Starz seems to have settled on explicit sex and violence as the keys to its brand precisely at the moment when the flagrant use of both of those elements in television drama has ceased to be a novel advantage cable held over the networks and started getting embarrassing, and not a little dull. And even though Spartacus, the franchise that perhaps made the best use of those elements in service of genuine ideas, has just finished its run on Starz, the network appears to be doubling down with Black Sails, a pirate show that’s being advertised as an opportunity for Michael Bay to move on up from showing Megan Fox arching her back to depicting actual lesbian sex and for Toby Stephens to get another crack at the American market after playing Fergus Wolfe in Possession didn’t exactly set his career on fire:

There’s a good show to be done about piracy. But it’s one that requires the showrunners to know as much about Caribbean governance, and economics—some privateering contracts guaranteed fair, consistent monthly wages and advance pay—social dynamics that gave pirates a certain amount of social capital in polite society as well as in island enclaves, slavery, and cooperative organizing as about how to make a lady look fetching in a corset.

It’s notable that this season of Game of Thrones has—with the exception of this weekend’s scene in Littlefinger’s brothel—dramatically scaled down its use of nudity and scaled up its discussion of policy issues, from the ethics and efficacy of purchasing a slave army to the impact on Westeros of the particular people who have helped the country run up a sizable national debt. There was a sense in some of the commentary on the show last year that the prodigious use of nudity in both non-consensual scenes and situations involving prostitution was cheesy, a sop to less sophisticated viewers who might not otherwise be inclined to keep track of the show’s enormous roster of characters or engage with its big ideas about the morality of war. In other words, a clear distinction was emerging between adult drama and “adult” content. And in the show’s third season, characters have talked more about sexual assault and sexual experiences than we’ve actually seen on screen. How characters like Brienne of Tarth and Jaime Lannister respond to a threat of sexual assault, or how Tyrion Lannister interrogates Podrick Payne about his first sexual experience matters much more than watching their bodies in motion.
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New In Theaters:

-The American Pie franchise wraps up this weekend with American Reunion: the humor’s as gross as ever, but there’s some real pathos there. And Alyson Hannigan in fetishwear.

-Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope: Morgan Spurlock’s latest is more sizzle reel than introspection, especially on issues of race and gender in the fan community. But there’s some fun to be had there, especially following aspiring artists and a costume designer for whom Comic-Con is a giant job fair.

On Television

-Starz debuts a new original series at 10 PM on Friday, Magic City, full of Jewish families, union busting subplots, Cuba’s fall to Castro, the arrival of casino-running gangsters in Florida, and gorgeous architecture—and people. The show’s uneven in the early going, but there’s potential there.

-Game of Thrones is back on HBO on Sunday with the second episode of its second season, and there are lots of fascinating gender politics on tap. Catch up, and we’ll discuss on Monday.

At the beginning of Knocked Up, when a group of nerdy Jewish dudes find themselves unexpectedly admitted to a nightclub, schlubby Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) tells his friends that “If any of us get laid tonight it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.” Magic City, Starz’s next attempt to burnish its reputation as a provider of high-quality drama along with its standard doses of reasonably explicit sex and violence, follows the noble and recent pop culture trend of portraying Jews as something other than nebbishes. It stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Ike Evans, a recently-remarried widower who built his dream hotel, the Miramar Playa, on Miami Beach, just in time for Castro to take Havana and kick out the casinos, creating a hot new market for a Caribbean vacation spot. It’s the first of the current crop of period shows to put Jewish characters at the center of the frame, and it’s one of the best decisions Mitch Glazer, the show’s creator, made in standing up this gorgeous-looking but uneven drama.

Magic City‘s a personal story for Glazer, who in a conversation with me in January described starting out as an “assistant engineer”—or janitor—a job his father, a lighting engineer who ordered the chandelier for the Eden Roc and put in gambling machine hookups below the floor of the Fountinbleau lobby, got him. Living in the city was also his introduction to both Cuban immigration and the Civil Rights movement. “My parents, I was 7, dragged me to Civil Rights marches in Flagler Street, and we had rotten garbage thrown at us. I remember, because they were very active in what was then a very Southern town,” he told me. “Most of my friends when I was in sixth grade, the first-wave of Cubans, were the white-collar Cubans who came to America, guys who had been lawyers who became short-order cooks. Those were my best friends’ parents. I tried to pass for Cuban for about six months. They just seemed cooler. My high school was 60 percent Jewish, 40 percent Cuban, and Mickey Rourke.”

Magic City is at its best when the show reflects that transition. Ike’s second wife, Vera (Olga Kurylenko) contemplated converting to Judaism on the eve of Ike’s daughters bat mitzvah, and Ike and his father squabble over which of them is the worse Jew. Older Russian emigrees play balalaika on the beach and a louche State Senator from Tallahassee goes on at length about the “Aryan” charms of a potential beauty queen. We’ve had Jews at the margins of Mad Men for years, and with the arrival of Michael Ginsburg in the office, we’ll finally have one at the center of the frame. But I enjoyed how Magic City puts Jews and Jewishness at the forefront of the show, giving a Florida Jewish community far richer than the stereotype of retirees we have today. And Jews aren’t the only community Magic City examines. Work in the Miramar Playa kitchens grinds to a halt as word comes over the radio of Castro and Che’s advance on Havana. And Ike plays off the black residents of Overtown against white picketers who want to unionize the hotel, busting up the picket line by violence. It’s that kind of conflict that shows how perceptive characters are of how the world around them is changing, and how bold they are about taking advantage of shifting power dynamics.

It’s less good when it overreaches in search of drama. Starz’s existing viewers may depend on a heavy dose of nipples and killings, but the gratuitousness of both elements in shows like Magic City or Boss seems more likely than not to turn off the new subscribers Starz would like to woo. There’s a troika of characters in Magic City that should have been recast and rewritten: Steven Strait as Ike’s oldest son Stevie, a sullen seducer whose charms are inexplicable to me but appear to turn every woman around him stupid, Jessica Marais as Lily Diamond, the wife of mobster Benny Diamond (an insanely over-the-top Danny Huston), who begins an impossibly foolish affair with Stevie that serves only to fulfill the sexual quotient, and Huston himself, who lurks around killing dogs and threatening to feed people to sharks. Maybe these things really happened. But I wouldn’t mind if Glazer appeared to trust the power of his memories a bit more.

On Friday, Todd VanDerWerff tweeted that one of the producers of Starz’s new political show, Boss, told reporters that “At no point during the show do we refer to parties.”

It’s entirely possible to make shows about politicians without referring to their party affiliations, especially if you show them mostly in isolation, brooding over power and tactics, and even easier if you don’t engage with policy, just with the exercise of brute force. But especially if you’re making a television program about tough-as-nails Chicago politicians, eschewing party politics means you’re giving up most of the means by which that brute force is exercised, and by which the objects of that force are defined. If you’re going to have enemies in political stories, you have to figure out who they are, and parties are useful identifiers, whether your foe is an ideological rival, a procedural one, or your rival for position within the hierarchy of the party itself.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that the folks who make smart television don’t want to risk their audience before a show even starts airing, especially if, like Starz, you’re trying to establish yourself as destination channel for smart original content that doesn’t involve people getting naked and killing each other in arenas. But Democratic and Republican politics don’t play out the same way on the local level — even in big cities — as they do nationally. Parks and Recreation‘s been an incredibly effective demonstration of that. It would be entirely possible to have Kelsey Grammar, who is playing a Rahm-like politician on the show Boss, have Rahm’s personally aggressive style without attaching Rahm’s voting record and stances in the Obama administration to him, using a series of local issues and relationships with local stakeholders to define him as a Democrat or a Republican.

Or even if that’s too touchy, why not invent a couple of fictional political parties? That kind of work happens most often in science fiction, scabrous satirical humor, or in Dave Barry books, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done in more realistic dramas, in ways that are usefully thought-provoking. I’d be curious to see a long-running exploration of what it would be like to have one party that’s fairly interventionist on both moral and social safety net issues, opposing abortion, equal rights for gay couples, and the death penalty while supporting universal health care and heavy taxes on the wealthiest citizens positioned against a much more staunchly libertarian party that’s pro-choice, low-tax, low social services, etc. One of the best things about Kings was that it didn’t spend a lot of time explaining the new framework that it was operating in: the show just sort of plunged in and let you figure out the importance of the powerfully active military-industrial complex. While I like Kings, it’s also reasonably obvious why it didn’t find a network following — the lead actor simply isn’t very good, and the religious stuff is incredible, but probably would have found a more natural audience on a network like HBO, which also would have found alternative ways to support its heavy production costs.

But I don’t think that fate would necessarily attach to a show that was more of our world, with smaller but significant tweaks to the positions that, bundled together, define political parties. We can make a nigh-infinite number of television shows about the nature of power as a raw, elemental thing (especially if they star Ian McShane). But they’re not the only kind of fiction we need to help us consider our political system and the future that our politics will define. Our parties are held together by duct tape, temperamental similarities, entrenched hatred, tears, and determination, but not necessarily by consensus or logic. We’re settled into them for now, but at some point, someone more effective than the Reform Party, or No Labels, or Unity ’08 might come along and present a viable alternative. Our pop culture’s daintiness about parties is in odd contrast to the brutality of our political contests.