what it is to struggle.