The bridge is yours.

-Oh, hey, maybe True Blood‘s new showrunner will make the show less insanely racist…after one more season of Alan Ball.

-What studios can learn from Battleship and The Avengers, which shockingly have one thing in common.

-I’ll have more on Bring Up the Bodies soon, but it’s true that it’s excellent.

Fortunately for my sanity and good cheer I consumed far more culture that I liked in 2011 than culture that raised my blood pressure. But there were some things that got me really irritated, whether because they’re noxious on their own or because they’re wasted opportunities. Here are ten of them:

1. Red Riding Hood is miserably conventional: The previews implied that Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight follow-up twist on a fairy tale would have Red Riding hood be the wolf, a parable of the violence of female desire and a throwing off of restriction. Instead, it featured a totally traditional love triangle, some impressively terrible dialogue, and a torture elephant. Good lord.

2. Lady Gaga’s incredibly terrible immigration reform song “Americano”: I love me some Gaga, one of the few major stars with any sense of how to use her platform to advance political goals. But this song was a hot, condescending mess. If she wants to dip back into these waters, she might want to take notes from Emma’s Revolution’s “If I Give Your Name.”

3. True Blood goes racist, incoherent:: Alan Ball should know that just because you say your show isn’t a political metaphor doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for the ideas your show expresses. And he should be pretty embarrassed by the way his show handled rape, gender identity, and the South’s racial history this season.

4. Colombiana is totally incoherent: Man, I want to adore Zoe Saldana as a badass tiny action heroine, but this movie featured laughable dialogue, fueled the idea that Ponzi schemers are solely responsible for the recession, and had what is possibly the least plausible romance on screens this year.
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In the course of a long discussion about how to get to a place where Hollywood and mass audiences recognize that stories with minority leads, and that contain references to minority culture and concerns, can also be vehicles for universal stories, commenter Paulie made, over the course of two comments, a valuable point that leads to a question with no easy answer. He wrote:

Can we agree, for example, that the work of Tyler Perry is simply not very good? It has no universal appeal. It’s created solely to pander to the lowest-common-denominator in black audiences. If white people like me dislike Tyler Perry, it’s not because his work is “too black.” It’s because it sucks.

I’m sure you can come up with counter-examples of stuff that actually was artistically good, and should have had universal appeal, but was rejected for being too black. (Jazz certainly comes to mind, along with many other forms of black music that were eventually embraced by white audiences, but were initially written off as being solely black.)…My point in the post before that was that quality storytelling is inherently universal. Of course this means that the concept should be defined in concert with minority populations. My point applies in reverse as well: if something only appeals to white audiences but nobody else, then maybe that’s a sign it’s not actually very good.

It’s a really tough situation: when all you’ve got isn’t very good, do you champion it? Ask people to turn out, spend money on it, ignore its flaws in the hopes that it’ll create space for something better? I was profoundly relieved when Bridesmaids turned out to be genuinely excellent so I didn’t have to feign enthusiasm or to write a very qualified endorsement as I’ve done in the past. I could recommend it unreservedly, and be pleased that it did so well because it’s not the thing that needs to succeed to let us get the good thing. It is the good thing.

But I do hit my limits sometimes. And it was interesting that after we finished that discussion yesterday, commenter Kyessa L. Moore wrote a long critique of my piece explaining why I find the way Alan Ball (I would note, a white man with an extremely spotty record on race) has framed Tara Thornton as a perpetual victim exhausting:

Are you really beyond the ability to understand or see the desire of a child of an alcoholic single mother (with no other family) to take advantage of the shelter and care being offered by a woman with so much to give and other people in need under her care? Can you truly be faulting Tara for being bewitched? Do you fault everyone else for their bewitchment as well? And are You Really asking Tara to have been psychic and discerned that the nice lady was really a maenad intent on destroying her life? Because I refuse to believe that someone who went to college would expect precognition of a Black female character as the grounds for the character to be considered ‘dynamic.’..Clearly, the reasons you present for why Tara is “static” are really reasons rooted in a desire for her character to be superhuman, infallable, maternal, and rooted in a quasi-behavioral Whiteness which you point out as being necessary for this to be possible…Now, if you list wonderful things and add, “–and she’s white.”, then follow by saying, “he made her black and an object of perpetual humiliation”, what you are doing, even if inadvertently, is setting up the similarity between the wonderful world of possibility that is White Tara in the book and how awful Black Tara is in the show. You are linking the characteristics to color not for the purpose of clarity, but to further establish why Black Tara is so faulty for this indistinct, intangible but seemingly preferential list of vague plot details.

I don’t think this is a particularly accurate description of my piece, and I’ve said as much to Ms. Moore in comments. Because, look, at the end of the day, I don’t need Tara to have any particular set of characteristics for me to like her more. All I need to see is that she gets as much of a shot as anyone else on the show to win.

My dislike is aimed at Alan Ball’s choices, not at Tara herself. As a white writer, it makes me viscerally uncomfortable to see another white writer take a character, make the conscious decision to turn her from white to black, and then make her the perpetual and most persistent object of abuse on his television show. Maybe, in the process, he’s turned her into a profound and moving portrait of an abuse victim that resonates deeply with some people. I don’t have the lived experience to speak to that. And even if some folks think Ball’s gotten it right, I just can’t tell people to embrace the character and the show when they come out of a process that seems to me like it could lead not to the next good thing, but to something disastrous.

Charmed, the WB’s attempt to bottle the lightning that was Buffy and sell it to grown-ups by dressing Alyssa Milano in outfits that were wildly inappropriate for work at a newspaper, has long been one of my guilty pleasures. In recent months, I’ve joked that it’s one of the few pieces of pop culture that I can watch at home and for pleasure because it’s so feather-light that there’s no risk that I’ll accidentally slip into analyzing it. No more. After Sunday’s True Blood finale, I realized something: we’ve reached a point where Charmed is actually a better show than True Blood. Here’s why:

Gaining power changes people’s lives.

One of the things that bothered me most about this season of True Blood was what happened to Lafayette and Tara when we and they learned they had magical abilities: pretty much nothing. Okay, sure, Lafayette got himself possessed multiple times and killed his boyfriend, and Tara was slightly less passive than usual and was rewarded for it with a shotgun to the head. But what did it mean for their, and our, understanding of themselves? Not a damn thing. There’s an interesting story to be told about the gay black man in a rural community who tells himself his whole life that he’s special and then finds out he actually *is*. There’s another story to be told about a woman who has been routinely disempowered and finds the strength to build a different life. Hell, there’s even a story to be told about someone like Marnie, who found safety from a world that judged her in a quirky magical enclave and decided she wanted to make everyone who ever mocked her burn. But True Blood didn’t tell any of those stories, throwing out Marnie’s motivations in single lines, condemning Tara and Lafayette to the usual messed-up relationships black people are doomed to on this show. Magic can serve plot by serving characterization. I’d rather see Lafayette grow as a character than some silly special effects that bring Gran and Rene back from the dead. And not only did Sookie’s shiny new powers appear out of nowhere, they appeared to have precisely no effect on her whatsoever.

Charmed always got this. When Piper got the power to blow things up, it unnerved her, and she had to learn to embrace it. Cole and Richard both struggled against their powers — and then reclaimed them to ill effects — to keep their relationships going. Paige struggled against her whitelighter abilities before accepting them, and the responsibilities that came with them. Having power changes your self-image, the way you interact with other people, your sense of obligation and where you fit in the universe. Charmed has always understood that, even if its three sisters were never as isolated as Buffy — the show wasn’t afraid to sit with the Charmed Ones as they figured things out.
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This post contains spoilers through the fourth season finale of True Blood. And lots of rage.

I should talk about the events of the season finale of True Blood, but before I do, I think it’s important to discuss something that didn’t happen. The most important — and most emotionally grounded — event that began this season was the brutal and repeated physical and sexual assault of Jason Stackhouse by the female werepanthers of Hotshot. The assaults themselves were tremendously uncomfortable to watch in a way I thought was powerful. The women involved, who are genetically and by means of acculturation effectively part of a patriarchal cult, were almost uniformly unaware that they were committing assault, with the exception of a young panther who helped him escape. The assault was set up to provide an interesting and useful gender-reversed set of issues, raising questions about Jason’s prior sexual reputation, the fact that men can respond physically even when they aren’t consenting to sex. And rather than dealing with it in any systemic way, the show essentially brushed it off with a scene where Jason decides God’s punishing him for sleeping around. Last night, rather than considering the lingering effects of the attack after Hoyt tells Jason there’s something fundamentally broken in him, the show just punted. Jason’s not a panther, so apparently, the lack of magical significance to his assault means it doesn’t have much emotional or human significance either.
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This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 4 episode of True Blood.

I would abjure True Blood, just to honor what felt like one of the only decently-acted scenes in Sunday’s episode and this increasingly dreadful season, but I do feel an obligation to make it all the way to the end of this season, even if I never come back. So I’ll save going all teary-eyed-but-clear Alcide on Alan Ball until later in the month.

I did actually think that moment in the show was handled well, with some real emotional grounding and force. Alcide’s efforts to stay with Debbie have been one of the most consistently-rendered storylines this season, each time bringing Alcide closer and closer to his limits. First, he’s joining a new pack, even if he’s not particularly comfortable with the people in it, as a way to try to help Debbie stay clean. He’s resisting Sookie, even though she might be an easier partner. And he’s stood by Marcus up to the point when it became clear that his packmaster wasn’t man enough to do his own fighting, much less enough wolf. But Debbie’s infidelity, her role in stealing someone else’s child, are too much, and True Blood made us feel the force of Alcide’s ritual without explaining it into the ground.
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Up at The Atlantic today, I’ve got a piece about the challenges of doing fantasy adaptations, as illustrated by True Blood and Game of Thrones:

[Charlaine] Harris’s Southern Vampire books may be fairly conventional paranormal romances, lacking some of the higher-level philosophical and mythological resonances Alan Ball’s added to the franchise. But they’re an impressive example of world-building and pacing. Harris started out with vampires and shape-shifters, giving readers a grounded sense of those concepts and mythologies before adding werewolf hierarchies in the third book, witches in the fourth, and faeries in the eighth. That pacing gave readers time to get a full sense of how different kinds of magic work before introducing new part of the world and explaining how different concepts interacted.

By contrast, the show’s moved faster, introducing both witches and the idea that Sookie has faerie powers this season. As a result, both concepts and characters have suffered…One of the most important structural elements of Martin’s novels is the addition of points of view that clarify events and to provide different perspectives on events we’ve already visited once in previous books. To move that diversification of perspectives forward more quickly, Game of Thrones’ adapters replaced some generic scenes of courtly life with conversations between characters that set up rivalries at court, like those between the realm’s treasurer and its spymaster…These additional scenes don’t change the pace of events—just our understanding of them.

I hadn’t really thought of it this way before I wrote the piece, but pacing’s particularly important with fantasy because of the way it interacts with world-building. If you want to disorient people, it’s fine to drop them in and rush them. But if you want the concepts and the assumptions of the world to be really clear so you can use them later, you have to take your time.

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 28 episode of True Blood, “Burning Down the House.”

If True Blood had no pretensions to political meaningfulness, it might be possible to enjoy it as a dopey, campy soap opera, to ignore some of the larger plausibility gaps (like the fact that Sookie just never got around to figuring out her faerie abilities since the writers appear to have forgotten about them) in favor of the pretty people. The problem is that Alan Ball appears to have some ambitions for the show. True Blood was, at one point, a decent little metaphor for gay rights and broader sexual liberation. But by shifting it into a riff on the African-American Civil Rights movement, the show’s gotten disastrous in a way that ought to cast doubt on the accepted narrative that Ball is an important and clear-thinking artist.

It’s one thing to do a story featuring several black characters, to have good intentions about it, and to handle it badly out of a lack of ability or sensibility. It’s entirely another to badly misappropriate the Civil Rights movement in the service of a shallow metaphor. If I thought last week’s episode of True Blood, in which two literally Magical Negroes worked together to bring peace to a white family, I might even be more offended by the crassness of the conversation between Bill and Nan this week after the massacre at the tolerance festival. “Remember the civil rights movement. Sweeping social change inevitably accompanied by violence and the appearance of chaos, yadda yadda,” Nan declares. “That’s the spin we’ll give it.” But Bill isn’t having any of it. “We are going after the Necromancer and we are taking her out,” he shoots back, pulling a weak white man’s ghost of Malcolm. “By any means necessary.”

There is a really important story, or stories, to be told about the way that movements have learned from each other, and the ways that the gay civil rights movement has failed to learn from the black civil rights movement — and the ways it couldn’t have replicated that movement. A story that was more tightly focused on Nan Flanagan and her efforts to build vampire narratives, networks, and allies, might be a way to explore that dynamic, which is an important one for American politics. Even a narrower focus on the witch-vampire storyline that took a broader look at anti-vampire sentiment and splits within the vampire community might be a powerful way to explore the tension in civil rights movements between separatists and assimilationists, to illustrate the broad-based roots of events like Jason and Jessica’s failed tryst, which leaves her walking away declaring, “I am not going to glamour you just because you don’t want to feel guilty. What about my guilt? Who’s going to make me forget? Fucking humans. I’m going to go find someone to eat.”

There is a way to make this metaphor work. This is not a function of vampires being tapped out as a topic. It’s a function of carelessness and lack of imagination, of blood and guts and sex trying to stand in for racial and sexual sensitivity. And it’s something that the folks involved ought to be embarrassed about.

The awesome Todd VanDerWerff and his wife Libby Hill asked me and Myles McNutt to come on their TV on the Internet podcast to talk about summer TV surprises. Along the way, we discussed spoiler culture, The Hour, set up an Anchorman-like fight between rival entertainment publications, and figured out who John Galt is. Check it out.

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 21 episode of True Blood.

After a season spent cavorting through convoluted mythologies, True Blood finally returned to politics tonight, with unimpressive results. One of my friends suggested earlier in the weekend that he wished the show would get down to politics instead of going off into snow-drifted fantasies, and while I agree with that in principal, that would require the show to have a coherent political vision, which True Blood lacks. Wherever the show turns this season lies shallowness, and worst, offense.

In that latter category lay the resolution to Lafayette and Mikey’s storylines. Lafayette, having been possessed of the spirit of a black woman, murdered along with her child by her white lover, storms into Hoyt’s house wielding both Mikey and a gun and orders Hoyt out of his house, prompting a standoff. He refuses to let Andy into the house on the grounds that “You sound like a white man,” prompting Andy to holler at Jason that “this situation became pretty damn un-defused by the time that she-male broke into my house.” It’s clumsy and entirely predictable to have an effeminate gay man imbued with the spirit of a woman. And it’s even more predictable that, despite a storyline that’s ostensibly about the deep wounds of Southern racism and how they stretch across generations, the entire thing’s resolved with a bit of magical mumbo-jumbo (and I mean literal mumbo-jumbo), a backyard excavation, and the nice white family getting their formerly haunted baby back. Getting reunited with your bones is one way of settling a spirit. But an actual engagement with the institutionalized racism that let Mavis get murdered and forgotten would be just a tad more meaningful.

In second-place for racial clumsiness was a moment at the beginning of the Tolerance Festival (the vampires need some marketing people on payroll) when Bill protested that the whole thing felt like “having a civil rights protest without any black people,” only to have his boss lady remind him, “They’re called African-Americans,” as if she’s telling him something profound and meaningful. I actually thought this scene was reasonably well put together, complete with a testimonial from a vampire ally. But it’s much more interesting to look at what happens when members of a minority group behave in a way that some members of that group think isn’t conducive to assimilation when those people are acting of their own free will, rather than under suggestion from evil wishes. This is a boring way at getting at a fascinating issue, and Marnie/Antonia’s quest has become just another predictable way to torture Tara.

The one part of the episode that I thought worked on a political level was Sam and Luna’s camping trip with Luna’s daughter, which turned into a nice illustration of the perils of sensitive parenting. “I hope I turn out to be a shifter instead of a werewolf,” Luna’s daughter chirps at one point. “Whatever you wind up being is what you’re supposed to be,” her worried mother tells her, worried that she’s caught the scent of some incipient self-hate. “Why are you being all serious when I just want to pet a bunny?” her daughter complains to Luna. Sometimes, wanting to be a shifter is a sign of incipient anti-werewolf prejudice. And sometimes, it’s just about the fluffy bunnies.