This is fascinating in concept if not precisely in execution: Lifetime is remaking Steel Magnolias, that redoubtable weepie of Southern women, beauty shops, and diabetic comas, as a television movie. But it’s doing so with an all-black cast that includes Queen Latifah, Phylicia Rashad, and Jill Scott. Latifah will play M’Lynn, taking Sally Field’s role in the original, and her daughter Shelby, portrayed by Julia Roberts in the original, will be played by Rashad’s daughter Condola. All the casting discussion aside, this project raises a number of questions* that I feel like I don’t have answers to.

Should we embrace remakes of movies that originally had black casts with white leads?

Or should we wait until original stories about characters of color can get into production, even if there’s little likelihood that studios will do the work to get those projects to cross over?

Television gets a lot of hype as a place where creators can be more innovative than they are in movies. Is that really true when it comes to race? It feels as if it’s less true now than it was in, say, the early nineties.

If a remake moves a concept from the movies to television, does that count as a demotion?

And will a remake of Steel Magnolias just slot Latifah, Rashad, and Scott into essentially straight rewrites of the original? Or will it be mindful of the ways in which the black and white southern experiences are different for women? It’s true, of course, that both black women and white women visit beauty parlors. But if you get that far and think you’ve figured out that folks are the same, you’re missing some rather important things.

*As a side note, I will be fascinated to see if the movie includes the original’s pilot about taking Shelby off life support, or if in our moment of resurgent pro-liferism and after Terri Schiavo, even that’s become too controversial.

Former Gov. Sarah Palin and her camp may be raking in media hits by complaining about the portrayal of Palin in HBO’s upcoming movie about the 2008 presidential election, an adaptation of Game Change. But Hollywood seems to be giving more than it’s taking away from the Palin family lately: Bristol Palin’s just inked a deal with Lifetime to do a new reality series, following in her mother’s footsteps. The show promises “never-before-granted access to Bristol’s real-life experiences growing into womanhood, Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp will reveal how she adjusts to her life in Alaska, where daily she faces the many pressures of raising her toddler son Tripp alone and maintains the close relationship she holds with her parents.”

For all the Palins complain about their treatment by Hollywood, this deal is actually a sign of the industry’s generosity to the family. Sarah Palin’s Alaska started out with strong ratings for TLC, but they declined, particularly in episodes where Palin was hunting or fishing, and TLC declined to order a second season of the program. Her special on Fox News, one of the things the network hoped would make her a star on the network, didn’t exactly sparkle in the ratings either.

And Palin, more than any other member of her family, ought to have been the draw: she was the one who was rocketed to national prominence and national controversy. If she didn’t exactly turn into a television star, even when she was given a couple of chances in a couple of different formats, it’s hard to see why there’d be a strong market for a show about a second-tier member of the family whose main prior accomplishment in the entertainment industry is a stint on Dancing With the Stars and a novelty appearance on The Secret Life of the American Teenager. For all the Palins complain about the way Hollywood treats them, the industry certainly seems generous about continuing to cut them paychecks.