I hadn’t read World War Z by the time the trailer for the Brad Pitt-Mireille Enos movie came out, but after I finished it this morning, it was clear what a travesty this adaptation seems poised to be. It would be impossible to adapt the oral history as a single, coherent narrative. But the book seems like it would lend itself to a miniseries that could float between different perspectives, or perhaps even more fittingly, a series of movies like the Red Riding trilogy, which explored the long-running investigation into a Yorkshire serial killer. Here are the six sections of World War Z that struck me as the most likely candidates for stand-alone films:

Section: Kondo Tatsumi and Tomonaga Ijiro
Director: Stephen Chow
Why It Would Be Great: An otaku and a blind gardener take Japan back from the zombies? It would be one of the greatest genre mashups since Kung Fu Hustle, not to mention a pair of fantastic roles for Asian men. And while Chow is from Hong Kong, rather than Japan, his touch with Hustle was absolutely delightful. I’d love to see him have a shot at pitting two unlikely heroes against a mob of incredibly scary antagonists, and to pair it with some gorgeous landscape cinematography.

Section: Todd Wainio
Director: Ed Zwick
Why It Would Be Great: As he proved in Glory, the man can do a battle sequence. And it would be exciting to see a filmmaker with his kind of conscience take on the utter failure of the American military, and its attempt to recover from it, strategically and psychologically, and to turn the tide. Also, if Nicholas Brody’s going to get killed in the finale of Homeland this weekend, Damian Lewis is going to have some time on his hands. I’d love to see him take on this soldier’s role, particularly for the chance to see him get paired up with an honest-to-God, badass battle nun, who is Wainio’s partner in the reformed military.

Section: Admiral Xu Zhicai
Director: Shawn Ryan
Why It Would Be Great: Last Resort may be toast, but Ryan was on to something interesting with his story about a submarine crew gone rogue after it was given orders to fire a nuclear weapon on Pakistan. I’d love to see him take a shot at capturing the story of a Chinese submarine crew who smuggled their families on board and created a survivable society on board their ship as they fled from the zombie apocalypse consuming their country. Instead of deciding not to fire their nuclear weapons, as is the case in Last Resort, this story ends with the agonizing choice to nuke a bunker full of hardline Chinese leadership. It’s a harrowing adventure, but a deeply creative one, and it would avoid some of the pitfalls Ryan ran into when he tried to build out not just a sub crew but the population of an island in his ABC show.

Section: Xolelwa Azania
Director: Connie Field
Why It Would Be Great: Field directed Have You Heard From Johannesburg?, the amazing documentary series about the end of apartheid. While most of the people I recommend to direct these movies are feature directors, it would be fascinating to see Field go fictional and tackle South Africa’s decision to implement the Redeker Plan, an effort to save a core of South Africa by abandoning some of the population and the country’s land to the zombie infestation. As a story about racial reconciliation despite the echoes of apartheid in the plan, this could be a fascinating, subtle movie.

Section: Christina Eliopolis
Director: Patty Jenkins
Why It Would Be Great: This story of an Air Force pilot bailed out in the middle of infested zombie territory, staying alive with a voice on the radio as her only guide, could be an incredible showcase for a young female action star, maybe Gina Carano. And Jenkins knows a thing or two about directing a woman under extreme duress. This could be a simple, stripped-down, incredibly scary movie that wouldn’t even need to showcase a lot of zombies to be terrifying.

Section: Breckinridge Scott
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Why It Would Be Great: In Contagion, Soderbergh featured a repellant blogger, played by Jude Law, who spread the news of a false cure for a global pandemic, and was later found to be in the pay of a pharmaceutical company which hoped to spike sales of herbal remedies. I’d love to see him put this kind of scenario at the center of a film, instead of addressing it as one of many threads in a single movie. He’d have so much fun tearing into a figure like Scott, and portraying the luxury he lives in as a kind of suffocating rot.

The killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Libya last month, and the protests that swept the region afterwards, were an illustration of the profound difficulties the Middle East faces in the phase of its history that followed the Arab Spring. The television shows that started airing last week were in development long before those tragic events, and couldn’t have anticipated them, but in a sense, that makes them more forward-looking. A profound sense of anxiety about America’s foreign policy in the Middle East is showing up on both network and cable television this fall, on issues ranging from America’s relationship with Israel and Iran, to the quality of decision-making in the chain of command, to our ability to project power to prevent genocide.

Showtime’s Homeland returned this season with its characters operating in an environment where Israel had bombed Iran’s nuclear sites in an effort to prevent that nation from successfully developing an atomic weapon. It’s a somewhat more realistic scenario than one in which an American prisoner of war returned to the United States and became close enough to the Vice President of the United States to have a serious shot at assassinating him, and a storyline that could give Carrie Mathison and Saul Berenson work to do even if Nicholas Brody were to be removed as the series’ primary antagonist. A strike on Iran may be a nightmare possibility, but it’s one that emerges from the region’s history and the public imagination rather than the fevered brains occupying a writers’ room.

It’s also a device that, unlike the drone strike that provided a background for the action of the first season of the show, portrays the United States as more drawn into a conflict than instigating it. We learn about the strike from a news report that doesn’t discuss whether the United States supported it, or whether it’s caused tensions between the United States and Israel. Future episodes suggest at least some Americans support the attack, or at least want to intervene to clean up the messy aftermath of it. But through the three episodes I’ve seen, the strike provides an atmosphere of tension more than an actual driver of plot for Homeland‘s second season. The theme of American complicity and blowback have receded, and I miss the narrative propulsion and moral engagement of the drone strikes debate from the first season.

Homeland‘s creators Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon told me when I spoke to them in August that the other frame narrative they’d considered for their show’s second season involved Pakistan’s growing instability and nuclear weapons. Their decision to go in another direction means they aren’t overlapping with Last Resort, about the crew of a nuclear submarine who become enemies of the state when they question orders to launch a nuclear weapon at Pakistan. That chain of events is a less literal thought experiment than Israel’s strikes in Homeland, given that nuclear disaster in Pakistan is more likely to result from weapons insecurity or the instigation of a war between India and Pakistan than offensive action by the United States.
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I’m excited for Sons of Anarchy to return to FX tonight and for the debut of Lost Resort on ABC (it’s available online, but airs for the first time on September 27). They’re both ambitious shows with big ideas, Last Resort about nuclear weapons and the geopolitical stability, Sons of Anarchy about masculinity and fraternity. And they’re both shows with diverse casts, from creators with interesting, if contrasting, thoughts on the best way to get television to get more like the people watching it.

Both Ryan and Andre Braugher, who stars in Last Resort, were asked about Braugher’s status as the rare African-American lead on television at the Television Critics Association press tour earlier this summer. Ryan pointed out that this wasn’t the first time he’s had a black male lead in one of his shows—Dennis Haysbert came first in The Unit. But Ryan said he thought that a color-blind approach was the best way to get television functioning like a true meritocracy for people of color.

“I just never looked at it that way. I’ve wanted the best actor for the role. I try to be as color-blind as possible in most roles that I cast,” he said. “You know, when we put together a list for this role, there were various ethnicities involved, the same for Sam, you know, literally every role. You know, networks want people to watch their shows, and a lot goes into who the audience is. I just don’t concern myself with that. I concern myself with how good can the show be? And you’ve heard Andre speak here today. What writer wouldn’t want him saying their words? So things are changing. Thing are getting better, I think. I feel like I’m doing my part…And I actually do believe that Hollywood is the kind of place where merit can and is rewarded, and so I assume it will be nice when these questions don’t get asked anymore, when Andre can just be an actor playing Marcus Chaplin and portray him and get praise for his performance, but unfortunately, we are not to that point yet. But it feels like we are better off than we were 15, 20 years ago, and hopefully, 20 years from now, we won’t have to worry about it.”

When I spoke to Sutter a few days after the Last Resort panel, we chatted about the arc of Sons of Anarchy in terms of its approach to race, particularly given last season’s plot in which Juice, a younger member of SAMCRO, is blackmailed over his father’s race and lead to believe the fact that he is part African-American could lead to him being expelled from the motorcycle club.

“The interesting thing about MCs, or maybe interesting is the wrong word, but the fascinating thing about the racial component I always felt was the idea that we have a very grey areas. They’re not really defined,” he told me. “It was important for me to separate [the club the show focuses on] from white supremacists in the first couple of seasons, and I did want to acknowledge there is this antiquated bylaw in most of the larger clubs. How did that play out? In some clubs, it’s very rigid. What happened to Juice, he definitely would have been drummed out. Other clubs, not so much.”

In the course of talking about Juice’s plot arc the last season, Sutter pivoted to talking about race more generally, and offered something of a counterpoint to Ryan, with whom he worked on The Shield.

“I just like the reality of bringing in people of color in terms of the show,” he said. “I was just reading Shawn Ryan’s TCA [session] this morning about casting Andre Braugher as a lead of that show. And I think it’s important, and I think there’s a certain responsibility that we have to do that. I try to, even though I write a show about a bunch of white guys riding motorcycles, I probably have as many or more people of color employed on my show than most shows.”

The reality of it is that Hollywood probably needs both of these approaches. Shows and movies that aren’t explicitly about race won’t get more diverse unless the people writing casting notices truly mean it when they say they want people of all races and ethnicities to read for roles, and make that desire clear all the way down their chain of command. And it would help if more white creators were genuinely interested in race, and felt comfortable and confident creating characters of color while remaining aware of the dangers of racial ventriloquism. We need a lot of kinds of stories, and a lot of kinds of characters, and it’s going to take people with a lot of different visions to make them.