I thought last night’s episode of The Newsroom was an improvement in its portrayal of the actual process of reporting and the kind of mistakes writers can make in both sourcing and tone when they’re in the heat of a broadcast, if not in Ladies Knowing How to Do Things, or Having a Modern Understanding of The Internet. But there was one thing I thought was disconcerting about the episode: the divide between the way the show talked about Will McAvoy’s father’s drinking and abusive behavior, and the way The Newsroom has consistently portrayed Charlie Skinner.

I’ve been bothered for a while by the way The Newsroom treats Charlie. He’s ostensibly on the side of the angels, and we do see him protecting News Night’s editorial independence. But the show also treats his heavy daytime drinking as if it’s an amusing character quirk, rather than a problem, something that leads him to get so angry at his colleagues at lunch that he’s spitting in their faces as he rants. And we often see him in full-throttle holler mode, going after his employees with an indignation that seems less passionate than abusive, and after executives in a way that seems less strategic than unhinged (speaking of which, where is Leona with the scheming?). Sloan’s screw-up tonight was obviously significant, if motivated by concerns about both the truth and the safety of Japanese people who live near Fukishima. But Charlie’s response, calling her “girl” rather than treating her as if she’s a professional who make a serious error, was bullying rather than a demonstration of commitment to high standards of journalism.

And it came in an episode where we learn that Will’s father was a physically abusive alcoholic. It was an interesting kernel of a revelation, meant to tie together Will’s response to the sorority girl questioner from the pilot and Will’s treatment of a black, gay aide to Rick Santorum, a callback to Chris Matthews’ on-air showdown with Robert Traynham. But instead of showing this and letting the revelation really sink in, The Newsroom chose to tell us in a therapy session Will finally attends after flubbing a show sign-off because he isn’t sleeping. It’s interesting to know that Will has a protective instinct, but given that he’s never demonstrated it to anyone other than MacKenzie before last night, there was something awfully tidy about suddenly making Will Sloan’s Kindly Brother in the story where we had this revelation. And just as The Newsroom’s told us that MacKenzie is a brilliant producer and thinks that means it never has to show her booking a guest or editing a story, the show seemed content to tell us that things had been bad and use that admission to drive plot rather than to make plot clear and to develop characters further.

A show with a stronger sense of drama might let us build to this conclusion and do work to set up Will’s journalistic relationship with Sloan rather than shoehorning it in when necessary to tell a story. A more searching one might even have questioned both Will’s instincts to bully and to protect as insufficient, given that saving women, especially by encouraging them to lie about their intelligence, is not the same as supporting them. And a more consistent one would recognize that certain behaviors are damaging whether exhibited by off-screen abusive fathers or shouty, grandfatherly news executives.

A year ago, when Charlie Sheen was melting down for fun and profit on his post-Two and a Half Men tour, Rolling Stone wrote this about him:

Staring failure in the face and calling it “winning” — that’s the closest thing we have to an American religion. It’s the native tradition, from Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick to Ron Burgundy in Anchorman. And if that’s our religion, Charlie Sheen is our Vatican assassin warlock. Lots of us can look back on ruined lives, lost jobs, squandered fortunes. But to look back on it all and shrug, “I’m tired of pretending I’m not a total bitchin’ frickin’ rock star from Mars”? That’s up there with Ahab threatening to strike the sun if it insults him.

Now, in the same magazine’s pages, in a Q&A that’s out in print today and that I’m looking forward to getting my hands on, he’s singing a rather different tune: “Clearly, a guy gets fired, his relationships are in the toilet, he’s off on some fucking tour, there’s nothing ‘winning’ about any of that. I mean, how does a guy who’s obviously quicksanded, how does he consider any of it a victory? I was in total denial.” Of course, he also says “I mean, the shit works. Sorry, but it works. Anyway, I don’t see what’s wrong with a few drinks. What’s your drink? Tequila? Mine’s vodka. Straight, because I’ve always said that ice is for injuries, ha ha.” And this week, he melted down, cursing out a security guard at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

I remain curious to see Sheen’s new show, Anger Management, if only to see if FX president John Landgraf, who said he accepted the pitch because he was convinced Sheen wanted to reexamine his life and his relationships with women, is right. But there is something wearying about this kind of cycle: a fall from grace, a spectacular burnout, a withdrawal, and a reemergence. As with Britney Spears’ return to music-making, touring, and now acting as a judge on the X Factor, Sheen’s semi-contrition tour feels like recovery as a product, as a means of restoring the value of a profitable franchise. I’m queasy about the repackaging of the wrenching, non-linear processes that are recovery and reinvention into a consumable format.

It’s going to be very, very hard for Elementary, CBS’s Sherlock Holmes adaptation, to convince Sherlock diehards that it’s superior in any way to the miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in any way except in that there will be more of it. But every modern interpretation tends to pick one facet of the great detective’s personality and hone in, and so I think Elementary’s decision to focus on Sherlock as an addict will be a nice complement to Sherlock’s focus on Sherlock as someone with potential Asperger syndrome:

In the stories, Watson regularly discusses Holmes’ use of cocaine and morphine, but the stories tend to track away from these conversations rather quickly, as in The Sign of Four where Holmes admits he uses because “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.” Watson warns him to “Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process which involves increased tissue-change and may at least leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?”

But his warning is diverted by the arrival of a mental exercise that puts Holmes off his second hit of coke. Arthur Conan Doyle was still writing stories on the assumption that we were more interested in the cases Holmes could solve than in Holmes and Watson themselves. In so much as the mysteries illuminated anything, they illuminated London and British society, and to a much lesser extent, the flexibilities that let said society tolerate a man as singular as Sherlock Holmes, and the limitations that led him, at the end of that case, to declare that “For me, there still remains the cocaine-bottle.”

Today, psychology is the point, and we learn about society and its attitudes through a microscope not a sprawling city map. And with Dr. House finally gone from Fox’s airwaves, there may be room for another cranky, brilliant addict on our airwaves. CBS may favor broad entertainments. But when it comes to gaging the market and looking beyond the PBC and BBC sets, it knows us all too well. Whether Elementary succeeds or fails may determine on how interestingly the show manages to update the narrative of the brilliant addict who turns to drugs to entertain himself in a society that moves too slowly for him to match our contemporary understandings of the science of addiction and the acceptable narrative paths to recovery.

I was quite charmed by NBC’s Bent, the sitcom about a stressed-out lawyer, Alex, (Amanda Peet) and her cutie of a contractor, Pete (David Walton), it’s inexplicably burning off to embarrassingly low ratings. Anything that stars Joey King and Jeffrey Tambor deserves at least some strong effort at promotion. And one thing stood out to me while watching the pilot and the second episode (NBC is showing them two at a time, a sad demonstration of the network’s eagerness to get rid of what should have been a solid fall season premiere). Pete’s character is a perfect example of a growing category of characters on television: the charming gambling addict.

It’s not as if gambling addicts are entirely new to television screens. Seeley Booth, the dapper FBI agent portrayed by David Boreanaz on Bones, has a serious gambling problem that the show has played to both dramatic and comedic effect. On How I Met Your Mother, Barney Stinson includes problem gambling among his other compulsive proclivities—he’s well-known enough in Atlantic City to have a regular gang of Asian gaming buddies. It was inevitable that Luck, HBO’s recently-canceled show about the world of horseracing, would have a gambler somewhere in the mix, as it did with Jerry, who can pick winners but inevitably lets his winnings slip through his fingers. Switched at Birth even has a teenage gambler.

Gambling addiction is a perfect fit for television in a number of ways. Gambling addicts don’t have to be kept out of bars, a common default social setting for shows with younger characters, particularly on multi-camera sitcoms. Other than stress, problem gambling doesn’t take an inherent physical toll or come with nasty side effects, so you don’t have to worry about compromising on Hollywood’s standards of attractiveness. And it’s a convenient, but not omnipresent dramatic device that can be deployed when you want to introduce risk or temptation into a character’s storyline.

But gambling addiction is also the perfect television flaw for a recession fueled in part by easy access to credit and a collective gamble that the economy would only continue to grow. These characters are the collective manifestation of a sense that we could beat the system, a sense that we now know is false and is prompting some serious reassessments. They’re charming and handsome (and interestingly, universally male)—in other words, they’re people we want to identify with, rather than condemn or push away, a balance that lets us assign them responsibility but also encourages us to stick with them through the process of managing their addictions. We can’t run away from the problems we’ve created for ourselves, and neither can they. And they make the point that all kinds of people can fall prey to the lure of easy wealth, whether they’re corporate honchos with unidentified functions like Barney, otherwise-upstanding FBI agents like Booth, or regular guys like Pete. It’s nice, but unrealistic, to believe that we all could have seen around corners and avoided trouble when trouble was presented in such a tempting package. Gambling addict characters don’t help us grapple with the larger financial system that benefitted from this collective delusion. But they can help us understand temptation, and the perpetual struggle not to fall for easy promises.

Because I was at SXSW last week, this open thread is a twofer, for which I’m sort of glad, if only because it gives me a chance to comprehensively discuss the political acumen of Mr. Boyd Crowder. This post contains spoilers through the March 20 episode of Justified.

Perhaps the biggest question in contemporary liberalism is whether it’s possible to forge a populism that brings together the white working class with people of color and immigrants. Boyd Crowder is probably not the person to answer that question, given the blowing up of churches and the white supremacy, but his behavior in these last two episodes suggests that in a world where we could run him against Rand Paul in Kentucky, we’d have one hell of an entertaining race on our hands.

His confrontation with Sheriff Napier at the debate is epic. After Napier tries to suggest that Boyd should be disregarded because his status as a felon means he can’t vote (a nice example of Justified drawing drama from real laws), Boyd calmly unloads on him. “”I didn’t come here to vote,” he explains. “You think Shelby’s the only man in this room been done by a coal mining company?…You talk down to me because I been in trouble with the law…[Starting with a picket line where] I know that you weren’t there Mr. Napier. There sure were a lot of men there who looked like you. Men standing on the company side. Laughing at all us hillbillies who were just trying to stand up for what we believed in.”

That summation of the balance of power gives way to some hilariously unorthodox electioneering. Ava’s decision to go contrary to Johnny’s wishes and the core of her and Boyd’s business, killing Delroy to save his girls may have been rather thrilling in the moment. But it doesn’t mean she’s exactly a feminist, just that she’s willing to run whores for a somewhat more innovative purpose than the vicious junkie she murdered. “The girls, they’re excited to practice their constitutional right to vote, and to give a free handjob for every vote cast for our friend Shelby,” she explains. “They’ve already given blowjobs to a couple of boys Napier was counting on to haul for him and convinced them to take the day off.” And Boyd is smart enough to realize that if shots, sex and populist appeal aren’t enough to pull off the election, that you can never go wrong knowing your electoral law as well as your voters.

Speaking of prostitution, we get a look inside the deeply troubled mind of Robert Quarles tonight in the wake of his defeat. When Wynn Duffy finds out his partner in crime has been popping Oxy, he asks “How long have you been taking those? Mr. Quarles, maybe it is time you leave Kentucky.” “I got nowhere else to go,” Quarles explains to him. And when a young man barges in on them with a gun, threatening to kill Quarles for torturing Brady Hughes, Quarles talks his way out of the standoff by exposing himself as a raw nerve end.

“My father was a heroin addict. He wasn’t necessarily an evil man. But he couldn’t kick his addiction, couldn’t keep a job either,” Quarles explains.Luckily for my father, he had a very pretty little boy. And plenty of men were willing to pay for my company. What is your name?…That’s what it was like for me, Donovan. For many years. And then one day a man named Theo realized what was happening. You see, Theo believed deeply in family…Theo ushered me in, where inside, on his knees, was my father. I was fourteen years old, and I understood what it meant to honestly be free…Hurt him. No, son, I never hurt him. I did everything I could to help him. And then I set him free.”

I’ve been debating with myself all season long whether I think the decision to make Quarles a sexual sadist adds to or detracts from his character. I tend to think the details, even these ones, are a bit formulaic. But I do think there’s something interesting about sending Raylan, in a moment when he’s a bit of a mess, up against someone who’s crazy. These are, in their own ways, two mythic figures facing each other at a moment when they’ve both been badly hurt. It’s Batman v. the Joker in Kentucky. In this land where hollers replace dark alleys, Raylan’s as close as you get to aristocracy, someone with a sense that peace is owed him and he’s going to take pleasure in wresting it from his rogue’s gallery.

In the wake of Whitney Houston’s death, unfortunate references to her past crack use—even though it appears her death was related to prescription drug use—were rampant. Take, for example, John Kobylt, the co-host of Clear Channel’s The John and Ken Show, who delivered this gem, from the theoretical perspective of Houston’s friend: “It’s like, ‘ah Jesus, here comes the crack ho again. What’s she gonna do? Oh, look at that, she’s doing handstands next to the pool. Very good, crack ho. nice.’ After a while, everybody’s exhausted. And then you find out she’s dead.” The remarks landed them a suspension and an agreement that they, as well as channel staff, would attend sensitivity training.

There was no such punishment for Fox commentator Eric Bolling, who decided it was clever to respond to comments by Rep. Maxine Waters by declaring “What is going on in California? How’s this? Congresswoman, you saw what happened to Whitney Houston. Step away from the crack pipe, step away from the Xanax, step away from the Lorazepam because it’s going to get you in trouble. How else do you explain those comments?” He was wise enough to roll back the comments immediately, but not to have refrained from making them in the first place.

It’s amazing that, given how racialized references to crack use are, and how ugly they can be when combined with implications about an accused female user’s sexual behavior, that people with any pretense to respectability, like Bolling, are still bringing it up. Kobylt’s remarks were ugly and insensitive, not only to Houston, but to the people in her life who cared abut her and who were affected by her addiction. Bolling’s are nonsensical—they have literally no point or relevance but to reach for a spurious stereotype about black women. It’s one thing to refer to crack cocaine use if someone is actually consuming crack cocaine. But it would be delightful if we could stop using it as a sloppy, ugly attempt to signal something meaningful.

We’re at a moment when a cohort of actors who cut their teeth in hipster-friendly projects like Party Down and the Frat Pack movies are coming of age. Whether it’s Lizzy Caplan’s emergence as a viable romantic comedy star thanks to her wonderful turn on New Girl; or Adam Scott’s Parks and Recreation-minted heartthrob status; the wave of goodwill Jason Segel is riding right now after his successful reboot of the Muppts franchise; or Aaron Paul’s search for the role that will take him beyond his turn as morally conflicted meth cooker Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad, these actors are all starring in romantic comedies this year. It’s fascinating to see what, if anything, is different about this well-worn trope as taken on by actors less invested in traditional Hollywood glamor than in self-lacerating humor. Mostly it seems that they’re just as invested in marriage and commitment as prior generations, but the obstacles to their happiness are different.

For the younger set, there’s Damsels in Distress, a decidedly odd-looking comedy about a group of college girls (played by actresses way too old for the setting) out to save their classmates from the scourges of depression and cads with donuts and tap-dancing. The movie’s quirky enough that I can’t tell if there’s an abstinence metaphor or there will be an abstinence subplot here. But there’s still something interesting about a college sex comedy framed around a very different framework and with characters who have very different priorities:

Then, there’s Save the Date, which doesn’t have a formal trailer yet, but is one of the movies from Sundance that’s stuck with me most closely. Alison Brie and Lizzy Caplan play sisters Beth and Sarah, the former about to get engaged to Andrew (Martin Starr) a drummer in a rock band, the latter shaken by an unexpected proposal from Kevin (Geoffrey Arend), the frontman for that same band. When Sarah breaks up with Kevin, she embarks on casual relationship that turns into something more serious. To a certain extent, it’s a movie with very conventional themes: love can show up at surprising times! Marriages are more important than weddings! But it’s interesting to see those themes play out in a setting and with semi-bohemian characters who might have rejected marriage in another generation of movies:

Bridesmaids let it be known that sometimes women go a little crazy in the process of planning a wedding, even when they’re happy for the bride. Bachelorette, which also stars Caplan along with Kirsten Dunst and Isla Fisher apparently goes much darker, exposing a group of women who get decidedly vicious when the least conventionally attractive of their number gets engaged before they do. I’ll be curious to see if the movie is honest in its darkness or an occasion to paint all women as catty, status-obsessed, jealous, and willing to tear each other up:

I think Bill O’Reilly is correct that Whitney Houston is perhaps not the best example to deploy if you want to make the case that legalizing narcotics would decrease violence related to the drug trade and make it easier for addicts to get help (I happen to agree with at least a limited version of that case). But the rest of this statement doesn’t exactly count as brave truth-telling. Watch it:

There’s nothing bold, counterintuitive, or perhaps more importantly, compassionate about saying cruel things about addicts like: “Whitney Houston wanted to kill herself. Nobody takes drugs for that long if they want to stay on the planet.” I’ve been fortunate enough not to be touched directly by addiction, but it’s my understanding that the compulsion to use has little to do with a specific suicidal ideation. And of course, you can have an addiction and still love life and depending on the level of use, contribute to society. Whitney Houston’s fans know she’d struggled for years with a disease—not failed morals. Whitney’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, who O’Reilly mentioned had been hospitalized in the wake of her mother’s sudden death, is probably more aware of anyone else on the planet of what it’s like to live with her mother’s particular failed fight against addiction.

Nobody Bill O’Reilly to remind them that Houston’s addiction robbed her of many productive years of her career and was painful, embarrassing, and detrimental to her. And there’s nothing brave about blaming addicts for the societal consequences of their addictions.