It’s a new year, and that means a whole lot of new popular culture, whether it’s a crop of television shows centered on female characters, like FX’s The Americans or Showtime’s Masters and Johnson, the continuation of promising franchises like J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek: Into Darkness, or even just news on who will be directing the new Star Wars movies and potentially starring as Carol Danvers in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. But every year, I like to take some time out to explore things that are missing pieces in my own spotty pop-culture education, that give context to the larger trends that are emerging in film and television, or that I simply didn’t get a chance to catch in the previous year. These are my 2013 pop culture New Year’s resolutions. I’d love to hear yours in comments:

1. Finish Homicide: Life On The Street and Twin Peaks: I got through a chunk of Homicide in 2011, and the first season of Twin Peaks last year. And I can’t stop thinking about either one of them. I’m looking forward to finishing both for the simple pleasure of watching them, and for all the things I know that watching them will let me see in the rest of pop culture.

2. Read all of the competitors in the 2013 Tournament of Books: Judging the 2012 Tournament of Books, a competition that puts all kinds of novels, written in all kinds of styles, up against each other, was one of the most fun things I did last year. This year, I’ll just be an observer as a group of talented critics tries to sort between everything from the pulp of Gone Girl to the interrogations of Bring Up The Bodies. But I’m excited to catch up with the books I haven’t read, including HHhH, The Round House, The Fault In Our Stars, Arcadia, May We Be Forgiven, Ivyland, Dear Life, Where’d You Go Bernadette, Beautiful Ruins, and perhaps most of all, Chris Ware’s Building Stories.

3. Seven Samurai. Yojimbo. Ran. Throne of Blood. I don’t know enough about Asian cinema, or about Westerns, either. So it’s time to get my Akira Kurosawa on. I’m going to start with these four movies. And I’d love your recommendations for where to go once I’m done with those.

4. Watch Hatufim: Whether you think Homeland jumped the shark this season or gained adrenaline as it ramped up to the major terrorist attack that ended this season, the show is guaranteed to remain a key part of the prestige television landscape—and shows based on Israeli programs look to become an even more important part of the network television mix. I want to go back and see where Homeland came from and watch Hatufim, the Israeli show it’s loosely based on, especially as Gideon Raff starts work on American television shows in conjunction with Homeland‘s creators.

5. Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl: One of the most common complaints about Hollywood today is that it’s hamstrung by commercial concerns, chasing movies that will make hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than ones that will recoup modest gains but make more important points. But I’m curious about what kinds of movies couldn’t get made when there was a genuine blacklist. So I’m going to spend some time this year with the movies Louise Brooks made in Europe when it was difficult for her to work in the United States.

The Wire and Treme creator David Simon has a tremendous post up about President Obama’s reelection that is also a back-door explanation for why Simon’s own work in television. He writes, among other things, that:

America is different now, more so with every election cycle. Ronald Reagan won his mandate in an America in which 89 percent of the voters were white. That number is down to 72 percent and falling. Fifty thousand new Latino citizens achieve the voting age every month. America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political irrelevance…

This election marks a moment in which the racial and social hierarchy of America is upended forever. No longer will it mean more politically to be a white male than to be anything else. Evolve, or don’t. Swallow your resentments, or don’t. But the votes are going to be counted, more of them with each election. Arizona will soon be in play. And in a few cycles, even Texas. And those wishing to hold national office in these United States will find it increasingly useless to argue for normal, to attempt to play one minority against each other, to turn pluralities against the feared “other” of gays, or blacks, or immigrants, or, incredibly in this election cycle, our very wives and lovers and daughters, fellow citizens who demand to control their own bodies.

This phrase stuck out at me, the idea of people “who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference.” My friend Tyler Lewis and I spend a lot of time talking about the real losses that would come to culture from being “post-racial” if such a thing were possible. It makes characters flatter to insist that their experiences living as a person of whatever race they are have had as little influence on their character and outlook as a sip of water has on the tongue, just as it does so to create characters who represent only racial tropes, uninflected by generation, or geography, or profession, or groups of friends, or cultural exposure. David Simon’s work has always occupied a rare space in between the colorless of race neutrality and the obscurantism of race as the only important fact about a character: his characters lives are shaped by race, including, and sometimes even especially in the case of Jimmy McNulty, their whiteness. And Simon is interested in how living as members of particular races and ethnicities have shaped his characters because he’s interested every single thing about the people he conjures to life on screen.

That ability to be interested in difference rather than intimidated by it, and to approach the things that make someone different from you not as a matter of anthropology but out of desire to know them, is critical to the political distinctions Simon is drawing here. For so long, our politics have been split between ideas like Mark Penn’s theory of microtargeting, which aimed to divide up the population into easily comprehensible interest groups based on shared characteristics, or the uglier, more pervasive strain of thinking that President Obama’s blackness, like that of all African-Americans, is the most defining thing about him. It’s time to abandon that tendency to predict–or diagnose–behavior from a distance maintained out of distaste and fear. And it’s time to embrace a politics oriented towards a genuine desire to understand and appreciate difference, a process that allows for mistakes and clarification as a necessary precondition for growth. It’s made for astonishing television. It could make for transformative politics.

David Simon has never had much patience for the vultures in any economic system he’s examined (with the possible exception of Omar, the roguish robber of drug dealers in The Wire), and he’s positively appalled by the idea that Mitt Romney’s declaration that he’s never paid less than thirteen percent of his income in taxes constitutes an appropriate defense of Romney’s approach to his finances and his fiscal obligations to his government and fellow citizens:

Am I supposed to congratulate this man? Thank him for his good citizenship? Compliment him for being clever enough to arm himself with enough tax lawyers so that he could legally minimize his obligations?

Thirteen percent. The last time I paid taxes at that rate, I believe I might still have been in college. If not, it was my first couple years as a newspaper reporter. Since then, the paychecks have been just fine, thanks, and I don’t see any reason not to pay at the rate appropriate to my earnings, given that I’m writing the check to the same government that provided the economic environment that allowed for such incomes.

Simon may be impatient with Obama, particularly on issues of the drug war and mass incarceration, but if he decides that the present commander in chief is preferable to a guy whose attitudes indicate that, as Simon puts it, “This republic is just about over, isn’t it?” I imagine the Obama administration wouldn’t say no if Simon wanted to shoot some ads for the campaign. Treme comes back in September, and Simon might have some free time once it’s in the can. Just a thought.

It’s been a big week for powerful dudes in the entertainment industry saying things they later regret, and David Simon is no exception. Yesterday, the New York Times published an interview with him in which Simon appears to be the hipsteryest hipster who ever hipstered, saying that if folks weren’t there from the beginning with The Wire, he’s annoyed by their interpretations: “I do have a certain amused contempt for the number of people who walk sideways into the thing and act like they were there all along…I’m indifferent to who thinks Omar is really cool now, or that this is the best scene or this is the best season. It was conceived of as a whole, and we did it as a whole. For people to be picking it apart now like it’s a deck of cards or like they were there the whole time or they understood it the whole time — it’s wearying.”

Fortunately, Simon seems to have recognized that contempt for your audience is not the best marketing strategy, because he called up Alan Sepinwall and attempted a clarification. This part of the interview strikes me as the most compelling:

You can watch it any way you want. I know I’m not allowed to speak for how people want to watch “The Wire.” But let me put it on its head and ask, am I allowed to say what I think has value in the piece for me, and for the other people who worked on the show? For us, telling us how cool Omar was four years after the entire thing is on the page — if that’s the point, then our ambitions were pretty stunted to begin with. I was asked a question about what I thought about the show’s longevity, and about the “Wire” mania that was going on in March when the brackets sprung up, and I answered to that. Other people’s mileage may vary and will vary, but if you’re asking me whether or not that stuff is meaningful, I think in some ways it diminishes “The Wire.” if you go online, you’ll find some people who made very smart critiques of that nonsense. I read those and went, “Yeah, man, those guys get it, and the fellows wasting time breaking this thing down to its components, what a shame.” I would have loved to see an idea or an argument that the show undertook come up in any of that bracketology, and it never does. Once you get done arguing over who’s the coolest, or what scene makes you laugh the hardest, there’s no room left to argue any of the things…

While I don’t think that breaking down Omar’s badassdom and discussing bureaucratic cultures are mutually exclusive enterprises, I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to this kind of frustration. Vulture’s drama derby, even if I found the way it treated gender to be kind of a problem, was one of the only brackets I’ve ever seen that was specifically set up to award intellectual ambition in television. What we want to watch, and the kind of reaction that’s buzzy and memeable don’t always go hand in hand. I think it’s somewhat overweening to suggest that The Wire can only be approached with the Utmost Seriousness, but I can also understand what it must feel like to see The Wire‘s declining ratings and some of the shallower reactions to its legacy and wonder whether it’s worth trying to build something that complex—or on a critical end, trying to plumb certain depths.

I’m not particularly surprised to hear that Felicia Pearson has plead guilty to heroin distribution: as her lawyer put it, “I can’t say she would have been found not guilty.” And it sounds like her plea deal, which lets her avoid a seven-year sentence as long as she doesn’t violate her three-year probation, was reasonable.

David Simon is a wonderful artist, and he’s created genuinely revealing work that has, in some small way, managed to move the conversation about the war on drugs. But the changes he wants to see happen in the real world are necessarily going to come about much more slowly, no matter how much he tells Attorney General Eric Holder that if the Justice Department ends the drug war, he’ll make another season of The Wire. And at the end of the day, as much as The Wire may have gained some real verisimilitude by adding people like Pearson to the cast, that didn’t mean that Pearson, much less the experienced actors involved with the show, were going to find steady work after it. Acting is not necessarily a stable alternative profession that will get someone away from the drug trade.

One of the popular memes in praise of Game of Thrones is that it’s a fantasy version of The Wire. I don’t think that’s inaccurate, but I think the goal shouldn’t be simply to find the next show that’s like The Wire, but to find ways to incorporate The Wire‘s structural sophistication and political values into lots of shows. To that end, someone should really, really adapt Tamora Pierce’s Provost’s Dog books, the third of which is due out in October.

The Provost’s Dog books are fantasy, set in Tortall, a country Pierce invented in 1983 in her first book, Alanna: The First Adventure. Among the major premises of that world is that individual people have magical abilities and that magical work is part of commerce; that the gods are actively involved in a small number of humans’ lives and that the boundaries between the real world and the realm of the gods can become more porous; and that the dead can communicate with the living.

But despite that setting, this is essentially a structural story. Beka Cooper, the main character, is a young cop (or Dog) in a deeply dysfunctional police force in Corus, Tortall’s capital city. She lives in a rooming house with a bunch of young ne’er-do-wells on the rise in the Court of the Rogue, the city’s criminal hierarchy. She and her partners are essentially an independent task force, senior enough to pursue investigations at their leisure. There’s even an avuncular judge, a gay criminal who’s willing to do deals, a real serial killer, and most importantly, an acknowledgement that government’s abilities are limited, and that sometimes you need extralegal organizations in order to maintain some semblance of order, but those groups are going to be less stable than government agencies.
Read more