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.

Back in June when the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, I predicted that one of its long-term effects would be on medical procedurals. One of the most common ways for televised doctors to show that they’re compassionate is for them to treat patients even if they don’t have insurance in defiance of hospital administrators’ wishes or their own well-being. The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling’s sitcom about an OB/GYN, which premieres tomorrow on Fox, is making insurance and medical bill collection a core component of its storytelling. It will take a while to get most Americans insured, but as coverage is increasingly standard, medical procedurals will have to find a substitute for that kind of storytelling.

And shows may start incorporating health care reform into their storylines sooner than I even expected. As The New York Times reported on Saturday, California, as part of its efforts to stand up its health care exchange, has hired Oglivy Public Relations to handle a significant campaign to educate state citizens about their obligations and options, and the plan includes major outreach to Hollywood:

Realizing that much of the battle will be in the public relations realm, the exchange has poured significant resources into a detailed marketing plan — developed not by state health bureaucrats but by the global marketing powerhouse Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, which has an initial $900,000 contract with the exchange. The Ogilvy plan includes ideas for reaching an uninsured population that speaks dozens of languages and is scattered through 11 media markets: advertising on coffee cup sleeves at community colleges to reach adult students, for example, and at professional soccer matches to reach young Hispanic men.

And Hollywood, an industry whose major players have been supportive of President Obama and his agenda, will be tapped. Plans are being discussed to pitch a reality television show about “the trials and tribulations of families living without medical coverage,” according to the Ogilvy plan. The exchange will also seek to have prime-time television shows, like “Modern Family,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and Univision telenovelas, weave the health care law into their plots.

“I’d like to see 10 of the major TV shows, or telenovelas, have people talking about ‘that health insurance thing,’ ” said Peter V. Lee, the exchange’s executive director. “There are good story lines here.”

Now whatever happens will depend on the willingness of shows to play ball—and the extent to which viewers actually understand that the storylines that end up incorporated in the shows reflect accurate information and services that are really available to them. But at a time when Very Special Episodes have become common to the point that there’s nothing very special about them at all, I can’t think of a better reason for shows to explain to viewers that they’re really doing something different than explaining to their audiences that, unlike the miracle doctors on screen, there’s something out there in the real world that can actually make a difference to the uninsured among them.

I’ve written in the past about the challenges in putting female anti-heroes on television: if they behave decisively and malignantly, they don’t get the credit male anti-heroes do for conforming to gender norms, and if they are weak, or indecisive, or self-obsessed, they’re treated as if they’re distasteful rather than admirable. But another challenge in getting more female anti-heroes on screen is getting networks to try to make them, rather than simply the cable channels that have made their reputations on male anti-heroes.

I think the creators of The Mob Doctor, a drama which stars Jordana Spiro as a surgeon who does medical favors for the Chicago mob to pay the debt she incurred to get her brother out of trouble, are setting up impossible expectations when they suggest that the show will be “ER meets the Sopranos,” as Rob Wright did on Monday. But I think Josh Berman, Wright’s co-creator is on to something, when he talks about the long arc it takes to build a female anti-hero on a network, where viewers will have to build a long investment in Dr. Grace Devlin before they begin following her through the development process that will turn her from a woman stuck doing bad things in difficult circumstances to a genuine anti-hero who embraces stepping over a carefully calibrated moral line.

“We’ve really mapped out her character, and we want it to feel very organic,” Berman said. “And we want to take a woman who never thought this was going to be her life and slowly watch her transform into someone she maybe didn’t think she would become, but is quite confident and happy with who she is. And we’re going to do that slowly. You know, we have milestones over the first season…So hopefully we can deliver on that.”

This strikes me as an astute insight. Viewers of cable shows have become conditioned to come to new programming ready to identify with or root for someone who behaves badly or aberrantly. Within the first episode, we expect to see the contradictions of Tony Soprano as a mobster and family man, Al Swearengen as a tyrant and a man of sympathy to sex workers, Walter White as chemistry teacher and meth genius, Lena Dunham as vain, lazy striver and as cuttingly observant friend. On networks, viewers expect to be introduced to characters who are, with slight variations, straightforwardly worthy of a rooting interest without serious moral complication. Even when a character like Dr. House arrives as a cantankerous jerk, it took a while for House to make him uncomfortably transgressive—his wounds were always obvious enough to provide a psychological backgrounder on his orneriness.

I’m not sure The Mob Doctor is going to be the show that executes this premise successfully, based on the pilot. I like star Jordana Spiro, especially from her tenure on My Boys, where she played a Chicago sports reporter, but there’s a fair bit of melodrama and silliness going on around her. But I think Berman is laying out an important formula, one that if we want richer, more complex women on television, it would be wise to keep in mind that we have to strap in for the long haul.

Back in June when the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, I wrote a post that explained how the implementation of the law would eventually change medical procedurals. In particular, as more and more patients come onto the insurance roles, shows aren’t going to be able to demonstrate that doctors are compassionate by having them take on uninsured patients in defiance of hospital bureaucrats or the policies of their private practices. That’s something that The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling’s promising new sitcom for Fox, does in its pilot episode: Mindy, an OB/GYN, takes on a conservative Muslim woman as a patient, telling her son that he has to promise her the family will be insured by the time his mother gives birth, even if it’s a lie, so Mindy can take her on as a patient.

On Tuesday, the people behind the show suggested they would take on another aspect of medical practice: medical bill collection. The show is adding Amanda Setton, who will play Shauna, the receptionist and person responsible for collecting bills at Mindy’s private practice. And the show says she’ll be tough about it. “I think Shauna would literally handcuff a pregnant lady to get her to pay her,” executive producer Matt Warburton. And Kaling added “she thinks of herself like a sexy bounty hunter.” I’ll be fascinated to see how that plays out, how much sympathy the show has for patients who are facing fees that seem disproportionate to the attention or benefit they’ve received, and if Shauna goes after insurance companies for reimbursements as well.

But however it plays out, I’m heartened that as House, one of the biggest medical dramas on television, departs the airwaves, some of the new medical programs that are coming after it, even if they aren’t direct replacements, are thinking beyond the operating room or the diagnostic process. Call the Midwife, which I wrote about yesterday, is as much about what the advent of the National Health Service allows doctors to do as how they do it. And if The Mindy Project ends up being about how people pay for their care as much as how the titular character delivers it, that would be a real landmark.

In the pilot for Mindy Kaling’s excellent new sitcom debuting on Fox this fall, The Mindy Project, the titular character, an OB/GYN, tells the son of a patient, a single, observant Muslim mother, to promise her that the family will have health insurance by the time she was due to deliver her baby. It’s a familiar trope in medical procedural shows: a doctor makes the decision to take a patient on who doesn’t have health insurance, frustrating hospital or private practice suits, or a doctor who’s previously worked for wealthy patients has their life and worldview changed by working among uninsured patients and witnessing their normally abysmal level of care. The former reoccurs in almost every medical procedural. The latter was the premise for CBS’s now-cancelled A Gifted Man, where the ghost of a surgeon’s ex-wife encourages him to begin spending time at the free clinic she ran, and it’s at the heart of the USA Network’s Royal Pains, about a concierge doctor in the Hamptons who also runs a clinic for low-income clients.

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act today, starting in 2014, there will be many fewer uninsured patients, thanks to a combination of a mandate to purchase health insurance or pay a compensatory tax. It’ll be harder for television shows to generate drama and opportunities for doctors to demonstrate their compassion out of patients who were denied coverage because they had preexisting conditions. In the absence of that kind of emotional stimuli, I’ll be curious to see where medical procedurals turn to generate drama and to generate opportunities to demonstrate human kindness. Will they challenge things like doctors’ lack of engagement with patients, a rebuke to the brusqueness fetishized on House that is not so cute when it happens in person? Shifts in the profession that have made nurses more important and made them key points of contact for patients? The Affordable Care Act will dramatically change who is insured in the United States, but it will hardly eliminate all the issues in our medical system.

But if shows do want to tell stories about uninsured patients in the future, it’ll be interesting to see if they acknowledge that those people are insured for political reasons. As Matt Yglesias explains, the Supreme Court’s decision means that the federal government will be offer states new money to subsidize the coverage of poor patients through Medicaid, but not to penalize states who decline to kick in 10 percent of the cost of coverage themselves. “Since your state’s citizens have to pay taxes to the federal government one way or the other, you’d have to be pretty crazy to refuse the carrot if you ask me,” he writes. “But ideological zeal may well lead some states to turn it down.” Previously, medical procedurals were able to treat uninsured patients like they were an accepted fact of the practice of medicine. Treating them in defiance of commercial pressure allowed television doctors to demonstrate apolitical concern for individuals. And taking as an assumption that a vast tide of uninsured patients would always exist means television doctors are essentially exempt from questioning the larger market in which they operate. But in the future, uninsured patients (who are not undocumented immigrants or prisoners) will not be an inevitable fact of American life—they will be created by the very specific decisions of individual states. Whether any television show will have the courage to identify that fact will be a fascinating question for the genre, which has yet to have a show that does for medicine what shows like The Wire and The Shield have done for law enforcement.

The production cycle in American television is long—but so is the time it takes to implement major societal legislation. I hope there’s a smart writer somewhere out there who is looking forward to the 2014 fall television season and seeing in today’s historic decision an opportunity to reinvent medical procedurals as our health care system undergoes its most dramatic changes since the invention of the form.

House creator David Shore, the show’s executive producer Katie Jacobs, and star Hugh Laurie announced late yesterday that House would be ending after running for eight seasons on Fox. And they set a high bar for what they think the show achieved:

After much deliberation, the producers of House M.D. have decided that this season of the show, the 8th, should be the last. By April this year they will have completed 177 episodes, which is about 175 more than anyone expected back in 2004.

The decision to end the show now, or ever, is a painful one, as it risks putting asunder hundreds of close friendships that have developed over the last eight years – but also because the show itself has been a source of great pride to everyone involved.

Since it began, House has aspired to offer a coherent and satisfying world in which everlasting human questions of ethics and emotion, logic and truth, could be examined, played out, and occasionally answered. This sounds like fancy talk, but it really isn’t. House has, in its time, intrigued audiences around the world in vast numbers, and has shown that there is a strong appetite for television drama that relies on more than prettiness or gun play.

Do folks actually think they fulfilled that mission? I enjoyed House, but it’s not as if the show was above theatrics that fall squarely in the category of theatrics and gunplay. If breaking up a marriage over one partner’s medicalized murder of an African dictator isn’t soapy, I’m not sure what is. And who now will give us our mistaken lupus diagnoses?

If last week’s Downton Abbey was all about the initial power war has to upset the social order, this week’s episode was about the lingering power of institutions, whether the idea that a man headed off to war is entitled to a sweetheart; the sororicidal battles between women for position; or the ability of the servant class to conduct intense power struggles entirely beyond the notice of their employers. It’s fitting, given that theme, that it seems we’re locked into some old plots this week, as Thomas returns to cause all sorts of trouble at Downton, but with increased capacity to sow dissension now that he can play Cora and Isobel off against each other; Mr. Bates and Anna seem locked in a stalemate by his iron and the pace of English legal proceedings; and Sybil and Branson have trouble understanding each other.

It was awful to see Daisy trapped this week, forced into accepting William’s proposal by Mrs. Patmore’s theories of troop morale, forced by William into announcing their engagement prematurely, and then told by Mrs. Harris that she should stay downstairs because “No, Daisy. Not you. The war has not changed everything.” There’s no question that Daisy is safer at Downton than she might be under other circumstances, but the very things that keep her safe and provided for also keep her trapped. It never occurs to anyone that Daisy might have a mind of her own — in fact, Thomas and O’Brien’s machinations against Mr. Bates last season depended on the idea that her head could be sown with any idea no matter how ludicrous. There’s a real sadness in that belief that could morph into a ruined life if William survives, and Daisy is railroaded into marrying him against her desires.

She’s not the only woman torn between her heart and norms, enforced by both law and society, that govern the behavior of women. When Anna finds Mr. Bates, she’s relieved to find out he’s found grounds for a divorce, but disconcerted by the revelation that “for her to divorce me, she needs something beyond adultery…for a husband, adultery is enough.” But when she ventures that that seems unjust, the force of Bates’ passion barrels past her bloom of a political opinion. “I don’t care about fairness,” Mr. Bates declares. “I care about you.” And he refuses to sleep with her, even when she points out “it’s not against the law to take a mistress, Mr. Bates.” Meanwhile, back at Downton, Ethel’s willingness to be sexually available gets her on Mrs. Hughes’ watch list, but it also lands her a date with a soldier that may put paid to her saucy talk.

While women are at subtle odds in those situations, they’re at outright war when it comes to the struggle between Isobel and Cora for control over Downton in its role as convalescent home, and Rosalind is trying to make a cold war hot by prodding Mary to slander Lavinia and break her engagement to Matthew. The first debate is exacerbated by Thomas, who’s returned to Downton determined to take Carson down a peg and with new power to manipulate the people upstairs. I have mixed feelings about Thomas’s manuverings here — the pilot this season suggested some real growth, so it’s disconcerting to see both him and O’Brien fall into old patterns. I hope there are longer games here that move both of them forward, or tragedies born of their limitations. But it’s fascinating to watch Isobel and Cora go at least other in conversations that come up to the very edge of civility. And of course it’s the civility that matters: one of Cora’s complaints is that Isobel has usurped her place with her servants. Cora has more social pull than Isobel does, while Isobel has more practical skills. It’s Edith, perhaps, who represents a way forward, combining Cora’s graces with Isobel’s unflinching desire to connect, even when it means confronting wounds like the amputation that took Captain Smiley’s hand (I am, for the record, considering him George’s father). Seeing the General call her out for her good deeds gave me hope that Edith will find her own way, a typically middle-child blending of Mary’s conventionality and Sybil’s rebellions.
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Emily Nussbaum points to an interview with Homeland showrunner Alex Gansa that contains this interesting tidbit about a network that banned any suggestion that police could ever disagree:

Well, I recently did a police procedural for a major broadcast network. And the note came down from the network time and time again that there could be no conflict among the police officers and detectives who were trying to solve the crime. In other words, they didn’t want any dissention in the ranks among the good guys. Because if you showed dissention among the ranks, then people would begin to question if they were actually doing their jobs properly. And, of course, that robbed every single scene in the precinct of any drama whatsoever. They had to get along. They became just mouthpieces of exposition instead of real people.
And it was infuriating on a weekly basis to get that note. They couldn’t disagree. They couldn’t be wrong. They had to always be on the straight and narrow. And it was impossible to construct stories under those kinds of conditions.

There’s no conflict? I mean, that’s the first thing I ever learned as a writer in television. You know, you have to have conflict for any kind of drama. And this particular network just believed that there was enough drama in the good guys catching the bad guys, so that you didn’t have to muddy the good guys in any way, shape, or form. They just had to be right all of the time, and they had to be in sync all of the time. I mean, it was absurd.

And Kate Arthur from The Daily Beast notes that “There’s at least one another network that has the rule that doctors can never be wrong.”

This doesn’t just make for bad storytelling: it’s an actively dangerous endorsement of the idea that we should never question people in positions of power. It would be ridiculous to present a vision of a police department where no one ever commits an act of wrongdoing or negligence during an investigation. And it would be worse to present a department where, say, mistreatment of suspects, lying about what you’d witnessed, or God forbid, using pepper spray or live ammunition on the public went unquestioned.

Similarly, having television deliver the collective message “trust me, I’m a doctor” carries considerable risk with it. We live in a country where medical professionals have sterilized black women, lied about providing treatment to people with sexually transmitted diseases, and massively overdosed infants on blood-thinning drugs. Not to mention the fact that perhaps the most prominent doctor on television routinely abuses and harasses his patients. We need stories that encourage patients to be informed about their health, and to be their own advocates in the doctor’s office.

Obviously, living in a society is grand, and I appreciate the police keeping my neighborhood safe. I find the rise of vaccine deniers who refuse to accept the consensus of the medical establishment and are making the rest of us less safe really disturbing. But there has to be space between giving doctors and the police absolute authority and no authority, for narrative, and for our own safety.