Tom Hiddleston, who plays Asgardian god Loki in Thor and will be the main antagonist of The Avengers, pens a nice little reflection on the impact of superheroes on his own actorly ambitions, and the role superhero stories can play in exploring big questions:

Superhero films offer a shared, faithless, modern mythology, through which these truths can be explored. In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings – stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of every man’s life, and we love it. It sounds cliched, but superheroes can be lonely, vain, arrogant and proud. Often they overcome these human frailties for the greater good. The possibility of redemption is right around the corner, but we have to earn it.

The Hulk is the perfect metaphor for our fear of anger; its destructive consequences, its consuming fire. There’s not a soul on this earth who hasn’t wanted to “Hulk smash” something in their lives. And when the heat of rage cools, all that we are left with is shame and regret. Bruce Banner, the Hulk’s humble alter ego, is as appalled by his anger as we are. That other superhero Bruce – Wayne – is the superhero-Hamlet: a brooding soul, misunderstood, alone, for ever condemned to avenge the unjust murder of his parents. Captain America is a poster boy for martial heroism in military combat: the natural leader, the war hero. Spider-Man is the eternal adolescent – Peter Parker’s arachnid counterpart is an embodiment of his best-kept secret – his independent thought and power.

I don’t know if arguments like this will convince doubters like the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane to take superhero movies seriously. But it makes the point that these holdouts are a minority. All critics have biases, and perhaps it’s better that those biases be put on display by someone like Lane, who thinks that Battlestar Galactica is a waste of his infinitely precious time, or the New York Times reviewers who make their contempt for fantasy every time they write about Game of Thrones. I’m not saying that genre material should be turned over to reviewers who privilege science fiction or fantasy over other frameworks. But if you want to give culture that a lot of people take seriously a fair shake, it’s probably worth assigning it to a reviewer who is open-minded about it. Bad things can make a lot of money, or garner high ratings. But quality doesn’t automatically decline as profits and ratings increase. It’s a shame that some folks deny themselves great fun out of close-mindedness, and unfortunate when they try to dissuade others from that enjoyment as well.

There’s no publication in America that does more with its cover and interstitial art than The New Yorker, whether it’s Art Spiegelman’s lovely, heartbroken commemoration of the September 11 attacks, his commentary on the Crown Heights riots in 1993 or Barry Blitt’s wicked satire on the so-called “terrorist fist bump.” So it’s a pleasure to see them do it again this week with a series of illustrations interrogating Geraldo Rivera’s idiotic declaration that wearing a hoodie made Trayvon Martin seem more legitimately suspicious to George Zimmerman.

The magazine’s hoodie-wearing figures include an older man with a cane, a woman in elegant heels, a child, a vigil attendee. In their quiet way, they illustrate how irrelevant the piece of clothing is—a hoodie can be a tool for a playful peekaboo or a shy glance out at the world, a solemn frame, or a simple convenience. And you can look beyond the hoodie, and still fail to see the full humanity of the person underneath it.

Nancy Franklin, who has been the television critic at the august weekly for 13 years, is leaving the magazine. I don’t know that it’ll happen, but this seems like an interesting and potentially important opportunity for the New Yorker to rethink the way it does television criticism.

More than any other form of criticism, television criticism has changed. A small percentage of it is devoted to telling readers if they ought to watch a show or not, but that’s far from its most important function. Instead, whether writers are recapping individuals episodes of shows, writing meditative essays on the course of single shows, or juxtapositional pieces that put television in a broader context, they are setting the stage for conversations between highly informed—or at least highly opinionated—viewers. They’re the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.

Franklin’s pieces are very good, but they’re infrequent, and sometimes oddly timed given that larger shift in how television criticism is consumed. She wrote for the magazine roughly every four weeks. The September 12 column on The Hour came out almost a month after the show started airing in America, and is behind a paywall, so non-subscribers can’t read it, and even if they could, there’s no comments section. This is a larger philosophical issue for the New Yorker, of course. Comments sections take a long time to moderate, and while I find it a joy, it is not everyone’s cup of tea. Similarly, her column on Terriers came out a month after the show premiered last fall—it’s too bad Franklin didn’t get to write a preview piece that could have championed the show and tried to build an early audience for it. If you’re going to be in the business of using criticism to get people to watch something, those pieces probably need to be published in time for the sink-or-swim early weeks of new programs. And the magazine has blogs for books, film, and photography, but not for television (though Amy Davidson sometimes takes on the subject), which really seems like it might be the most natural fit for blogging.

So as the New Yorker thinks about who it’s going to hire to replace Franklin, I hope they pick someone who can help the magazine move into the new age of television criticism. Whether it’s Todd VanDerWerff at the AV Club, who’s proved you can build a community and set a tremendously high standard for the discussions it has; Heather Havrilesky, whose big, synthesizing pieces have been one of the best things about the revamped New York Times Magazine; Jace Lacob from NewsBeast, who brings a fierce reporter’s sensibility to bear, figuring out how what we watch comes together; Vulture’s wickedly funny Willa Paskin; and I’m sure you can all think of terrific alternatives. But in any case, I’ll hope for the New Yorker think not just about the person but about the job description.

For folks fretting about whether HBO’s actually going to roll with a full seven seasons of Game of Thrones, I think you can probably relax. Over the weekend, The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that the network apparently has signed up Tom Hanks’ Playtone to do six seasons of its planned adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods, each at 10 to 12 episodes. Obviously, things could fall apart, and I’m not sure what the very sizable order will mean for how the story changes from page to screen: will they be lingering in the narrative? Throwing Anansi Boys in the mix, too? But the fact that the initial plan is for six seasons suggests huge hopes and huge ambitions — as well as sizable cojones — at HBO. And given that American Gods is a single novel, if the network’s willing to blow it out to 60-plus episodes of television, I imagine they’re ready to go the distance with the existing material of Game of Thrones.

I’m utterly fascinated by HBO’s decision that fantasy is the place for them to take a stand. I love it, of course. Even more than conquering the box office, the premium cable channel to end all premium cable channel’s decision to embrace genre fiction is a major mark of validation. But it also strikes me as a risky one. HBO has always relied on good reviews, on Emmys, on the sense that it’s doing something profoundly different and better than other networks, to get audiences to pony up the subscription fees that let them turn out highly unusual programming. The high priesthood of criticism hasn’t uniformly accepted fantasy as a serious genre, whether it’s Ginia Bellafante’s headache-inducing dismissal of Game of Thrones as a dudely fantasy, or the fact that (though the magazine did do a feature on the long-awaited A Dance With Dragons) the New Yorker has yet to review the show. By contrast, Nancy Franklin got to John From Cincinnati just two weeks after the show premiered in 2007. True Blood‘s always intentionally been treated as if it’s been froth, which is probably due in part to its origins in Charlaine Harris’s paranormal romances as well as in its embrace of its status as high-concept, good-looking, violent candy.

The Wire and The Sopranos were easy shows for critics to embrace, if only because they were morally challenging variations on familiar forms: the Dickensian social novel and the tragic American family novel. Championing them was a way to show your sophistication, as well as the quality of your education. That’s not to say that Game of Thrones hasn’t been reviewed, and reviewed very, very well, just that it hasn’t conquered everyone’s hearts yet, and I think part of that has to do with its genre. And certainly fandom has a critic-proof power.

Neil Gaiman has much more mainstream cred than George R. R. Martin does; to a certain extent, he has transcended the label of fantasy. And it may be that if American Gods succeeds, it’ll end up casting a backwards glow on Game of Thrones. But HBO has long relied on critical acclaim to attract audiences to shows they might otherwise find baffling or unattractive. It’ll be interesting to see what the long-term impact of the network’s investment is on where fantasy fits in the pantheon.