When Luck was cancelled in March, I wrote that it would be nice if we could get as upset about the health and safety of reality show participants as we do about animal cruelty on set. The New York Times has a disturbing new report about the state of horse racing in New York state that serves as an upsetting reminder that there are people inside the industry who don’t care very much about the fate of the animals they’re entertained by and make a great deal of money by racing even when it’s clear that their bodies are broken, the rot at the snapping point disguised by drugs:

“The horses go perfectly sound right up to the second they snap their leg off,” Mr. Clifton said. The following day he came back with a warning: “If we have one more horse break down, we are going to have a major problem on our hands.” That night, riding in the fifth race, Mr. Clifton heard a bone snap and saw another jockey, Ricky Frazier, vaulting off a horse named Laughing Moon. Mr. Clifton yanked his own mount, but they still went soaring over Laughing Moon. Within minutes, Mr. Frazier was in an ambulance and a veterinarian was administering a lethal injection to Laughing Moon, the ninth Gill horse to die racing in 10 months.

That is when the jockeys decided to take a stand: They would not ride in any race with a Gill-owned horse. Their boycott cast a harsh light on the Pennsylvania Racing Commission and Penn National Gaming, which owns the track.
“It wasn’t the commission or the racetrack or anyone with any responsibility for horses and riders who took action,” said George Strawbridge, a prominent breeder and owner. “It was the jockeys who feared for their life. That’s not a shame. That’s a disgrace.”

The fact that inspections of horses at the track before they race aren’t standard from state to state, giving owners like Michael Gill, the one described in those paragraphs, the ability to essentially go shopping for venues where they can race unhealthy horses, is deeply upsetting. I’m not saying horse racing needs to be federally regulated. But it’s hard to believe that track owners and racing commissions couldn’t come to relatively standard conclusions about the desirability of keeping horses from getting unrepairably injured on the track if only in the interests of keeping jockeys safe. And anyone who thinks watching animals hurt themselves dreadfully is part of the entertainment might want to take a careful look at themselves.

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.

The Los Angeles Times has a piece up looking at the panic in Hollywood over the failures of John Carter, Terra Nova, Luck, and Hugo, all projects with extremely well-connected talent attached that none the less failed to find the audiences that would make them successes—and would make them profitable. Writer Patrick Goldstein blames a lack of relatable heroes at the center of each project, and interviews blog favorite Gavin Polone, who suggests that studios just don’t have any idea what audiences like anymore. Here are five ideas for what they might learn from these particular projects:

1. Bland doesn’t mean broadly appealing: I admire Taylor Kitsch’s abs, but if you haven’t seen Friday Night Lights (and many people haven’t), it’s not clear what his hook is other than his extreme handsomeness. Is he self-deprecating-but-not-really like George Clooney? Does he have a gift for physical comedy like the one Channing Tatum surprised people with in 21 Jump Street? Similarly, Jason O’Mara on Terra Nova was perhaps the epitome of the flavorless hunks Hollywood’s tried to peddle us over the last decade. There’s just nothing to him, but they’re convinced we’ll like him anyway. Being inoffensive is not the same time as being appealing to a broad swath of viewers, and it’s time for Hollywood to stop treating leading men that way.

2. Concepts matter: I’ve beat this horse on Terra Nova a lot, but it’s really not enough to throw robot dinosaurs at us and be assured we’ll be entertained and engaged. If anything, John Carter had the opposite problem. There are a ton of good concepts to draw on there, and there simply wasn’t enough time to explore them all. The movie might have been better if it could give us a sense of the nature of the conflict between Mars’ humans, or sharped the relationship between those societies and the Tharks. Instead, it had to rush through everything. So two rules: 1) Make sure your concept is well-developed and good, and 2) Make sure it’s a match for your form.

3. Your private interests are not inherently fascinating: There are horse-racing fans who share David Milch’s intensity for the sport, but there are not many of them—it’s why the sport is in trouble. And while there are more people who care about movie history, they’re still not the majority of the movie-going audience. Hugo‘s $73 million in domestic box office may be worse considering what it cost to make, but it’s not like The Artist has lit the world on fire, either. Even after its Best Picture win, it’s only taken in $42 million. Fascinating things may emerge from creators’ private passions, but just because they feel strongly about something doesn’t mean it’s inherently going to pull in an audience to match.

4. The 3D jig is up: It may jack up ticket costs, but it’s not like we don’t notice. And it’s particularly irritating when 3D doesn’t add a single thing to a movie and gives viewers a headache along with it. 3D may be an attractive way to get your movie to the Chinese market, which is allowing more 3D and Imax American movies into its theaters, but that doesn’t mean it can replace storytelling, characterization or acting here.

5. The hero doesn’t always have to be a dude: I tend to think that Hugo’s hero should remain who it is, though Chloe Moretz’s Isabelle was delightful. But Dejah Thoris is vastly more interesting than John Carter; anyone would have been more interesting than O’Mara in the lead in Terra Nova; and watching a woman try to break into top-flight jockeying might have been more interested than David Milch’s latest foray into Dudeland.

While I was on the way home from Austin last night, HBO permanently suspended production on Luck and announced that it wouldn’t air the episodes it had produced for a second season of the critically-praised but little-watched horse-racing show from David Milch, Michael Mann, and starring Dustin Hoffman. Three horses had been injured so badly in the making of the show that they had to be euthanized, and as Jamie Weinman suggests, I think correctly, that track record became a liability that offset the benefits HBO garnered from renewing the show despite the fact that it wasn’t a smash.

For me, Luck became a kind of litmus test: it was the first critically-regarded show about middle-aged (mostly) white men that I gave myself permission to stop watching because I felt like it didn’t have anything to say to me. I don’t mean to say that I don’t want to watch shows that aren’t about characters who match my demographics exactly—though you are going to hear a rather enormous amount about Girls in coming weeks. But I’m tired of a sense that shows about middle-aged white men behaving aberrantly attract a cultural and critical cachet that attaches itself to no other type of programming. And I just care too much about other things to push them out of my schedule to make room for something like Luck.

My personal feelings on the show aside, though, I do think it’s probably a positive thing that, if the show couldn’t find a way to continue production without destroying horses, HBO cancelled it. We’re not that far removed from the use of trip wires to bring horses down in Westerns, and it’s a good thing we don’t see the damage we do to animals, either accidentally or intentionally, as acceptable. Now if only we could get folks as exorcised about reality shows that require participants to sign contracts that exempt the companies producing the programs from any responsibility if they get raped, we’d be in good shape.

It’s my sense that not enough of you are tuning in to House of Lies and Luck on a regular basis for it to make sense for us to do recaps. I’ll revisit both of those shows at the end of the season, but I’m going to make the executive decision to free up some space for the return of The Walking Dead next week.

This post contains spoilers through the February 5 episode of Luck.

While I essentially agree with Tim Goodman that difficult television isn’t inherently a bad thing, I’m still having trouble finding my big emotional hook into Luck. Fortunately, my political hook’s presented itself in the stocky, short-fused person of one Chester “Ace” Bernstein, also known as Dustin Hoffman, or a man currently living out the kind of cushy parole of which Bernie Madoff can only dream. He is—or would like to be—the man who holds all the other characters’ fortunes in his hands even if they don’t know his name. And at the moment, he’s reading like a dour Al Swearengen (fitting, given Geri Jewell popping up on the track next to Marcus this week)—a visionary without the sense of humor or personal charm.

Or perhaps he’s Rhett Butler, who before he married her told Scarlett O’Hara “There’s good money in empire building. But, there’s more in empire wrecking.” Ace has come out of prison at the perfect time to capitalize on a wreck. “The U.S. economy’s in the fucking toilet. The New York bankers with their three-card monte bond swaps brought the whole fucking walls down. Tremendous structural damage to tax base, unemployment, plus my impression, tremendous, tremendous compression of the leisure gaming dollar,” he explains to his potential fronts. “In California, established and passed by the legislature, horse racing is legal and casino gaming isn’t. Leaving aside for a second the fucking rain dancers. And like the whole state economy, the race track is desperate for new streams of revenue. Perfect fucking Trojan horse.”

There’s a grandiosity to his schemes, a grand sense of what Ace thinks he’s owed. And while he’s almost meek with the parole officer who has Malcolm X on his wall, who asks him, with what sounds like genuine concern “How are you settling in?” Ace can be button-poppingly angry when asked about his prison experience, snapping at the investor who remarks that his company name will be on the new venture that it’s “Because I’m a fucking felon. Anything else you want to explain to me?” But it sounds like he’s angry less that people don’t understand what he’s been through and more that they don’t understand the code that got him there, founded on an overdeveloped sense of responsibility that led him to take the rap for his partner’s cocaine stash when the drugs were mistakenly pinned on his nephew, a New York University student. “All I remember from that time is a little boy who was running around with his shoes untied,” Gus recalls. “The question is, Ace, what if it was all turned around?” “Mike would have given me up in a heartbeat,” Ace says with certainty. Self-righteousness may not keep you warm at night, but the fire it provides will fuel you during the day.

Interestingly, it seems like the biggest threats from Ace’s plans may come not from Mike and the other higher-ups, but from below, from Escalante, bitter already at losing his horse in a claiming race. “Ace Bernstein that they calling him coming with his beard to see what his $2 million bought him,” he grumbles. “Ace Chester Bernstein gonna look to running my business?” And it remains to be seen what their history is. “There’s a picture for your, Escalante behind a pushcart full of fruits and vegetables,” Gus muses at the end of their day. “Doesn’t know to this day it was you who got him through the gate?” “It was him made himself into something,” Ace tells him. Escalante may be living by the code, just on a different scale.

The bridge is yours.

-Horse-racing fans, rejoice. You get another season of Luck.

-The best review I’ve read of Lana Del Ray’s album.

-The Smithsonian adds the Mexican Museum in San Francisco to its network.

-Great prints of classic pop-culture real estate.

-A first glimpse at Skyfall, the next James Bond movie.

-Sarah Palin accent fans, your fix is here:

This post contains spoilers through the January 29 episode of Luck.

Because Luck is so big and sprawling, I’m going to focus these recaps on a different character every week. And because this is the premiere, and I’m new to horseracing, I want to start with Gus. I’ve always liked Dennis Farina, who I think can be a wonderfully sensitive and underrated actor, and I particularly appreciate him here as Gus, a role I found to be even more sensitive and nuanced on a second pass.

I think it makes sense to look for structure and the larger idea in David Milch’s work. We’re not far enough into Luck for me to see the show as clearly as I do the themes in Deadwood, of course, but Ace is clearly the power broker here, the man who thinks he can see the future and manipulate it, who can turn the recession and the financial desperation of the area into a revitalization and expansion of gaming at Santa Anita. That life is made possible in part by Gus, who handles the great details and the small of Ace’s post-prison existence, whether he’s adjusting Ace’s thermostat to “67 degrees. 67 degrees is perfect,” or acting as “the first front in history” so Ace can own a horse again. But does that make him a butler? A political factotum? Or the citizen to Ace’s great man?

Whatever it turns out to be, there’s a real tenderness in Gus’s service to Ace. “I got a pencil right here, and I got an old ad from Sears I can write on the back of,” he tells Ace when Ace asks him to get a tape recorder, eager to be helpful as quickly as possible even though he misses the larger picture in the process. We learn that he’s answered every letter Ace got while he was in prison, a touchingly old-fashioned gesture. And though he ventures into the world of horse racing out of duty (Gus has trees to tend), telling Ace nervously “What do I know? All four of his legs reached the ground,” Gus finds genuine joy there. The look on his face when Mon Gateau eats a carrot off his hand for the first time is utterly charming in a world that’s already revealed itself to be brutal in the break of a horse’s leg, desperate in the form of Jerry’s gambling.

“All I’m worried about is you relying on me when I’m out past my depth,” Gus confesses to Ace after the latter’s tiring first day out of jail. “You don’t know your own depths,” Ace tells him. It’s an interesting, paternalistic moment, and it remains to be seen what it means. Is this the powerful issuing a vote of confidence in the common people, or a powerful man seeing in his factotum a man who could rise above his station?

Last night, HBO aired the pilot for Luck, its new horse racing and casino show from David Milch, ahead of the show’s actual run in January. There’s no question that the pilot immediately establishes Luck as a serious contender for the most gorgeous show on television, and I’m really glad to see someone else step up to Breaking Bad and do all sorts of gorgeous, vertiginous things with color and light. And it’s nice to know that Carrie and Saul from Homeland have a little competition in the category of best mentor-mentee relationship on television, that competition being Sad Nick Nolte and a potentially champion horse. Saul got a decent, if misguided, soliloquy last night, but nothing quite as juicy as: “You don’t know how special you are, do you? How you can run. Who your daddy was. How they killed him.”

This being a David Milch show, though, after my marination in Deadwood, I’m curious to see what he’ll do in another framework where women generally are marginal but individual women have the capability to be tremendously powerful. After all, it’s not just that the Old Man notices the potential in a horse, it’s that he sees the potential in Lizzy, a female jockey (played by Chantal Sutherland, a jockey in real life), remarking, “I guess I still know a peach when I see one,” as he checks his stopwatch. “Who’s gonna ride it?” one character asks Joey, the stuttery agent who caught the miracle horse’s workout. “Some exercise girl or something,” Joey replies. The ability to see human as well as horseflesh matters. And it’s women who treat horses when they’re healthy, as well as easing them on when, as happens in a final, climatic race in the pilot, they snap a leg.

There’s going to be a lot of wrangling about the economy in Luck: the pilot already has references to payday loans and the dismal state of the city’s tax base. I imagine we’ll rise far above individual horses, individual owners, and individual races. But I hope the beating, high-strung heart of Luck remains its horses and the people who own them, ride them, and care for them. There’s a nice bit when Gus (Dennis Farina), who has bought a horse as a front for Chester (Dustin Hoffman) who is recently out of jail and preoccupying himself with larger concerns, anxiously feeds that horse a carrot for the first time. There’s a jittery delight in the proximity to the velvet of those noses, to the muscle force behind the enamel that chews up those carrots. You could do worse on a metaphor for the power, randomness and seductive appeal of capitalism.