Because I spend a lot of time overanalyzing things, I tend to grade on a bit of a curve for pop culture I can just purely enjoy, like Revenge (though even there I get some sweet, sweet class warfare politics) or Once Upon a Time, ABC’s frothy fairy tale, which debuted last night. I’m a sucker for fractured fairy tales — I once won a Girl Scout writing contest by revising Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to make Snow White a union organizer and her evil stepmother a majority shareholder in a mining corporation.

But the show also got me thinking about a funny little holdover, the persistence of shows about magic set in small towns. In Once Upon a Time, Emma leaves the city where she’s working as a bail bondswoman and finds an eerily perfect little town in Maine that happens to be populated (perhaps entirely? We don’t know yet.) by amnesiac fairy tale characters. In Eastwick, the short-lived 2009 ABC adaptation of John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, magic turns another small New England town upside down. Grimm, NBC’s supernatural cop show, which premieres this weekend, is set in Portland, and while that’s not exactly a small town, the show is shot to make it seem like it’s taking place on the edge of the frontier, with cases that take its paranormal detective into the woods. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which eventually expanded in scope over the years, started in a Southern California version of a New England small town, a community that looped between school, home, and the Bronze, a closed little world.

It’s not really surprising that this is the case. We actually had witch trials in New England in the early years of our country’s history: the fear of and fascination with magic, as well as anxieties about how easy it is for misconceptions to set in and take over small communities, is part of our founding story. When characters live at the edge of what you consider the known or civilized world, maybe it’s easier to believe that there are things beyond the canon accepted human knowledge than it is to believe such things surrounded by the calming omnipresence of civilization in the city. And if you want magic to be something that disrupts the lives of a wide swath of characters rather than be the secret knowledge that binds together a small group of people, a small town is a more reasonable setting. But the presence of magic in small towns is an interesting photo-negative commentary on the idea that they’re a repository of values and a guarantor of safety. You may leave a set of contemporary, human-created concerns behind if you flee to the suburbs and beyond. But you may find a whole new set of concerns if you venture into — or close to — the woods.

I’m going to need some time to figure out how I feel about a medical show starring a ghost, even if said ghost is All-Time Alyssa Rosenberg Favorite Jennifer Ehle. But I have to say, I was really impressed by the extent to which the pilot episode of A Gifted Man took on the impact of inadequate health care from multiple dimensions.

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

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

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

The first and most forceful thing that struck me about Pan Am is the extent to which the show looks like a product of the era it’s about. The colors are incredibly bright. If a scene isn’t set at night, even if it’s someone running away from her theoretically-perfect wedding, everything gleams. There isn’t a bit of dirt or grit anywhere. The characters barely even sweat when they’re flying exiles out of Cuba (without, of course, the recognition that these might be the same types who stormed the beach in the Bay of Pigs fiasco). Roses glow on night tables. Even rainy London looks fantastic. I harp on this not because it’s bad — the show is lovely to look at — but because if there’s a case to be made for period stories reflecting actual nostalgia for the period at hand, Pan Am‘s lushness would be it.

Is a better show than The Playboy Club? Almost certainly. Christina Ricci is always a delight to watch, whether she’s changing in the back of a cab or bossing her coworkers around, and I hope the show has a meaty and specific storyline in store for her other than lusting after a profoundly dull pilot who’s in love with one of her colleagues. And Kelli Garner’s really wonderful as a stewardess who springs her Barbie-like sister from a stifling marriage, only to find said sister eclipse her as the face of Pan Am, and in fact, an entire age. I really appreciate that the show refrains from just making her jealous, giving her a mission and purpose. The world may open up for a pretty girl who becomes a Pan Am stewardess and gets a chance to travel and see the world. But it really opens up for a woman who’s asked to spy for her country.

That said, I think Pan Am has the same problem that The Playboy Club does: an insecurity about the idea that their basic setup is interesting enough to engage an audience. Working at The Playboy Club is pretty interesting totally on its own. Introducing a new generation to transatlantic travel opens up all sorts of conversations about female independence, sexual norms, and cross-cultural exchange. And while The Playboy Club‘s a mess, Pan Am‘s gender politics actually feel much more conventional. That final scene of the little girl watching the Pan Am stewardesses, in all their regulated beauty, walk through the airport and seeing them as goddesses bothered me just as much as the voiceovers declaring Playboy Bunnies the luckiest women in the world. At least The Playboy Club‘s events give lie to that argument. Pan Am just makes embodying a corporation look grand.

In a sense, Whitney feels like the most conventional new sitcom to hit airwaves this fall (at least of the shows I’ve been checking out, and so I didn’t have extremely high expectations for it). Unlike 2 Broke Girls, also the product of Whitney creator and star Whitney Cummings, it doesn’t have a particularly strong frame narrative. And unfortunately, like Free Agents, it’s got a deeply annoying cast of backup characters including a piggish police officer, a drunk divorcee (who, to be fair, gets the great line when someone tells her she can’t wear pants to a wedding “I pay alimony to a husband who does spoken word for a living. I could wear cargo pants.”), and an irritatingly in love couple. Are we really getting less of Maulik Pancholy on 30 Rock so he can do this?

Fortunately, Cummings and Chris D’Elia, who plays her character’s long-term boyfriend Alex, have a really nice warm chemistry. The opening scene of them sparring over the bathroom mirror, eyeliner on Whitney’s temple, Alex using Whitney’s hoodie as a towel, all felt natural and fun, like an actual couple that’s been together for five years but still enjoys pushing each other’s buttons.

As for the rest of the show, Whitney feels like something that I’m glad exists, even if I don’t really feel engaged by it. Are there more dramatic, or funnier ways to illustrate the problems that couples, both straight and more particularly gay, face on things like hospital visitation than to have Whitney try to talk her way to Alex’s beside in the hospital while she’s wearing a sexy nurse’s outfit? Sure, but it’s still useful to have someone dramatize it. Is Alex declaring, “You can forget Cosmo studies, and your can forget your Mom, and forget all that stuff. This is about me and you. This is the best part of being together for so long. You can wear your hair up, or down, or hoodies, or whatever, I don’t care,” the last word in feminism? No, but it’s still the kind of thing that it’s good to have people say until women stop pressuring themselves about marriage.

As long as we knew it was coming, I’ve been a vocal, even loud skeptic of the idea of a Prime Suspect remake. Helen Mirren’s performance as Jane Tennison is definitive, I thought. American network television would never portray a character who’s that actively and interestingly difficult, an alcoholic who kind of uses the men she dates, who has an abortion as if it’s matter-of-fact. And most importantly, I thought that the way the show dealt with institutionalized sexism might feel kind of unfortunately dated. But you know what? I was wrong. And I’m quite sorry to hear that the show is going to sideline sexism in future episodes.

What changed my mind was a summer where two now-former New York police officers, Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, were acquitted of raping a woman they were supposed to help get safely home, in part because one of the jurors wondered, “What if [Moreno and the victim] became close? What if they hit it off, somewhere between the taxicab and the dead roach? A moment that turned into conversation, that turned into flirting? What if it all led to something that Moreno thought was consensual?” It was a summer where another cop, Michael Pena, was charged with 10 counts of rape and assault, and is now under investigation for attacking two other women. And it was a summer where the Manhattan district attorney walked away from a sexual assault prosecution but not before utterly hanging the victim out to dry.

I don’t believe all cops are rapists. I don’t think that Special Victims Units always let women down, though I’m confident what happens there is more complicated than what I see on Law & Order: SVU. But you know what? I do believe a force that includes people who abuse their power to assault people might also include people who say things about women detectives like “A squad is only as good as its beef trust, because the beef trust only cares about the work…The beef trust can’t flutter their eyelashes. All the beef trust can do is the work. That’s why the beef trust deserves the jobs. All the jobs.” That there are probably cops who hate sexual harassment laws and complain that “You scratch your batteries and it’s a hostile work environment…She’s one of us until it suits her not to be.”

And I believe that it’s important for there to be, among all the other shows that lionize our police forces, one that explores and is attentive to that reality; that explains that men can be both loving fathers to their daughters and awful to their female coworkers. The show is smart enough to have her obnoxious coworkers have a sense that they’ve crossed a line, even though where they draw the line is not even close to where I’d draw the line. At a benefit, when Jane offers to buy her coworkers a drink and one of the guys on the squad goes off on her, telling his colleagues not to take her money because “Tell that bitch it’s no good in here,” calling her an “opportunistic whore,” their other male coworkers tell the guy to can it, and get him out of the way. They may not comfort Jane, but they aren’t totally monsters, which makes the portrait of them as sexists much more convincingly damning than making them all monsters.

And it helps that Bello is very good, and her character isn’t a direct copy of Mirren’s Jane Tennison. She’s in a steady relationship with a divorced man, Eddie, whose ex-wife uses Jane as an excuse to make it harder for Eddie to see his son. She’s also aware about when she’s screwing up, as when she asks too quickly after one of the officers in the squad dies if she can have his case. “I just thought I gotta ask now while they’re distracted, before they can regroup, right?” she agonizes to her father. “I thought that was my only chance, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I should have waited. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked at all. Or maybe, I should have called Dan Costello and ask for the job because that’s what they all think I do anyway.” Just because she’s treated badly doesn’t mean she does everything right. After she discovers major new information in a case, she’s prickly with a coworker who is acknowledging the merits of her work. “Can I ask you something?” he says, exasperated. “You ever worry that someone might drop a house on you?” “This car won’t drive itself,” she tells him dourly. It’s not quite the moment in the original where Mirren tells a coworker who keeps calling her Ma’am and suddenly switches to Sir that “My voice suddenly got lower, has it? Maybe my knickers are too tight. Listen, I like to be called Governor or The Boss. I don’t like Ma’am – I’m not the bloody Queen. So take your pick.” But it’s it’s own thing. And in its own way, it’s as important a story now is it was in 1991.

Revenge isn’t the best show of the fall, but it’s more fun than I expected, full of the kind of dark sizzle that Ringer should have had. And while the setup’s baroque and soapy, it’s actually set around a fascinating premise. The main character is working to take out a group of wealthy Hamptonites who helped frame her father for helping provide financing to terrorists.

It’s an interesting choice. For the last 10 years, collaborating with terrorism has probably been the worst accusation you could level at another American. Such charges have been the justification for horrible attacks on American Muslims, they are the source of the fascination with John Walker Lindh. The idea of a businessman helping a terrorist group route funding without any ideological reason for doing so is difficult to imagine, and so you can see how charges like that would be horrifying. Would it be better to tell a story about false accusations through the eyes of Muslim characters, and from the basis of communities that have actually been victimized by these kinds of allegations and hate crimes inspired by those allegations? Absolutely. But it might also be a very hard sell, and not necessarily a productive thing, to have a Muslim character taking sometimes violent revenge on Americans who are too stupid, or self-interested, to separate out a religion from its fanatics. It would be pretty disastrous if an ABC soap got in the business — however accidentally — of spreading the impression that there are grievance-mongering, taqiyya-practicing Muslims all up in the Hamptons. If we’re going to have a pop take on the issue, this may be the way to go.

I don’t really think that shows like this are a major and valuable part of our debate over issues like terrorism or class (there are lots of nice little class and intra-social class conflicts in the pilot). But I do think it’s interesting that rather some baroque and non-topical way of killing off the main character’s father, the show chose something topical, appropriate, and attuned to American fears and weaknesses. I’d rather stupid, fun shows acknowledge that politics play a big role in American life and use that as the basis for ridiculousness than invent flimsy personal stories that don’t really hold up as the basis for melodramatic events (a la Ringer). We messed up our country in the way we responded to terrorism. It’s really a stretch for me to believe that bad people would use national tragedy to disgusting personal ends.

Okay, we’ll start with this, and as folks coalesce around a sense of what fall shows they want to discuss, we’ll revisit this. But we’re definitely going to do Boardwalk Empire, The Good Wife, Homeland, The Walking Dead, Community, and Parks and Recreation, which will start tomorrow. I was also thinking of doing a joint post on Pan Am and The Playboy Club, which I think belong in conversation with each other, if that’s agreeable to folks.

I was talking to the awesome Chloe Angyal from Feministing a couple of weeks ago about how we need a more specific set of terms so people don’t use Manic Pixie Dream Girl to describe all annoying female character tropes. One friendly person (if it’s you, holler and I’ll provide proper credit, I swear) on Twitter had suggested Paper Dolls for replaceable action starlets. Chloe came up with Insert Girl Here for the girlfriend the male lead dumps so he can fall for the lead woman, and Lesson on Legs for women who exist to provide the male lead with an important lesson before heading off to live the rest of their lives presumably in service of their own interests. In The New Girl, Zooey Deschanel is an archetypal Girltergeist, a character who despite her ephemerality manages to be impressively annoying. She would be a female Peeves if she seemed capable of intentionality.

The thing that’s frustrating about the character is that the show makes her seem stupid, rather than goofily endearing or unsocialized in a way that seems charming because it exposes social rituals as artificial and contrived. No grown-ass person thinks that humping a plant is a way to fulfill a stripper fantasy. It’s not actually charming to spend your first days in a new apartment crying loudly in common areas and totally hogging the TV without any consideration for your new roommates. Going up to someone in a bar and addressing them as “Hey, sailor,” is just weird. As is refusing to do as much as order a glass of wine to hold a table in a restaurant and instead asking if you can have more free things when you are an adult with a job. As is being spacey enough to burn your own hair off. None of these things expose anything about social rituals, or calcified senses of how women ought to behave. They’re just infantilizing and strange.

A long-term commenter suggested that I might like the show because of a scene where one of Jess’s new roommates, Nick, suggests that he can guide her back into the dating market, only to have her reply in a quaver, “Like Gandalf through Middle Earth?” Nick’s game, talking her through it and suggesting “First, let’s take the Lord of the Rings references, let’s put them in a deep, dark cave, where no one’s going to find them, ever.” Instead of laughing, blowing her nose, and returning to the world, Jess keeps going in that baby voice, telling Nick: “Except Smeagol. He lives in a cave.” If this is what nerd girls are supposed to be, people who dodge adult conversations by retreating further into fairyland, count me resolutely out. And it’s not like there’s any sign here that Jess is really a nerd, just that she watched the same couple of movies that all of us watched because hey, they’re awesome. This is nerd-pandering, and I have other options. I’m not so desperate for references to the nerd canon that I have to watch this to get some affirmation that Hollywood knows that I exist.
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I’m on record as being pretty excited for Tower Heist, and for a movie that considers the non-extremely wealthy of Bernie Madoff’s fraud. And it seems like Bernie Madoff revenge fantasies or victim stories are everywhere this fall. Ponzi schemes play a role in 2 Broke Girls and Apartment 23. A Bernie Madoff grotesque is one of the assassination targets in Colombiana

But the obsession with Madoff isn’t just a bad thing because it’s a derivative trope. If pop culture makes him the sole scapegoat for the financial crisis, our television shows and movies will be dodging a complicated but important issue. I understand why Madoff’s convenient. If he’s to blame for people losing their trust funds and job opportunities, shows can give us a slightly shrunken New York, a recessionista version, as it will, without blaming all those cute investment bankers who are potential love interests for our heroines. But that’s a dodge. Not every story should be a complete chronicle of the entire financial crisis, but shows set in New York or with interests in our reshaped economy should be clear that you didn’t have to be criminal to cause an incredible amount of damage even if they’re not incredibly specific about the mechanisms of the damage.

I’ll admit I started watching The Playboy Club with a certain measure of ill grace and anti-Eddie Cibrian bias, and even after watching it, I think my skepticism is correct. There are a lot of intriguing elements in this show — a former mob lawyer who’s now representing black Chicagoans in housing discrimination cases; an aging Bunny trying to move into the ranks of management; a black Bunny who sees the Club as a refuge from the outside world’s discrimination; the problematic but interesting notion that being a Bunny was a way to reinvent yourself, even if it was a highly controlled and limited one — that are essentially swamped under some deeply clunky writing and overacting by the leads. But the first episode did have one surprise so gratifying and so potentially important that I’ll be back for another round of the show, even if it’s a storyline that’s only five minutes a week.

A lot of the Playboy Club’s problems, I think, stem from a lack of self-awareness, of the pilot’s unwillingness to explore the uncomfortable assumptions behind the things the characters are saying to each other that should be the essence of a show like this that’s all about a moment when one set of behaviors became not okay and another set of behaviors and identities fought ferociously for their right to exist. When some young Club patrons learn, to their surprise, that they can’t sleep with one of the Bunnies for the grand total of $1.50, the Bunny in question explains to them, “And I’m not a waitress, either. I’m Bunny Janie.” The interesting bit here is that self-delusion, the idea that she’s achieved some separate category, and what it takes to convince herself of that. When Hugh Hefner says in the voiceover that opens the show, “it was a place where anything could happen to anybody. Or any Bunny,” that’s true, only if bad things can happen as well as good things.

The other challenge the show faces, and I’m curious to see how Pan Am will handle this, is how to create an atmosphere of pervasive sexism and racism without making the characters who say sexist and racist things seem totally revolting to an audience who will refuse to identify with them in ways that will allow the show to actually explore issues. When one Bunny jauntily declares that if she overeats at the Mansion’s breakfast buffet, “I just stick my finger down my throat and throw ‘em up. It’s this new diet I heard about,” it’s alienating rather than creating affinity between an audience who knows the cost of bulimia and a character who’s embracing it as a trend.
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