Alyssa Rosenberg : The Atlantic

'We Need to Talk About Kevin' Author Wonders Why Anyone Has Kids

2012-01-26T10:15:16-05:00

An interview with Lionel Shriver, whose novel has been turned into a film that goes into wide release this week.

Osilliscope

We Need to Talk About Kevin expands to more theaters this week. The movie, based on a 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver, follows Eva (Tilda Swinton), the mother of Kevin (Ezra Miller), who committed a massacre at his high school, as she tries to decide if she was responsible for turning him into a monster--or if he was one all along. The novel is an unflinching look at a set of emotions that are often considered unacceptable for polite conversation, including the failure of mothers to bond with and to love or trust their children. We spoke to Shriver about what it's like for a novelist to hand her work over for adaptation, why you can leave your country of origin but not transcend it, and why anyone has children in an era of widely available birth control.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is coming near the releases of two other movies about shame and disgust, Steve McQueen's Shame and Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman's Young Adult. Do you think these are emotions we wall off as much as we can, and when we're forced to deal with them, cope with them all at once as Eva seems to in her letters to her husband Franklin?

By and large, when films, or for that matter books, break new ground or go into territories that previously other people have avoided, it makes it a little easier for others to come along and explore those same things. For example, I have hopes that a comedy like 50/50, or ... The Big C, might make it a little easier to sell the rights to my [health care] novel So Much For That to film, because suddenly it's okay to do stories that involve cancer. But you never know, whether in opening a window, it suddenly closes again because people think we've now done that.

Is it difficult to turn your work over to someone else for adaptation?

In times past, I was inoculated against that anxiety because I sold any number of options to previous books and they never turned into films. Once I got the message that your chances of getting a film made from one of your books are lower than Richard Branson personally inviting you to the moon, I relaxed. There was no reason to be concerned about what they were going to do to my work because they were never going to do anything to my work. Savvy authors take the money and run...they're giving you a little dosh for nothing.

How do you feel about the movie?

I am pleased with how it turned out. I think it is a far better film than I had any reason to expect them to be able to make...it doesn't make up all that much, and I think it's true in spirit and intention. The one difference I would cite, which I expected, is it's a little more understood that Kevin was wicked from birth, where in the book that's a major point of ambivalence. And I think there's a moral sophistication that film just cannot achieve in the same way.

Throughout the novel, Kevin insists on the basic meaninglessness of everything that everyone around him sees as important. Is there an extent to which you think Kevin is right about the emptiness of it all?

Well, yeah. He is right. One of the things that's so chilling about that kid is he's pretty smart, and he has capacity to observe adult hypocrisy, which is pretty common to smart adolescents. I think that's one of the hard parts about being a teenager is you're just old enough to see all the holes in the adult world around you. But you're growing up anyway. And you're not old enough to have any positive substitute, so it's very bleak. So you don't feel powerful enough to create an alternative reality, but you're smart enough to see there's so much wrong with the world your parents have created that you're not eager to participate, you don't want to join. It's what makes adolescents so apocalyptic.

I'm particularly interested in Eva's internationalism, especially given that you are yourself an expatriate. Is part of the point of the novel to suggest that there's a uniquely American kind of malevolence that it's impossible to inoculate yourself against? Or is Eva's problem that she loves America too much to entirely let go of the country and the pain it's capable of inflicting?

She's not that different from Kevin in that she can't help but be American...you can't just choose a different nationality. You can't change fact. She's tried to opt out of her country, but you can't really do that. It's a very West Wing impulse, and meant to be trite. If you have had much to do with liberal intelligentsia in the U.S., they like to think they are above their own country, and they often have contempt for their compatriots, and they think they're better. They think that being super-critical of the United States exempts them. When they talk about Americans, they don't think they're talking about themselves. They're the same people who are always vowing if Bush wins the election, they're moving to Italy. They never move to Italy.

I'm also curious about how legitimate we're supposed to feel Eva's claim to her Armenian heritage is: Is it another affectation?

It is an affectation in so far as much as grasping after one's roots is an affectation. It's too big a country and too fractured a country to find an identity. Being American doesn't cut it. It's not specific enough. You're still lost. You need a sub-identity. That's everywhere. Maybe it's being Jewish. Being Armenian, because it's a small expatriate community, has a gratifying specificity to it...When writing Eva, that's where I was in some ways rooted in my own earlier history as an ex-pat, and I would have been guilty of the same things as Eva is. Especially when I first started living abroad, I was self-conscious about being American, and imagined if I was sufficiently ashamed of it, people would regard me as a non-American. Of course, that's ridiculous.

Especially because that shame is quintessentially American, especially for that subset of left-wingers. In a lot of ways, I came full circle. I've been an ex-pat for long enough to understand that I will always be an expat. I can't live down my nationality. At the same time, there's something wrong with everybody's nationality, so might as well live with this one.

It's a fine line between writing op-ed and writing fiction if you're writing about big social issues. Since you've worked as a journalist, I'd be curious how you think about the differences between your fiction and non-fiction writing, and how those voices inform each other?

They have a lot to do with each other and one feeds the other. I would like to think that there's a Chinese wall, but there isn't. There are single little passages of my books that could have easily come out of my journalism, and I probably can't fight it. I like setting books in a real, political and historical context, and my characters are going to have opinions about the issues of the day. I try not to let the fiction deteriorate into polemic. I think that is a pitfall when you are putting characters in the position of mouthing off. At the same time I enjoy the risk...in fiction I can let fly in a way that in journalism, I have to watch my back a little more...

For me to screen out every more journalistic opinion I have would be foolhardy. What am I reading all those newspapers for? I did have to be careful, particularly in my last book, which is a particularly vicious take on the U.S. health care system...The standard I had to apply was is it fun to read? And it's amazing how much you can get away with that could be considered polemic as long as it's funny. As soon as it ceases to be funny, your readers start feeling preached to and rebel.

Androgyny seems to be one of the things that Eva and Kevin have in common: She's uncomfortable with the way her face becomes more female when she's pregnant, and admires her son's almost feminine physical grace while being unnerved by the way he dresses, which overemphasizes his genitals. And Franklin and Celia, the two most gender-conforming people in the family, end up Kevin's first victims, and he later kills an emerging beauty queen. So is their collective in-betweenness meant to be disconcerting? Evidence of their ability to see a certain kind of uncomfortable truth?

Eva is the ultimate gender non-conforming character. That's because nothing presses the reality of your gender for a woman more than childbearing. It's the very definition of what it is to be female. It's the main thing that women do that men don't. And anyone who has a broader sense of themselves, any woman who has a broader sense of herself, must have a moment of feeling confined, constrained, limited in some way by this defining task. We've got a lot of ideas of what mothers are, and what mothers are supposed to be. And if you've never thought of yourself as that nurturing, cuddling, soft, eternally giving gooey sort, then it's really jarring. I've never been in that position because I've never had children. But I do sympathize with women who suddenly find themselves mothers and are dumped on by all that cultural crap, and feel that this has been imposed on them. And also begin to lose their sense of their earlier selves, that we're not defined by being a woman. Certainly my sense of myself is not especially female. I suspect that's not universal. But I also believe I'm not alone. When I walk around, I'm not feeling like a woman. It's a bigger sense of existence of that.

Now, I think that constraint of gender preconceptions is equally limiting for men, but they're less aware of it...When the default setting for your gender is that you're strong, more powerful, more successful, richer, smarter. Why would you fight it? Sounds great. But it does have a downside. It means admitting to weakness challenges your very idea of who you are. That is unfortunate. That is not enviable.

So is deciding to have a child ultimately an irrational decision?

I was keen to include the period of time when they were trying to decide whether to have a child. You're entirely right. You go through these rational set of pros and cons. And that kind of cost-benefit analysis doesn't get you anywhere. It is this huge leap of faith. You have no idea what's going to happen. You have no idea who's going to walk into your life....Rationally, it's amazing that now that we have birth control, anyone has kids...The stigma against childlessness, now that the norm has changed considerably, has lifted. I don't feel discriminated against because I don't have children, and I don't think people feel sorry for me. It's the safer option. So I'm in awe of the number of parents who voluntarily continue the human race. Good for them.

This interview was condensed and edited for clarity and length.

The 4 Female Characters You'll See on TV for the Foreseeable Future

2012-01-19T11:00:00-05:00

As the women-in-comedy trend grows, certain archetypes for fictional funny ladies are emerging.

One of the most heralded trends of the fall television season was the heavy investment by networks in female-centric comedies. Not all of them have panned out entirely as expected. Whitney's ratings started at 6.7 million viewers, fell to 4 million, and sputtered back up again to 6 million ahead of the premiere of Are You There, Chelsea? in January, hardly a huge hit. And the biggest success of the bunch, 2 Broke Girls, is mired in a swamp of ethnic humor that would have seemed cutting edge in 1952. (The show's executive producer, Michael Patrick King, vigorously defended that direction for the show in a wildly contentious session at the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena, Calif. last week.)

But networks are sticking with the funny ladies (in scripted television and not, as David Letterman fired his comedy booker Eddie Brill after Brill suggested women weren't as comically authentic as men) in spring television. And the tropes for a generation of funny fictional ladies are starting to emerge. Here are the four types of women you can expect to see on TV for the months (and possibly years) to come:

1. The Woodland Creature

Fox

This genre is defined by Zooey Deschanel, whose eyes may come mail-order from Disney rather than Mother Nature, but uses them to convey an impression of vulnerable adorability. New Girl's Jess, her well-meaning free-spirit who is baffled by many of the rules of human society, has been one of the breakout characters of fall. At Fox's comedy panel at press tour, all the other actors on stage with Deschanel found themselves commenting on their own "adorkability." And Jess's unworldliness has become the spark for a debate about whether twee naivete is feminist self-expression or evidence of arrested development.

It's also hard not to see Jess as an influence on Dee Dee (Lauren Lapkus), the wacky roommate to the title character in NBC's Are You There, Chelsea? Among the things the show finds amusing about Dee Dee are her lack of knowledge about pot brownies, her conviction that Chelsea's cat is frustrated by his inability to communicate verbally, and her commitment to her virginity. Where Jess's three male roommates on New Girl offer her a chance to learn from her mistakes—a setup that shows some actual respect for her capacity to learn—so far Chelsea and her best friend are meant to be the sophisticates to this naif, introducing her to the ways of bars and men as if she's the human equivalent of a baby duck. While I've found myself wishing Jess would just grow up already, I sort of want Dee Dee to keep doing her baby duck thing just to drive Chelsea and Olivia nuts.

2. The Crude Broad

NBC

That's because Chelsea in particular is the most egregious example of a second comedic trope: the gal we're supposed to appreciate because she's like some people's conception of a guy. She drinks, she behaves badly, she talks about sex crudely. In the much-commented opening of Are You There, Chelsea?, our leading lady gets busted for drunk driving, plays gay in prison, prays to vodka (in the show's best line, she tells her sister that the liquor is like God because "They're both invisible and have a hand in unplanned pregnancies"), and when bailed out by her sister changes her life by drinking her car instead of her drinking habit. Perhaps we're meant to think she's a truth-teller, or getting what she wants because she's claiming prerogatives men normally reserve for themselves. But when she suggests that a red-headed date trim his pubic hair in the heat of the moment or mocks Olivia's attempts to get a job in the field she actually studied for, Chelsea just seems like an jerk, independent of whatever gendered traits have made her that way.

Fortunately, the two other hard broads the networks have given us are defined by more than their attachments to their shot glasses. On CBS's smash hit 2 Broke Girls, Max may make awfully frequent reference to her vagina, but we also know her dream of illustrating children books is on hold while she services her student loan debt. We also know that she's capable of falling hard, whether for hipster graffiti artist Johnny or roommate Caroline's horse Chestnut. The tough exterior she projects in the diner where she and Caroline work is actually protecting something.

Chloe (Krysten Ritter), the main character in ABC's upcoming Don't Trust the B— In Apartment 23, may be a worse human being than Chelsea is and is certainly less sensitive than Max. But show creator Nahnatchka Khan's given us a delightful twentysomething anti-hero. Chloe makes a living taking on roommates and then harassing them into leaving so she can keep their security deposits. When it turns out she can't drive away June, the small-town dreamer who falls into her trap, she decides to help her adjust—but her chosen method of getting June out of a bad situation includes seducing June's boyfriend. Her best friend is James Van Der Beek playing a fictionally sexed-up version of himself. And Chloe doesn't have to try to be a dude: she's just delightfully, evilly herself.

3. The Rueful Blonde

ABC

Part of what makes Don't Trust the B— In Apartment 23 work is Dreama Walker's work as June, Chloe's roommate. While June moves to New York with high hopes, they're quickly dashed: her job vanishes after the company is wiped out in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme and Chloe rapidly divests her of her steady. But instead of being crushed or getting bitter, June fights back, selling Chloe's furniture out from under her. She's part of a new species of comedy blondes who are bruised but unbowed—and they're far from dumb.

June's joined by Jeannie (Kristen Bell), the number-two consultant to the wildly anti-social Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) on Showtime's House of Lies. The lovely woman in a club of disgusting boys, Jeannie suffers her disappointments—there are hints of an abortion or miscarriage in her past, and she goes on a date with a handsome college classmate only to discover he's recruiting her for a job instead of trying to go out with her. Jeannie's a straight woman to a pack of sex-obsessed workaholic men. And as a result, most of the laughs she generates come from acting as surrogate for an audience that vacillates between not being able to believe what it sees and being utterly disgusted as they watch Marty's team run rampant through American capitalism. In this very dark comedy, Jeannie's a dash of bitters, but she's one of the least alienating things in House of Lies, where her dark perspective on the proceedings surround her feel like sanity.

Finally, there's GCB's Amanda Vaughn (Leslie Bibb), the former high school Queen Bee who finds herself back in her Dallas childhood home after a divorce. If that wasn't bad enough, she's facing comeuppance from her high school targets, particularly fellow blonde Carlene Cockburn (Kristin Chenoweth), which gives us two rueful blondes for the price of a single hour. It's a nice little reversal from the blonde-brunette showdowns of the fall, with the novel setting of a large Texas church. And in a moment of recession, there's something appropriate about Amanda and Enlightened's Amy Jellicoe (Golden Globe winner Laura Dern) moving back in with their mothers. They may not be foreclosed upon, but they're facing a downturn of the heart and spirits, and entertaining us all the way.

4. The Somewhat-Wise Woman

HBO

While the rest of these categories are filled with the twenty- and early thirtysomething characters who dominate pop culture, the midseason brings us two genuinely seasoned—and very funny in their own ways—female characters.

First, there's imperious producer Eileen (Anjelica Huston) on musical drama Smash. The show is more drama than comedy, as befits a program that has least two power ballads per episode. But watching Eileen scheme to bring bring together feuding writer (Christian Borle) and director Derek (Jack Davenport), and in the process, restore her own fortunes after her divorce locks her production company in escrow is a grand, snappy spectacle. Without her swanning around, Smash might risk sinking under the weight of its portrait of creativity at work.

Unlike in Smash, where Eileen buoys an ensemble, Julia Louis-Dreyfus carries HBO's upcoming Veep on her immaculately tailored shoulders as Vice President Selina Meyer. It's a role that shows there are some circumstances where no amount of wisdom will suffice. Whether she's accidentally offending first the oil industry and then disabled Americans, greenlighting a complicated operation to recover a card to a dead Senator's wife to which her chief of staff has accidentally signed the wrong name next to the president's, or waiting for a call from the Oval Office that never seems to come, Selina is constantly five minutes behind. She's got Gary, her right-hand man, and "spinning" sessions in a very twirly leather office chair for consolation, but not much else. When you're the theoretically second-most-powerful woman in the world, it's impossible to catch up, much less work ahead.

Are these archetypes perfect? Not exactly: some of them still rely on awfully reductive gender politics and old-school narratives about little girls and big cities. And the actresses who get to play the parts are almost entirely white. But maybe the first step in getting past reductive tropes is having someone make up tropes for you to play in the first place. And these shows are a forceful reminder that while academic debates rage about the humor or lack thereof possessed by women, network television is convinced there are a lot of ways for women to be hilarious.

5 Ways the Networks Want to Change How You Watch TV

2012-01-18T11:30:21-05:00

How television executives are adjusting to the post-Netflix world

AP Images

The Television Critics Association press tour is a chance for the networks to show off their new shows and returning hits to television critics. But as viewers increasingly use technology ranging from DVRs to streaming services like Hulu and Netflix to watch television, and as artists increasingly tell and sell stories outside the conventional network structure, how network executives approach technology is as important as how they think about storytelling and marketing. These are the five smartest ideas we heard at the press tour in Pasadena over the last two weeks.

1. Use web content as a development pool for the airwaves.
Executive: Kevin Reilly, Entertainment President, Fox Broadcasting Company
While some of the people who make Internet television series are happy to stay online, there are plenty who would love the support of networks, and to make the jump from the Internet to the airwaves. Friends alum Lisa Kudrow's Web Therapy, for example, started as a web-only series and is now aired on Showtime. Reilly's bright idea is to jumpstart that process and to bring it internal. Fox has a strong foothold in animation in prime time with shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy. So Reilly announced that Fox is going to start an aggressive program to develop animated series online to compete with YouTube, which is building out a series of web TV channels anchored by celebrities. And he says that "something that starts in digital could be the next big prime-time hit...You're seeing those entities [like YouTube] beginning to see the value of content. We have an expertise, and a history, and a proficiency, and a prime-time audience base." Tech companies from Netflix and Hulu to Yahoo are behaving more like content providers. It's smart of Fox to start acting like a tech company.

2. If you want critics to assess your ratings more creatively, give them more data.
Executive: John Landgraf, President and General Manager, FX Networks
Landgraf started his session at TCA with a plea to critics to look beyond the ratings of shows when they air in their initial time slot, and to include viewing of repeats of episodes in the same day that they air, and DVR viewings of shows both in the three and seven days after episodes air. Only reporting the first dramatically underestimates the true audience for his shows, Landgraf argued, saying "We're getting paid, from an ad sales standpoint, for about a third of the audience of our show...if we hadn't gotten into the ownership [of shows that air on other networks] business, we'd be struggling to maintain this level of business."

But ratings come out in piecemeal ways, and it can be hard to aggregate numbers and draw trends. So I asked Landgraf if he'd build a portal or tool for journalists to help us get the data we need to do what he's asking. He said he would. If he lives up to that promise, it would help journalists quantify the time-shifting revolution—especially if other networks follow.

3. Help advertisers find their way to audiences, not shows—and support cult favorite series, while you're at it.
Executive: Andy Forssell, Senior Vice President of Content, Hulu
You know all that time you spend watching Community on Hulu? And clicking yes or no when the company asks if the ads you're watching are relevant to you? Or subscribing to Hulu Plus? Hulu generates a lot of information about who you are and what you watch. And when the company's 1,069 advertisers come to them and want to reach a very specific audience, Hulu tells them exactly where to go, even if it's to shows that they wouldn't expect. In other words, Hulu is treating television programming like print content's being treated online for years. And if that approach can generate extra revenue for low-rated but critically-brilliant shows like Community, all to the good.

4. If you want people to put television on their calendars, make television that's worth the appointment—in every way.
Executive: Paul Lee, President, ABC Entertainment Group
Lee isn't alone in recognizing this. But he was the executive of the press tour to point out that if you want people to plan their weeks around television shows, you have to give them not just can't-miss plots but visual spectacles that they want to see on television screens, which have gotten larger and cheaper even as we've added multiple smaller screens. "I think part of that is we are taking risks and having fun and a lot of feature [movie] directors are attracted to that...that's one of the reasons you saw Phillip Noyce" (the movie director who helmed two episodes of ABC's Revenge and an upcoming episode of HBO's Luck) "coming in. I think you're going to see feature actors as well as directors." The profusion of movie actors, such as Anjelica Huston on Smash, Josh Lucas on The Firm, and Dustin Hoffman on Luck, coming to the small screen in mid-season seems to be proving him right. It may not have worked for The Firm, which is floundering, but we'll see how Smash and Luck do.

5. Time slots don't matter. Nor does waiting between episodes. Or traditional seasons.
Netflix didn't present at press tour this year, but the service and other streaming providers were an undeniable factor. Particularly given how many questions executives were asked about serialized versus one-off storytelling. They're in a bind: serialized stories may make it harder for viewers to drop in casually or mid-season, but they may also hold up as more consistent and coherent for viewers who binge on entire seasons of television at a time. In its foray into original content, Netflix is leaning heavily towards serialization, releasing the entire season of its mobsters-in-Scandanavia drama Lilyhammer at once. Technological developments don't just affect distribution and marketing: They affects storytelling, too. And all the networks are trying to figure out what that means for them.

How Coming Out Became Cool for Celebrities

2012-01-10T08:30:13-05:00

For some famous, secure people, official confirmation of their sexual orientation isn't just a matter of honesty: It's a highly valuable commodity.

AP Images

Anderson Cooper has evaded questions about his sexual orientation for years. He may clarify the question soon, though: Rumors swirled recently that the CNN reporter and daytime show host will come out on Anderson in February—and lend his fledgling talk show a ratings boost. While it might seem slightly crass, it's not particularly surprising. Coming out remains a fraught process for many Americans—particularly for young people who still rely on their parents for emotional and financial support—but for some famous, secure people, official confirmation of their sexual orientation isn't just a matter of honesty: It's a highly valuable commodity.

The coming-out process has become yet another celebrity experience to be packaged up for consumption, along with weddings, divorces, weight loss, and first baby pictures. Famous people ranging from Neil Patrick Harris to country singer Chely Wright to boybander Lance Bass have announced their sexual orientations in splashy features in People magazine. Harris is perhaps the only one of those three whose career was sufficiently hot to have landed himself that cover for any other reason. Former American Idol runner-up Clay Aiken pulled a twofer in 2008 when he both came out and introduced the world to his infant son on the cover of People. Even straight guys can get in on the act. This July, former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin landed the cover of Out magazine with an exclusive interview about his gay brother, who died in 2009, and his subsequent work encouraging sports to become more gay-friendly.

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It wasn't always this way, of course. Just as the treatment of gay people has evolved in the United States, it's the coming out process itself has changed. It was only a few decades ago that celebrities started to feel comfortable discussing their sexuality publicly. Despite the fact that there are still no out, active athletes in American professional team sports today, athletes actually beat Hollywood in beginning the public coming-out process. Former NFL running back David Kopay came out in an interview with the Washington Star in 1975, and tennis star Martina Navratilova followed six years later after she'd finished the process of becoming an American citizen. But those revelations carried greater personal and professional risk in a time before gay sex had been decriminalized, and as the rise of AIDS stoked anti-gay panics.

AIDS became an impetus for more stars to come out of the closet, not always at the rate they'd wished, and not always in their lifetime. People's status as the vogue venue for coming out stories began after Rock Husdon's death in 1985 when the magazine published a major story about Hudson's AIDS diagnosis and homosexuality, something his agent had kept a carefully if incompletely guarded secret during the star's life. Keith Haring was openly gay during his lifetime, but as HIV created a new kind of coming-out process as people disclosed their sexual orientations and their HIV status, he was vocal about his illness and used the Keith Haring Foundation in part to provide financial support for and images that AIDS organizations could use to communicate their messages.

It was Ellen Degeneres who set a new model for coming out that was designed both to help her life a more honest, fulfilled life, and to bolster her career int he process. In a coordinated campaign, Degeneres personally came out on the cover of Time 16 days before "The Puppy Episode," in which her character on her sitcom Ellen joined her outside of the closet. She went on Oprah Winfrey to discuss the revelation the morning before "The Puppy Episode," and then had Winfrey serve as her confessor again on Ellen that same night. At the time, Degeneres said, "I did it selfishly for myself and because I thought it was a great thing for the show, which desperately needed a point of view."

And in the long arc she's been proven right. 42 million people turned in for the coming out episode, and after two seasons where the ratings had averaged 10.6 million viewers per episode, Ellen's numbers rose to 12.4 million viewers per episode in the final season. There were bumps along the way: her follow-up, The Ellen Show, only aired 8 episodes before it was cancelled. She's found new success as a daytime talk show host where she averages 2.74 million viewers per episode, a star on a smaller stage—though she's graced bigger ones, including hosting the Academy Awards in 2007. While her decision to come out may have made her a hot commodity in the gay market—the Human Rights Campaign and lesbian-oriented Olivia Cruises tried to advertise on "The Puppy Episode" to replace lost sponsors—Degeneres used that base to build a national audience composed of gay and straight people alike. Neil Patrick Harris followed in Degeneres's footsteps, coming out on the heels of high-profile playboy roles in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and How I Met Your Mother to show that gay actors shouldn't be limited to gay roles. He later hosted the Emmys and Tonys. When Degeneres and Harris came out, audiences could feel good rooting for a brave gay actress and a gay actor who transcended stereotypes. Those fans have stuck around because Harris is tremendously funny, and Degeneres is a charming host and interviewer.

That's the dream scenario, of course. When Chely Wright became the first mainstream country singer to come out last year, Lifted Off the Ground, the album she released in conjunction with her coming-out memoir, sold only 21,000 copies. Chaz Bono's documentary about his sex reassignment surgery was one of the few things that went right for Oprah Winfrey's fledgling and struggling OWN network. But it seems unlikely to move him beyond turns on Dancing With the Stars and a continued—and important—role as a celebrity spokesman.

And at a time when, as Out puts it, "many otherwise responsible adults slipped into a Glee-induced coma" about the obstacles young gay and transgender people face, we're not at a point where we no longer need role models. Between 20 and 40 percent of the homeless youth in the United States are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender—26 percent of young people who came out reported that they were asked to leave home, a risk rather more considerable than a television show cancellation. A study that focused on gay youth in Oregon, published in May, suggested that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender young people are much more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. 21.5 percent of gay youth interviewed for the survey had tried to kill themselves, compared to just 4.2 percent of straight students. And the numbers were 20 percent higher for gay students who didn't have access to support systems like a gay-straight alliance. Even students who get help can get worn down: Jamey Rodemeyer, a 14-year-old who made a highly publicized video as part of Dan Savage's It Gets Better campaign, and who had the support of his parents, a therapist, and a social worker, committed suicide in September.

The coming-out process Cooper would go through, if he indeed reveals his sexual orientation in February, exists in a whole different universe than the one entered by vulnerable young gay people who risk homelessness, bullying, and vastly elevated risks of suicide. He has a solidly established professional pedigree, and doesn't need to lock up a segment of the gay market to maintain a tenuous foothold in the entertainment business. And Cooper hasn't made an effort to make any particular secret of his personal life for years. When he went on vacation with his presumed boyfriend Benjamin Masiani in 2009, Gawker sighed in exasperation: "Cooper's see-through closet is such a joke that it doesn't make sense to call him in the closet anymore. If he won't say it, we will: Anderson Cooper is officially out." If he does decide to put a rubber stamp on that fact during February sweeps, it'll be hard to imagine who the declaration will surprise. And while it might make him a role model, Cooper won't even be the first enterprising CNN reporter to come out of the closet. Don Lemon beat Cooper to the punch earlier this year.

Anderson Cooper's life is his own, and he can tell us as much or as little about it as he wants. But if he's treating his own coming out story like a commodity rather than a personal journey, we can act like educated consumers, deciding whether he's setting a positive example or profiting off his safe distance from real-world homophobia. For young gay people, not enough has changed in America. But just because the coming-out process has become beneficial for some celebrities doesn't mean we're required to buy what they're selling.

'House of Lies' Could Be TV's Best Comedy About the Recession Yet

2012-01-06T11:07:10-05:00

Showtime's smart new series, starring Don Cheadle, follows a team of management consultants. It's too bad it relies on the cable clichés of gratuitous sex and stereotyping.

Showtime

It may be a profitable time to be a management consultant, but as far as the public's concerned, the profession has hit a rough patch. Elite universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have come under scrutiny from Occupy Wall Street and likeminded critics for the numbers of graduates funnelled into the finance and consulting industries. In pop culture, Lev Grossman's The Magician King (soon to be a television show on Fox) imagines management consulting to be a scam that provides a hideaway for magical burnouts. And now on Showtime's new sitcom, House of Lies, a team of management consultants from an up-and-coming firm, led by Marty Kahn (an alternately impish and melancholy Don Cheadle), represent everything that's wrong with the American economy. Anchored by some strong performances and acid scenarios, House of Lies, which premieres Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern time, could turn out to be the best comedy about the recession yet. It's too bad that the people behind it seem unaware of their show's own strengths.

House of Lies is at its best when it focuses specifically on the grotesqueness and desperation of the one percent, a subject that management consulting is uniquely poised to explore. "These guys are just looking for a way to justify their bonuses," one of Doug's junior team members tells him as they walk through the airport on the way to their first assignment. "And why shouldn't they?" Marty wants to know. "Because they robbed the American public of billions of dollars by selling them bad mortgages," his coworker Jeannie (a charming but underused Kristen Bell) tells him. And true to form, Greg Norbert, an executive at fictional mortgage giant MetroCapital, complains that people are unjustly angry at the company for giving them what they wanted in a boom, suggesting that underwater homeowners "cowboy the fuck up."

'House of Lies' keeps veering off into hijinks, perpetuating the misconception that naughtiness is inherently interesting

But rather than delivering a short, sharp shock to the self-satisfied mortgage barons, Marty's team explains that America hates the company and then outlines a plan for MetroCapital to lie its0 way to a better reputation. He offers up a "mortgage amnesty" program that, after disqualifications, will actually help very few struggling homeowners but will let the company stave off enough criticism to keep their bonuses. Rarely have corporate priorities been so clearly articulated.

After the assignment at MetroCapital, Greg Norbert appears again, this time to set into motion the season's major plot arc: MetroCapital's attempt to acquire the firm Marty and his team work for so the mortgage company can have in-house consultants rather than hiring outsiders. "After you left, we felt sad," Greg tells Marty, who had hoped not to see Greg again after a sublimely awkward business dinner. "No, not really. But we had all this bailout money." That last line sums up one of the most off-putting things about the economic crisis and recovery we've been living through since 2008: The people substantially responsible for our current peril ended up with a lot of money and remain unrepentant.

If only the show would keep its consultants focused on cases like MetroCapital's to expose the rot in the American economy. They could easily take on a financial services firm trying to avoid a Lehman-like fate, a payday lender, or an outrageously abusive CEO like former Massey Energy boss Don Blakenship. Unfortunately, House of Lies keeps veering off into extracurricular hijinks, perpetuating in a tiresome misconception that's becoming increasingly common on cable: the idea that naughtiness is inherently interesting. Surely by now no one is surprised that Midwesterners, too, have sex dungeons and foot fetishes, or that self-professed masters of the universe sleep with a lot of women. It was vastly more entertaining to watch Ben Schwartz chastely profess admiration for Leslie Knope as wannabe small-town operator Jean Ralphio on Parks and Recreation than to sit through a scene of him contemplating anal sex with a saucy Mormon chick as he does on House of Lies. The network show may be tamer than the cable one, but it's more clever and winning. And it was much more revelatory to watch Damian Lewis and Claire Danes's damaged victims of the War on Terror make love sober for the first time on fellow Showtime program Homeland than it is to see House of Lies' Marty bring a stripper to a business dinner, only to have her hook up with Marty's client's wife in the ladies room.

That's not to say that the show fails entirely when it comes to its characters' personal lives. One of the best parts of House of Lies is what Marty comes home to. It's refreshing to see a household made up of three generations of black men, rather than a standard contingent of matriarchs. From the first scene of Marty's family life, it's clear that he, his father, and his son are all characters rather than tropes. His retired therapist father struggles with the memory of Marty's mother's suicide and helps raise Roscoe, Marty's son, who prefers to dress in girl's clothes and tries out for Sandy in the school's production of Grease (though it's not yet clear if he's gay). House of Lies is admirably unafraid to present Marty as something more subtle and intriguing than a fully supportive father. Like Burt Hummel on Glee, Marty struggles to understand what Roscoe is going through. The pain on his face when Roscoe asks him "Hey dad, what's a fudgepacker?"—the boy wanting to know what the term means before admitting he's been called it—is hard to witness.

But because his son is so much younger than Glee's Kurt Hummel and less clear about the permanence of his sexual and gender identity, Marty has much more negotiating to do. In an early episode, he stands up for Roscoe's right to try out for Sandy in a school production of Grease. "He wants to sing 'Summer Nights' and wear a poodle skirt," Marty rants to Roscoe's principal when a rival's mother protests his son landing the part. "Now Britney Kaufman's mother can't stand it that her little baby isn't getting every goddamn thing she wants so she's off on some kind of gender witch hunt." It's a stirring defense, but ultimately a hollow one: Marty eventually folds and accepts a compromise with the school to put Roscoe in the less-visible but still-female role of Rizzo. It's both a protective act and a betrayal, an illustration of the imperfect choices parents make on behalf of their gay and gender-variant children all of the time. Rather than simply preaching parental tolerance, there's something bracing about House of Lies' insistence that parenting correctly is hard work even in the best of circumstances.

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Given the skillful ambiguity on display here, it's a shame Marty's ex-wife is such a stereotype. She's a wildly neglectful and spoiled pill-popper who ignores Roscoe except when she's stood up by her married boyfriend or wants to use him to hurt Marty. "Our son's a tranny for life," she complains when Marty lets Roscoe try out for Grease. "He's experimenting with different modes of gender identification," Marty spits back at her, barely under control. We're told she's brilliant at her job—she's a rival consultant—a contradiction that would be fascinating to see reconciled with her slovenly personal life. But instead of watching her close deals, we see Marty having hate-sex with her and then dressing her in the morning when she's too stoned to wake up.

The show does better in its rejection of colorblindness. It refuses to pretend that people don't see Marty's blackness just because he's successful and powerful. On assignment to a Mormon-run hotel chain, the executives assume Marty's white, younger colleague is his boss. And talking to a black, Harvard-trained recruit to the firm, Marty offers a blunt assessment of one of his superiors: "He's a racist piece of shit." It's a nice contrast to the sunny multiculturalism of the USA Network shows like White Collar and to artifacts like The Help, which insist that good intentions, even paternalistic ones, wash well-meaning white people clean of the sins of racism. House of Lies very much stands by the idea that we're hardly a post-racial society.

If House of Lies rooted its week-by-week cases in these sorts of insights about our corporate cultures, our economy, and the consultants who attend to the people at its peak, it would be a revelation. But who has time for that when there are Mormon executives to be deflowered, expense accounts to be flaunted, and ex-wives to shame instead?

The Year's Best Case for Immigration Reform May Have Been at the Movies

2011-12-28T10:48:08-05:00

A Better Life and Miss Bala show why workers come to America—and why they leave Mexico

Summit

This past year was heavy on "issue movies," from the 9/11 reminiscences of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to the class-war metaphors of In Time. But while foreign policy and the economy lead national headlines and the box office, immigration policy stayed confined to bitter local fights in states like Alabama and South Carolina—and inspired two of the better, and most tragically ignored, movies of the year. A Better Life, Chris Weitz’s tender, sad look at a few days in the life of a gardener in Los Angeles, went largely unnoticed in theaters but was boosted when star Demián Bichir got a well-deserved Screen Actors Guild best actor nomination. And Miss Bala, which will be Mexico’s entrant in the Academy Awards Best Foreign Language Film category, chronicles the life of a beauty-pageant contestant after she becomes the terrified pawn of a cartel leader.

Seen together, the two movies offer a powerful case for reform of a broken American immigration system, and for action to stabilize Mexico and fight government corruption there. A Better Life provides a painful explanation of the hopes that draw undocumented immigrants to America, while Miss Bala depicts the forces in Mexican life that make it easier—or even imperative—to leave that country behind.

Small improvements in their lives make these characters happy, but also introduce them to terrible vulnerability

Incredibly modest ambitions put A Better Life’s Carlos Galindo (Bichir) and Miss Bala’s Laura Guerro (Stephanie Sigman) in the path of much larger forces. A gardener living from one day’s work to the next, Carlos purchases his former employer’s truck and landscaping equipment for $12,000, thinking he’s investing in his own small business. Laura enters a local beauty pageant almost on a lark, fitting her hurried appointment with the organizer in between her duties for her family’s laundry business. But those small improvements in their lives—Carlos's ability to drive to work rather than having to stand on a sidewalk soliciting for day-laboring gigs, and the pageant’s validation for Laura that she is beautiful—may make them happy, but also introduce them to a terrible vulnerability. Suddenly, they have something to lose.

One of the most moving sequences in A Better Life shows the joy Carlos feels after one of his relatives comes through with the money he needs to buy the truck and equipment. It’s not that his life is miraculously transformed. It’s that suddenly he has access to the pleasures the rest of us take for granted, whether it’s seeing one’s own city from the driver’s seat of a vehicle or watching pretty women passing by on a sunny day during lunch break. The happiness on Carlos’s face during these simple interactions illustrates the gap between undocumented immigrants and citizens, between the poor and the well-off, better than any hectoring depiction of squalor ever could.

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But Carlos’s sudden comparative wealth makes him a target of a man with even smaller ambitions than his own. On his first day out with the truck, he picks up a day laborer who was kind to him in the past, only to have the man steal the truck and equipment, sell them for far below their value, and send the money back to family in Mexico. It’s a heartbreaking betrayal, ruining Carlos’s joy in his new ability to be generous.

Laura, singled out as a beauty, finds herself at a party she might not have attended otherwise. But instead of a happy evening out, she gets caught in the middle of a massacre and entangled with cartel leader Lino Valdez, forced to work for him and submit to him in exchange for protection.

While Carlos gets temporary access to a range of ordinary experiences and emotions that were previously out of reach for him, Laura finds herself exposed to a horrifying new normal. When Laura has thousands of dollars taped to her body to smuggle into the United States, we’re terrified for her. But Lino and his collaborators are relaxed, and not just because she’s taking the risk for them. It’s hard to think of a better demonstration of the enormousness and porousness of the border between the U.S. and Mexico than the sight of a rickety little plane passing over it effortlessly. Later, Lino casually strings the body of a murdered Drug Enforcement Agency officer up over a bridge in broad daylight. It was one of the more disconcerting things I saw in theaters this year.

And when Carlos’s and Laura’s wild runs across Los Angeles and the peninsula end as such chases inevitably must, they find themselves in the clutches of justice systems that are implacable in very different ways. In Carlos’s case, the efficient machinery set up by the United States government to deport undocumented workers has essentially no room for appeal. The volunteer lawyer who visits him recognizes that Carlos has all the makings of a solid citizen, but none of the resources to fight for an incredibly rare exemption to the rules that say he must be returned to Mexico. The most the system can bend is to give Carlos a moment with his son before shipping the gardener off in shackles.

If a state with something to offer citizens its citizens can afford this kind of callousness, a state that couldn’t care less about its people can be all the more harsh and arbitrary. And it turns out not to matter to the Mexican government that Laura’s been coerced, threatened with death, and raped. Treating her as a collaborator with the cartel makes for a more interesting news story, so after she tips off a powerful general of a coming attack, she’s imprisoned, trotted out before the news cameras, and ultimately abandoned on the streets of Baja California.

Faced with treatment like that, with the knowledge that the border is crossable and that beyond it lies something better—even if only the placidity of poverty—of course immigrants will keep coming to the United States from Mexico. The immigration system that deports Carlos may be designed to preserve American jobs and the benefits of American citizenship for legal residents. But knowing why immigrants come here isn’t the same as understanding what compels them to leave there. A Better Life and Miss Bala together tell both of those stories. They should be mandatory viewing for policymakers who would rather punt immigration reform to the next election cycle—and for any of us who are at risk of taking America for granted.

Fall TV's 10 Biggest Disappointments

2011-12-08T10:00:43-05:00

NBC shelves a cult favorite, True Blood gets weird, and more lowlights from a frustrating season

Fox

The end of a year in entertainment always produces a glut of best-of lists. But it's as important to learn from mistakes as it is from successes. And in television, 2011 was full of missteps, weird decisions, and regressive plotlines. From the creative crash and burn of initially-promising trends like a spike in comedies created by and starring women to True Blood's descent into racist nonsense to HBO's decision to kill what could have been a delightfully weird, feminist look at Hollywood before it even got off the ground, here in no particular order, are what we can learn from the biggest disappointments of the last season in television.

The Extraordinary Ordinariness of 'All-American Muslim'

2011-11-11T10:00:44-05:00

TLC's new series subverts reality TV cliches as it focuses on the everyday lives of Muslim families in Michigan

Adam Rose/TLC

The producers and stars of TLC's All-American Muslim, which premieres this Sunday at 10, are taking great pains to insist that their show is nothing unusual. "It's just a natural fit for us," says Alon Ornstein, TLC's vice president of production and development. "We're always all about telling compelling stories about real families." Nawal Auode, one of the cast members insists that the show is more about what Muslims and non-Muslims have in common with each other than what they don't: "You'll relate to me being a new mom and dealing with post-partum, and you'll relate to [her husband] Nader being a loving husband." All-American Muslim certainly follows in the tradition of programs like The Cosby Show and The George Lopez Show in debunking myths about minority families. But there's nothing ordinary about how excellent All-American Muslim is, or how skillfully and sensitively it builds drama out of questions of faith and religious practice.

One of the most important things that distinguishes All-American Muslim from its reality-show peers is simply that the cast is uniformly likable and engaging. Hatefests like Bravo's Real Housewives franchise and villain-focused competition show formats have been wildly successful, but it can be spiritually draining to watch wildly privileged people savage each other on television. And attempts to adopt a kinder tone can also fall flat: TLC made tried unsuccessfully to humanize controversial figures like Sarah Palin, whose reality show, Sarah Palin's Alaska, was cancelled after a single season, or to tell a heartwarming family business story in DC Cupcakes, whose baking sisters seemed more sickly sweet than sympathetic.

But in All-American Muslim, the network appears to have found a genuinely engaging cast in its network of Dearborn, Michigan families, who range from tattooed and country music-loving Shadia Amen and Jeff, who converts to marry her; Shadia's bossy but well-meaning brother Bilal; ambitious event planner Nina Bazzy, who defies expectations based on her gender and her faith to expand her business; Nawal and Nader, who are expecting a baby; Mike Jaafar, Dearborn's deputy police chief, who finds himself defending the safety and free speech rights of virulently anti-Muslim protesters; and Fouad and Zaynab Zaban, who balance Muslim observance with Fouad's role as the coach of Dearborn's competitive high school football team. There are no obvious schadenfreude possibilities here—at worst, I found myself wishing that Bilal, who tends to police the rest of the cast's behavior, would get taken down a peg or two. It would take the most hardened Islamophobe or a committed skeptic to root against a Muslim version of Friday Night Lights' Coach Taylor, or to look for signs of incipient extremism in a couple preparing for parenthood.

That switch in tone isn't the only way All-American Muslim subverts what have become reality television norms and produces genuinely moving television as a result. Take the show's clever inversion of the confessional, a staple of reality television that traditionally gives individual cast members a chance to sound off—often about each other. It's routinely a source a source of drama, but rarely of insight. All-American Muslim's replaced the confessional with group discussions of faith. That's not to say it's not raw. "I would feel like a failure," Lila Amen tells her children as they discuss the impending conversion of Jeff, Shadia Amen's fiance, from Catholicism to Islam. "It would depress me immensely if you wanted to convert."

The group-confessional device is thoughtful and the discussions are serious, but they're never boring or academic. If the cast is talking about Ramadan, it's because Fouad Zaban's trying to structure football practices so players don't pass out from fasting, or because Jeff, and inveterate snacker, is struggling to stay observant. If they're talking hijabs, it's because Samira's trying to decide whether to start wearing one again in the midst of her struggle with infertility. In a pop-culture environment where religion is either a simplistic signpost—often of hypocrisy—or reserved for indie fare like Vera Farmiga's directorial debut Higher Ground, a mainstream show that's deeply engaged with faith is groundbreaking for everyone, not just for Muslims. And Nawal Auode says viewers won't be the only people who take new information and perspectives away from the show.

"Nader and I, we would go back and try to research," the questions that came up in discussions, she says. "This has kind of stepped up our game in trying to understand our faith better. This is an educational opportunity for us, too."

None of which is to say the show is saccharine, or drama-free. Bilal may be a bit preachy, but at Jeff's conversion to Islam, he jokes that Shadia's finacee suggested the whole family become Jewish instead but that they compromised on Buddhism. When a sheikh tells Samira that she can't use donor sperm to try to become pregnant if she wants her child to be recognized as her husband's, her disappointment is palpable. The show never treats the difficult and ongoing project of trying to reconcile the demands of faith and the possibilities of the modern world as if it's easy, or if there's an obvious answer the characters are missing.

And it manages to generate powerful tension out of that most anodyne subject: tolerance. For instance, how Jeff's mother handles his conversion: In one episode as she struggles find a way to say she wishes he'd stay Catholic, she tells Jeff, "Society evolves. It doesn't stay the same. Sometimes we would like things to stay the same," connecting her personal anxiety to larger fears of change. Later in that very same episode, she lets Shadia's mother fix a head scarf for her and tells the camera, "Today was one of the most special days of my life." Her evolution from rejecting her son's new faith to embracing at least his new family is genuinely moving. Similarly, when Shadia and Jeff hit up a country music festival, telling us, "I'm a hillbilly at heart," it's easy to brace for a confrontation between her and the cowboy-hatted fans bugging her husband to chug a beer. Instead, she ends up talking to a white, non-Muslim woman who's happy for a chance to vent about how annoyed she is by Islamophobic stereotypes. And when Samira comes to work wearing a hijab for the first time, her coworker Kelly tells her, "You look so different. You look awesome, though. I love the color." There's something touching about the faith All-American Muslim exhibits in Americans generally—when a heavily pregnant Nawal and Nader find themselves repeatedly ignored by a restaurant hostess, Nader tries to convince his wife that they're just experiencing routine bad service rather than outright discrimination.

Of course, we live in a world where that faith isn't always justified. A well-financed and paranoid industry that conjures wild fantasies about the establishment of Islamic theocracies in the West, rather than focusing on the mutual goal of mainstream Muslims and non-Muslims alike: marginalizing and disempowering extremist terrorists. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors bias attacks and extremists groups, reported a spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes around the ten-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Dearborn is an incomplete refuge from that turmoil. But with All-American Muslim, TLC suggesting that the town and its families might be part of a better American future. And in challenging Islamophobia, the network's upended the conventions of reality television and produced one of the best new shows of the fall.

'Tower Heist' and '2 Broke Girls': How the Recession Humbled Hollywood

2011-11-07T09:00:34-05:00

Movies and TV shows long perpetuated the myth that the American dream means earning vast wealth. Tower Heist and 2 Broke Girls suggest that may be changing.

Universal Pictures

Hollywood's responded to the recession by making movies about the people who conduct mass layoffs and the people who rebuild their lives after them, bankers who go to hell for foreclosing on gypsies, and fantasies of vengeance against Bernie Madoff. And in recent months, a movie and a television show have challenged one of Hollywood's own persistent economic myths: the idea that the American dream means achieving extreme wealth, rather than economic security.

Tower Heist—which opened this weekend and stars Ben Stiller as Josh Kovacs, a luxury apartment building manager and Alan Alda as a Madoff-like Ponzi schemer Arthur Shaw—is, as the title suggests, a heist flick. But while the action sequences are risible (if realistically queasy), the movie is at times an acid comedy about how difficult it is to resist the allure of wealth.

At the beginning of the movie, Josh tells himself that his relationship with his richest client is professional, but for the first half of the movie, he's clearly deluded. He and Shaw play chess over breakfast, and Josh listens to an interminable radio show about Bouchon cheese and killing your own Thanksgiving turkeys so he can impress Shaw with suggestions for food and wine pairings. When it's revealed that Shaw ripped off the pensions of the people who have made his life comfortable for years, it turns out it was Josh who fell for the promise of exorbitant returns on their investment. It isn't really enough for him to make other people's lives free of ordinary concerns: Josh wouldn't mind some of that comfort for himself, and in pursuing it, he's denied himself and his friends even the prospect of a modest but dignified retirement.

It takes the explanation of a former investment banker who's being evicted from the building to make clear the full extent of what Shaw's done to his employees—and the fact that his lifestyle was the result of fraud rather than hard work or reliable knowledge of the markets. "At a certain point, it isn't about securities fraud," the depressed banker (played by Matthew Broderick) explains. "It's about catering." When Josh tells Shaw that one of the defrauded employees has attempted suicide and asks if he cares, Shaw insists that of course he does because "Lester has been part of my life for over a decade." "Then why haven't you asked if he's alive or dead?" Josh asks bitterly, remarking that Shaw's opulent displays of wealth are irreplaceable, "not like doormen." Shaw's ongoing schtick where he pretends he's just "an Astoria boy, like Josh" is, it turns out, its own kind of callousness. Josh may have envied Shaw's wealth and taste, but when he learns what it would take to achieve them, it turns out there are other things he values just as highly, among them, community and fairness.

CBS's 2 Broke Girls focuses on a different kind of victim of a similar fraudster: a Ponzi schemer's daughter. When Caroline finds herself locked out of her penthouse, she ends up waitressing in a Brooklyn diner and sharing an apartment with her coworker Max, who grew up poor and is now is hiding from her credit card bills and student loans by pretending to be dead. Their partnership is a reset for both of them. Caroline has to confront that her old life might have been momentarily secure, but it wasn't exactly admirable, much less sustainable. "Now that you support yourself by earning your own money, that's somehow shameful?" Max asks Caroline after she flees from an ex-boyfriend who she is afraid will mock her for working as a waitress. As the series progresses, Caroline's friendship is unsettling for Max not just because Caroline can be dippy and naive, but because her expectations force Max to confront the idea that she deserves more than a terrifying dentist in the subway and debt that will cripple her for the rest of her life.

Neither woman should have lived the way she has for the previous twenty-odd years, Caroline in a false paradise, Max in poverty that's hardened her to the point of brittleness. But their plan to open a cupcake shop together is a class-war compromise, a promise that with hard work they can achieve a sustainable comfort that Max has been afraid to even dream of and that Caroline previously would have seen as a nightmare. The show is far from perfect—it's fallen prey to ugly racial stereotypes and stupid sex jokes. But it's providing Caroline with an honest education in the subjects that Arthur Shaw only pretends to know about.

If Tower Heist is about the impossibility of the 99 percent and the 1 percent to talk honestly to each other, 2 Broke Girls is about how people across the 99 percent began to see themselves as participants in the same uncertain economy, rather than divided into working class, middle class, and endless variants thereof. Downward mobility, or the risk of it, has had a clarifying effect, letting some Americans see and feel the possibility of what many others have known all along.

'Hell on Wheels': AMC's Disappointing 'Deadwood' Rip-Off

2011-11-04T12:10:59-04:00

The new Western series fails to live up to its excellent HBO predecessor in almost every way

AMC

It might feel unfair to compare Hell on Wheels, AMC's new show about the race to span the United States with railroads, to Deadwood, the great HBO series that ended its run in 2006, if the former didn't so aggressively invite comparisons to the latter. Both shows involve the rough process of bringing organization to the American West, and try to struggle with race, class, and the consequences of capitalism. They both tell that story via men with handsome sideburns and a talent for violence, unexpectedly resilient widows with interfering older male relatives, prostitutes who pal around with reverends, and unscrupulous businessmen, setting up essentially similar dynamics between them. Only Hell on Wheels has the sight of the rapper and actor Common digging railroad cuts in a top hat and vest, which I suppose counts for something. But the show is badly overmatched everywhere it goes head-to-head with its venerable predecessor.

Some of the problem lies with the shadow cast by Deadwood's two main protagonists. Ian McShane's profane, hilarious, fearsome performance as saloon-keeper and Deadwood founding father Al Swearengen already shows its influence in another new show this fall: Kelsey Grammer's turn as Chicago Mayor Tom Kane in Starz's Boss. In Hell on Wheels, Colm Meaney, by no means a bad actor, tries to summit the same peak as businessman and Swearengen surrogate Doc Durant. He has some fine moments, notably when he sticks extra arrows in a corpse to make for a more dramatic massacre photograph. But he's left to monologue about his place in history and dictate portentous telegrams. The construction of the railroad is an event that will profoundly change the country, wresting control of territory from Indians and connecting disparate enclaves to established American cities. But where Swearengen struggled to balance his personal concerns with his plans for Deadwood's future, Durant talks about history but acts mostly in his own interests. For all his bombast, he's a much smaller man.

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Similarly, Timothy Olyphant's turn as store-keeper-turned-Deadwood-sheriff Seth Bullock has been so influential that he's essentially reprising it in a contemporary setting as a U.S. Marshal on FX's Kentucky Western Justified. We met Bullock in Deadwood when, in an act of mercy and justice, he sped up a man's execution to save from him a vastly more painful lynching. By contrast, former slave-owner and Confederate veteran Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount) enters Hell on Wheels when he shoots a Union veteran in the face while the man is in what he believes to be confession. It's an oblique act rather than a searing one, and while we learn more about Bohannon's capacity for mayhem and desire for revenge on the men who killed his wife, the show appears to have little sense of his inner person. Once again, a national conflict's reduced to personal vendetta.

But mostly Hell on Wheels has the all-too-common misapprehension that it's better to tell than to show. And that when you're dealing with big issues like the aftermath of Civil War and race, the show has a bad tendency to make blandly comprehensible what can be grand and strange while remaining profoundly human.

When it comes to race, I appreciate that Hell on Wheels includes black and Native American characters in the main cast from the beginning. And it might have made for a better show to focus on the experience of former slaves and displaced Indians on the frontier rather than defaulting to a standard Western narrative about victimized Confederates. Instead, we've got the insulting and not particularly well-written scene where Cullen, a white man and former slaveowner who fought for the Confederacy, tells a former slave, "You got to let go of the past"--which gets the response, "Have you let it go?" The exchange isn't nearly as moving as the mournful conversation between Hostetler and Samuel Fields, two free black men in Deadwood, after a horse they were castrating tramples a young white man. "Horse run trash like that over by accident, still ain't a white man on earth gonna stand up against roping us up, now is there?" Hostetler laments. "John Brown would've," his friend Samuel Fields reminds him. The failures of Reconstruction aren't just something you state in a straightforward manner on occasion—they would have been something that seeped into every facet of your life.

That same blunt blandness extends to other characters' confrontations with the lingering effects of the Civil War, which are stated, rather than shown. The minister who's set himself up in Hell on Wheels is a straightforward prairie minister (though one with a dark secret that ultimately reinforces the show's sympathy for former slave-owners and advocates of slavery), rather than the tormented Union civil war veteran who ministered to Deadwood in its first season before succumbing to the brain tumor that was robbing him of his faith. And when the Hell on Wheels minister mildly asks "Haven't we had our fill of war? Our fill of killing?" it's no match for the anguished cries of Deadwood's camp doctor raging at God: "What conceivable use was the screaming of those men? Did you need to hear them to know your omnipotence?"

Hell on Wheels doesn't compete with Deadwood in the arts of cussing or whoring, either. Declaring of the Emancipation Proclamation, as Elam Ferguson does at one point, that "Ain't nothing good coming from this either...Look what this got. I might as well wipe my ass with it," or the sight of Doc Durant denouncing his own pitch to investors as "Twaddle and shite," don't remotely compare to Swearengen promising a crowd fired up by rumors of a massacre by Native Americans "I will offer a personal $50 bounty for every decapitated head of as many of these godless heathen cocksuckers as anyone can bring in. And God rest the souls of that poor family. And pussy's half price, next 15 minutes." Hell on Wheels' prostitutes are hookers with hearts of gold—and in one case, tattoos from her time in Indian captivity—rather than full-fledged citizens in this rough new society, and their interactions with men are entirely predictable.

Hell on Wheels can be a handsome and funny show when it tries. The lonely sight of a man shooting his fatally wounded horse alone in a lush green wilderness, or the humor of that same man grabbing a primitive church's crucifix as the only available weapon suggest a higher ambition. But if it's to truly try for greatness, Hell on Wheels needs to stop mistaking the bloody sight of an arrow wound on a woman's breast for insight into the heart of the great matters at hand.

From 'Boss' to 'Glee,' Do Any of This Season's TV Shows Get Politics Right?

2011-10-24T17:29:54-04:00

A number of old series have delved into campaigning this fall, as has Kelsey Grammer's new drama. Only occasionally do they rise above broad parody, though.

NBC/Starz/Fox

Perhaps to brace us for what promises to be an exceptionally brutal 2012 presidential election, scripted television has taken on politics in a major way this fall. Campaigns are everywhere on TV, from established sitcoms (Glee, Modern Family, Parks and Recreation) to newcomer prestige dramas (Boss).

And while D.C. often gets dismissed as Hollywood's homely cross-continental cousin, in a way, it's not surprising when campaigning shows up in pop culture: The subject, with its sex scandals, brave stands, and backroom deals, is plenty entertaining. "Politics is sort of the mainstay of theatrical behavior in our contemporary culture," says Kelsey Grammer, who makes a break with his comedic past (Fraiser and Cheers) in a striking performance as Chicago Mayor Tom Kane in Starz's Boss. "You don't really need to blame that on any one person, or any one mayor, or any particular party. Both parties are capable of behaving nobly and dastardly."

But politics carries risks for those in Hollywood who take it on. This fall's shows do best when they mine the territory's inherent drama and ridiculousness, and worst when they try to summon grotesques from the shadows.

"There's a demonic quality that comes with anyone who stays in power for a long time," Grammer says.

In their own ways, each of these shows skewer the silly side of government and elections. But Glee seems to think that the skewer it's wielding—villainous gym coach Sue Sylvester's run for state legislature on the platform that the arts ruin students' lives—is sharper than it is. It's not that conservative opposition to public support for the arts and arts education isn't real. After all, Kansas's Governor Sam Brownback shut down his state's arts agency this year, sacrificing federal funding for the arts in the process. But as is often the case, Glee seems to think that it needs to venture into overwrought parody to be effective, when reality is often funny and horrifying enough on its own.

Both that show and Modern Family have tackled the idea that it would be good to have more women run for office, but they've framed that idea more as a source of self-esteem for individual candidates rather than as a vehicle for meaningful policy change. As Feministing editor Chloe Angyal pointed out in a Bloggingheads episode we taped together recently, Claire Dunphy's decision to run for city council is directly motivated by the encouragement of her stepmother Gloria, who tells her to overcome her fears of returning to work now that her children are school-aged. But rather than setting Gloria up as her campaign manager or exploring what Claire's platform might look like, the show immediately cut to an image of Gloria deploying her considerable physical assets to help her husband close a business sale.

Similarly, Brittany S. Pierce's run for student council president on Glee isn't really inspired by specific changes she wants to make at McKinley High. Rather, while managing another student's campaign, she becomes convinced of her own specialness. When she kicks off her election bid with a raunchy rendition of Beyonce's "Run the World," it's cute, but it's also a substitute for actual ideas. As The Onion joked in a 2003 article, this is "Women Now Empowered By Everything a Woman Does"-level feminism.

Parks and Recreation, by contrast, has been establishing Leslie Knope's resume and her campaign platform since its opening episode. In previous seasons, she's saved her department—and a beloved children's concert—from budget cuts, filled in an enormous pit, and pulled off an epic harvest festival. This year, she's handling a potential scandal about her birthplace with an aplomb that defied President Obama and founding the best scout troop ever. And the show's made a point of demonstrating how her abilities and persistent cheerfulness have won over even her dedicated libertarian colleague, Ron Swanson, who can't help himself. His small-government convictions shrink in the face of what Leslie's able to accomplish. The notion of swaying someone like Swanson through mere competence may amount to liberal fantasy, but it's a nicely small-scale one, rooted in the modest hope that local government can make life just a little bit better. It's certainly better than bigger, more harmful flights of fictional-political fantasy: Say, to imagine that a single speech by the president will turn the country around, as it does in Aaron Sorkin's painfully sincere romantic comedy The American President.

It's Boss—one of the most ambitious shows of the new TV season, along with Showtime's Homeland—that veers most dramatically between the intelligently realistic and the grotesque. It may be an inevitable outcome given Boss's stated ambitions. In the show, "the stakes are enormous" for the principles, as Grammer puts it. His character, Kane, is "losing his kingdom," and facing "the betrayals are betrayals of a lifetime." Kane doesn't respond all that humanely, but there's a reason for that, Grammer says: "There's a kind of demonic quality that comes with anyone who stays in power for a long time."

Grammer's magisterial, strange performance as Mayor Tom Kane has a little bit of the supernatural to it, along with some agonizingly human moments. In the opening scene in the pilot, Kane is receiving devastating medical diagnosis, a horrifying prophecy of his own decline. He says fewer than 15 words during the consultation, but the silent work he does is devastating, and his fight to compose himself during a car ride to a speech reveals a tremendous will.

But the show struggles to make Kane's surroundings as strange and fascinating as Kane himself. There are bright spots. One of the show's core political conflicts—a fight over an expansion of O'Hare Airport that turns out to be on land that includes Native American burial ground—has promise, plumbing to the heart of historic Chicago ethnic conflicts and raising the specter of literal ghosts to accompany Kane's metaphorical ones. And Sam Miller, a Chicago Tribune reporter played with a dour humor by Troy Garity, who also served a stint on NBC's short-lived period show The Playboy Club, is fun. He serves as a proxy for the audience trying to figure out the complicated skeins of loyalties and conflicts, and his adventures are reasonably grounded in the real life of an investigative reporter, giving his scenes heft and humor. Miller literally lifts the curtain on corruption at a mold-infested model school, and gets himself in trouble on the job when he tries to ingratiate himself with a group of construction workers by eating a sandwich and ends up gagging on the incredibly hot peppers. Boss doesn't have to invent bizarre adventures for Miller—instead, it wrings the drama out of genuinely plausible events.

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"It's hard to speak about this in sort of simple terms, 'this is about politics and the political process,'" Garity says of the show. "Of course it is. It's about how you control coverage, how you change the news cycle, how you cut deals, patronage. But the show moves beyond that into the realms of gods and monsters, almost mythological terms."

The show succeeds when those gods and monsters are mired in procedure, as Kane and Miller often are. The site of an incumbent governor lofting an iPad into a marsh in a fit of pique and then ordering an aide after it is both very funny and a nice reference to Primary Colors, the satire of the Clinton administration that increasingly looks like the gold standard for explorations of political darkness. Where Boss goes off the rails, though, is when it mistakes luridness with meaningfulness.

A twist on a political sex scandal that leaves an up-and-comer getting it on with his lover in increasingly public places is one of the more genuinely egregious use of cable's license to depict sex I've seen in quite some time. Kane's daughter, apparently a priest, a doctor, and an addict, checks so many urban-politics boxes at once that her personality disappears under the weight. While there's no question that Aldermanic debates can be brutal, it feels showy and crude to have Kane tell the City Council, during a contentious debate, "Let the streets run with shit." Overblown moments like that don't as effectively paint Kane a South-Side Satan as does a brutally violent, darkly funny, and far realer scene later in the pilot does.

"This here, this is the contest," Kane snarls at the nephew of a man who's come to meet him after derailing the O'Hare project. If television shows, comedies and dramas alike, want to say something meaningful about politics, they should heed that lesson. The measure of a truly grown-up show, and of a truly adult approach to politics, is resisting the temptation of contrived stairwell sex, goofily aggressive campaign videos, and empty girl-power campaigns.

What's the Scariest Show on TV?

2011-10-19T08:30:11-04:00

Assessing today's fright-filled series, from The Walking Dead to American Horror Story to Luther

We're in the scary season, and not just because Halloween is less than two weeks away. The Walking Dead returned on Sunday to huge numbers for a cable network—11 million people tuned in over two viewings to watch zombies shamble through Georgia. 2.5 million people—though presumably not the same ones who watch Glee—came back for a second helping of Glee creator Ryan Murphy's Los Angeles gothic tale American Horror Story. The second series of the acclaimed British crime thriller Luther comes to an end on BBC America tonight, and on October 28, NBC debuts its cops-and-monsters procedural, Grimm.

These shows vary in the extent to which they're traditional horror stories. American Horror Story is a grab-bag of the baroque; The Walking Dead is a classic zombie apocalypse; Grimm goes back to its titular origins to explore the dark side of fairy tales; and Luther falls under the genre mostly by virtue of how completely terrifying it is rather than by inclusion of any particular images or monsters. But they all have one thing in common: The best moments of these shows comes not when a monster lunges onto the screen or a skull appears beneath a character's skin, but when the monstrous and fantastical push characters to places we didn't know they were capable of going.

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American Horror Story is a veritable smorgasbord of horror tropes. If bloody medical instruments aren't enough to make your flesh creep, maybe a fetus in a jar will push your buttons. And if not that, severe burn victims, creepily prophetic children with Down syndrome, haunted S&M paraphernalia, ghosts of murder victims, demonic basement creatures, neighbors who are perfectly willing to poison teenagers (though not pregnant ladies), and underemployed young people obsessed with recreating famous murders are all on offer.

But one of the most genuinely frightening moments in the first two episodes had nothing to do with any of that sturm und drang and axes to the stomach: Rather, it was when Vivien (Connie Britton) discovered, on returning home from her obstetrician who is treating her after a violent miscarriage, that her husband Ben (Dylan McDermott) is cheating on her. Having grabbed a knife in the kitchen when she suspected a home invasion, she swipes at him with it, cutting into the muscle of his arm.

Later, under attack from some very real humans who have taken Vivien and her daughter Violet captive and intend to recreate a famous murder that took place in their house, Vivien strikes back. And she doesn't simply defend herself: She bashes her attacker repeatedly with the very eBay-obtained artifact of that past killing that he intended to use on her. Before Vivien moved into the house, we knew she had the capacity to strike out in anger and in grief. Now that the house is working its grubby magic on her, we've discovered she's capable of more, of violence in service of retribution, not just physical or emotional self-defense. Instead of being the victim in that recreation, she becomes a near-perpetrator.

The Walking Dead, unlike American Horror Story with its cornucopia of dreadfulness, just has the walkers. But the show's found myriad number of ways to deploy them, whether they're shattered bodies crawling across the grass, a mob devouring a horse, or a mindless, migratory herd swarming a choked highway. And while dragging entrails, gory mouths, and dead eyes are undeniably unattractive, what's scary about the walkers is what they require the living to do to survive them, the way they complicate the survivors' efforts to carry out normal human tasks.

The prospects of shooting a child, of stabbing a man in the eye, of killing your own sister are all repugnant. But they're all things that the characters are forced to do to stay alive, and they do them, pulping the brains of what were once people, learning to live splattered in gore. But even when they don't have to kill, and to kill with a particular closeness and visceralness to get the job done, the walkers make it extraordinarily difficult to accomplish even the simplest human tasks. It's bad enough to see your son shot before your eyes on a jaunt in the woods. How much more terrifying is it to see your son shot and know that the closest doctor probably has a brain rotted to black mush and reduced to endless hunger? After you've seen the Centers for Disease Control, a technocratic but still primal source of medical relief, go up in flames? It's not just that zombies make you do bad things, but that their existence, and the cataclysm that produced them, makes doing good, and neutral, and normal things impossible.

In contrast to American Horror Story and The Walking Dead, Grimm lies closer to fairy tale traditions than to contemporary horror tropes. Its characters are creatures like werewolves—some cranky but affable, others capable of kidnapping children—and the family apparently designated to hunt them. Most of its chills lie less in horrifying acts than in the moments when the main character Nick, a police detective, sees something familiar shift into something very strange. Some of these images are more striking than others. When a pretty girl's face changes into a skull as she walks down a street, it's a sickening rebuke to girl-watchers. It's unsettling to think of him desiring a corpse, less so for him to see his biases confirmed in the face of a criminal with lizard-like scales and teeth.

Luther, alone among these shows, has no supernatural elements. But in making its monsters entirely human, it may be the scariest of them all because it's so unsettlingly plausible. We meet the show's main character, DCI John Luther, as he lets a criminal fall to his death. In a subsequent episode in the first season, the distraught wife of a serial killer clubs her husband to death with a hammer. To be fair, it took a mummified body and a terrified hooker in the bathroom to push her into sickeningly brutal retribution, but it most certainly didn't require monsters. When, in the first mystery of this season, a serial killer donned an antique Punch mask to commit his crimes, the image was terrifying not because new threats were seeping into the established order, but the established order had revealed a face that most of us would prefer not to acknowledge.

"My god, that could happen at any petrol station, anywhere in the world," the show's producer, Phillippa Giles, says of the most recent episode of the show, when a man unleashes a silent and deeply unsettling attack on the patrons of a London gas station setting off a story that concludes in tonight's finale. "That's what [show writer Neil Cross is] the master of."

That he is. When a show like Luther can make a scene of a woman ordering a nail to be driven through a man's hand in between sips of tea seem plausible, we hardly need the hysterical theatricality of a haunted rubber gimp suit to make us afraid of the world around us.

Margaret Atwood on Sci-Fi, Religion, and Her Love of 'Blade Runner'

2011-10-12T16:45:53-04:00

An interview with the award-winning author about her new book, In Other Worlds

AP Images

Margaret Atwood has written everything from historical fiction to volumes of poetry to dystopian novels. But the science fictional impulse that informed the The Handmaid's Tale, her 1985 classic of speculative fiction, has recurred in her novels of environmental catastrophe Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, and as a theme in her sweeping survey of the 20th century, The Blind Assassin. In her latest book, a non-fiction exploration of science fiction and collection of Atwood's science fiction criticism, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Atwood plumbs the depths of her life-long relationship with the genre, and considers how science fiction can lead us to a better future. Atwood spoke to The Atlantic about the importance of defining science fiction, the risks of trying to build an ideal society, and the relationship between science fiction and religion.

Nan A. Talese

You begin In Other Worlds with a discussion of the definition of science fiction. Why is it important to demarcate the boundaries between, say, science fiction and fantasy, or science fiction and speculative fiction?

When I pick up the cornflakes box, I want there to be cornflakes inside of it. I think that [George Orwell's] 1984 is different than the [H.G. Wells'] War of the Worlds...It's a matter of whether you're building with your Lego set, do you get to use just the Legos, or can you use rutabagas? The tool kit is different. Kafka is experimental work. But I don't know whether you'd call it science fiction. Gogol has a story in which a man wakes up one morning and finds out that his nose is gone, and it's living an independent life as a government bureaucrat. What would you call that? Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets. What is that sparkly vampire one? The Twilight series. Is it science fiction? Is Star Trek science fiction? Of course it is. It's got spaceships, it's got spacesuits. They're both wonder tales in that none of this is likely to happen.

1984 is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names. If I pick up a book with vampires on the cover, I want there to be vampires. If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don't want to open up my cornflakes and find that they're full of pebbles....You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn't.

You ask, at one point, "How much social instability would it take before people would renounce their hard-won civil liberties in a tradeoff for safety?" and discuss how the repression in The Handmaid's Tale has seemed more and less likely since you wrote it. Where do you think we are on that scale now? What do you think it might take to push the U.S. as it stands towards a radical reorganization of the social order?

It has come to pass before, except with different names and different outfits. I don't know whether you've been noticing, some of the presidential candidates would be quite happy with a theocracy. All you need is 30 percent to put it over...Why do the talk if you don't intend the action? ... I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance...A tipping point in American society might look like a social disruption, plus environmental catastrophe, plus too much wealth at the top, plus an eroding middle class. If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.

In your discussion of Brave New World, you talk about all the questions that science fiction lets us play with. In a world where politics often get broken down issue by issue, is science fiction one of the only places we can imagine holistic solutions?

Yes, I think so. That's certainly true, because you're creating a 3D world, and of course, any world that you create, you're going to have to account for the same kinds of thing. I don't think a television soundbyte can accommodate that. I think maybe in the days of FDR's fireside chats, you could take a more multi-dimensional approach. In something like the State of the Union address you can deal with it because it's a longer form.

In your discussion of utopias, you suggest that "the future societies imagined by mid- and late-twentieth-century writers, and indeed by early twenty-first century ones, are more likely to be dark than bright." If that's the case, is utopian fiction really meant to reconcile us to the current state of affairs? To suggest that we should settle for reform rather than revolution because revolution's always likely to end in disaster?

Yeah. I think there might be something to that, but remember, it's based on real-world experience where radical things were tried, and the results were not at first what we expected.

But isn't there the risk that we might not take action until it's too late to prevent catastrophe?

There's always that risk? Yes, I think there might be something to that, but of course, taking a very radical approach could be radically if not more risky. Pol Pot in Cambodia intended to make the world better by killing many of his subjects. You can propose a great many desirable and wonderful things. But people won't necessarily act that way. I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

I tell people that I feel that Oryx and Crake is quite hopeful because people are still alive at the end of it compared with what we might end up doing. Any novel is hopeful in that it presupposes a reader. It is, actually, a hopeful act just to write anything, really, because you're assuming that someone will be around to do it. It's why Jimmy doesn't write at the end of Oryx and Crake, because he can't assume a reader.

I love your point about the idea that theological questions and theological figures have taken up residence in science fiction because "they're acceptable to us there, whereas they wouldn't be here." What do you think that displacement suggests about our attitudes towards religion?

I think it suggests something about the possibility or impossibility of constructing a 3D religious world in art after Milton. You'll notice that the next person who came along and did something similar after Milton was William Blake, and his prophecies are not couched in the form of angels or devils, he made up new things and some of them are quite scientific.

I think that the religious strand is probably part of human hard-wiring...by religious strand, I don't mean any particular religion, I mean the part of human beings that feels that the seen world is not the only world, that the world you see is not the only world that there is and that it can become awestruck. If that is the case, religion was selected for in the Pleistocene by many, many millennia of human evolution. That would make sense. If you think there's an unseen somebody or other helping you out, you're more likely to feel encouraged. Suppose that the religious thing is kind of a given and you can't act it out using your old figures and images, because time has moved on and people no longer quite believe, and if you announce that you have seen a bunch of angels sitting in a tree, you're likely to be locked up in a bin, so instead you put them on planet X, where they're like to feel quite at home.

I think it says something about the disjunct between people who say they interpret the Bible literally, which nobody does, and people who take a historical view of the Bible...that has made it more difficult to posit a world that is imaginatively complete and identical with the earlier medieval cathedral view of the universe. The imagination likes to deal with imaginatively complete worlds. It's made it harder to do that than the old arrangement from creative to revelation, that you used to be able to see marching around the ceiling of cathedrals...It was a 3D house of the universe.

In In Other Worlds, you mention Avatar. What other recent science fiction have you enjoyed? Have your tastes in science fiction changed at all over the years, particularly as you've written it?

I'm a big fan of Blade Runner. Mister [Ray] Bradbury, indeed, is an early read of mine, and very important...I'm a big fan of this book called Ridley Walker, Russell Hoban.

I'm not sure that I have any taste. I'm a ubiquitous reader. I am the person who will read the airline magazine on the plane if there is nothing else to read. I'm interested in it all.

From 'Playboy Club' to 'Pan Am,' When '60s-Era Nostalgia Isn't Enough

2011-09-25T11:25:36-04:00

A new crop of period series raises the question: What are we looking for in shows about the past?

ABC

All pre-teens have their idols, but growing up an emerging nerd, my fixation was typically out of step with my peers. I caught a 30-years deferred case of Beatlemania and acquired a life-long affinity for the '60s. I snapped a pair of headphones in half so my best friend and I could listen to Beatles cassettes simultaneously on my Walkman. I got special permission to stay up late for the airing of The Beatles Anthology on ABC. And I even dressed up as a hippie for Halloween, though my mother wisely drew the line at letting me carry a hand-lettered "Make Love, Not War" sign as part of my ensemble.

Over time, my interest in the era shifted from its music to its social movements, from the first half of the decade to the second. But this year, the wave of Mad Mad-inspired '60s-era shows drew me back to ponder my youthful nostalgia for a period that I never actually experienced for myself.

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Of course, all of these shows take for granted that the audience isn't engaged just by the era itself. Mad Men, The Hour, The Playboy Club (which debuted on NBC last Monday) and Pan Am, which starts on ABC tonight, share a common anxiety, a sense that they need to up the ante or audiences will lose interest in the clothes and cocktails. Don Draper can't just be an archetypal alpha male facing the sudden awakening of women's demands and desires. He has to have a secret identity. The Hour can't just be about the tensions and joys of running an upstart news program at a pivotal moment in British history. Its characters have to be pulled into a Cold War conspiracy. Similarly, Pan Am doesn't quite trust audiences to stick with women who, in exchange for representing a corporation, got to see the world. It has an espionage subplot of its own. And The Playboy Club isn't content to explore the tension between feminist self-expression and the commercialization of sex. The show just has to add a very dead, very powerful, mobster to the mix.

And while they're both concerned with women's nascent quests for liberation, The Playboy Club and Pan Am take wildly different approaches to their shared subject. Visually, The Playboy Club is a nocturnal show, splashes of shiny satin costumes and Mondrian-inspired lighting providing occasional sparks in the gloom. It's a fitting scheme for a show about people who are hiding something, whether it's a mobbed-up past, a made-up backstory, or secret desires. In Pan Am, by contrast, everything gleams, from the roof of the Pan Am building to the technicolor wheel of dresses at one of the main character's wedding, to a jet shining in a swampy Havana night as a crew evacuates Cuban dissidents as Castro takes over the country. It looks like a product of the period it's chronicling. The Playboy Club tries to sell the era with words, but it's Pan Am that presents a wildly delectable vision. We're supposed to be like the little girl, only slightly younger than I was at the onset of my obsession, who gazes at the Pan Am stewardesses as if there's nothing better or more glamorous she could grow up to be.

The Playboy Club, which desperately tries to sell Bunnydom as liberation, actually does a much better job in its messy pilot of laying out many of the ways sexism operated in the '60s than Pan Am. In The Playboy Club, Hugh Hefner tells us in a voiceover that "The bunnies were some of the only women in the world who could be whatever they wanted to be." But the characters are assaulted, harassed, assumed to be prostitutes, denied promotions (a decision reversed by an off-screen Hugh Hefner, also treated as an icon of racial equality), grapple with the fact that they earn more than their parents, and are told to quit their jobs by their boyfriends.

Pan Am suggests that working as a stewardess gave women options other than getting married and a chance to travel, which is certainly true. But it also buys into the same idea that liberation was there for a select group of women smart enough to grab for it. "I've hit on enough of these girls to know they're not like normal women. They're mutations," declares a loutish but charming co-pilot. "It's a compliment! Do you think when the first man crawled out of the primordial ooze he knew he was different?...Look at that table. That is natural selection at work. They don't know that they're a new breed of woman. They just had the impulse to...take flight." It's the same sentiment, but the closest thing to an exploration of gender roles is one pretty stewardess's embarrassment at becoming the face of the brand, and another, who has an unpleasant run-in with the wife of her lover.

And none of these shows quite capture my childhood yearning for the '60s, to feel something as strongly as the girls screaming their heads off for the Beatles did, to see the world turn upside down. Maybe that's part of growing up, and Pan Am and The Playboy Club are an embodiment of the tug-of-war between wanting to think of the '60s as magical and knowing that the struggles for equality that marked those years are still going on today. I have an original poster advertising the Beatles' Shea Stadium concert hanging in my apartment. But I know there's more to life than four boys from Liverpool, no matter how fab they were.

Are TV's 'Bridesmaids' Knock-Offs Good for Women?

2011-09-19T11:35:35-04:00

From 2 Broke Girls to Apartment 23, female-centric comedies are invading network lineups, with mixed results

This fall television season was supposed to represent the triumph of Bridesmaids. Networks greenlighted a round of new comedies with female leads ostensibly inspired by the comedy about female friends that broke box office records this summer. But in some ways this year's sitcoms—which include 2 Broke Girls, Apartment 23, Up All Night, The New Girl, and Whitney—feel a lot more like throwbacks to Archie comics than a continuation of the R-rated exploration of sex, materialism, and friendship that proved so powerful with movie audiences. These shows pit caustic and manipulative brunettes against surprisingly canny blondes, or alternatively, focus on dippy brunettes. And while their setups promise interesting explorations of marriage, friendships between men and women, and even the recession-era economy, they're also an acute illustration of the limitations of network television.

There's something odd and unfortunate about the tendency of sitcoms to pitch women against each other—even when there aren't the affections of a boy like Archie Andrews at stake. In CBS's 2 Broke Girls, which premieres tonight at 9:30, brunette Max (a tart and wonderful Kat Dennings) is immediately suspicious of Caroline (Beth Behrs), a former socialite who lost her fortune when her father's Ponzi scheme collapsed and takes a job at the same Brooklyn diner where Max works. A gentler version of that dynamic is at work in NBC's family comedy Up All Night, where new mother Reagan (Christina Applegate) tries to defend her right to family time against the demands of her boss and friend, talk show host Ava (Maya Rudolph, the only woman of color in a leading role in any of these shows). And in Apartment 23, which will debut on ABC later this fall, June (Dreama Walker), who moves to New York only to have her job vanish in yet another Madoff-like collapse, ends up rooming with the cartoonishly manipulative Chloe (the always wonderful Krysten Ritter).

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In each case, some of the tension between each pair dissipates by the end of the first episode. But it remains frustrating that the most common way to generate dynamic friction between women in pop culture is to start with a win-lose scenario, where only one woman can end up in control of her time, a choice New York apartment, or a deeply scuzzy diner in an up-and-coming neighborhood. If the stakes were higher, the competitions might seem justified, but there's something depressingly recession-sized about these conflicts, and the faster these shows move on to interesting and fraught collaborations rather than battles over scraps, the better.

On the other hand, at least these battles of the blondes and brunettes tend to emphasize their participants' competence. On 2 Broke Girls, Max is a hustler, and Caroline gives her the ambition to dream of running a bakery rather than selling a few underpriced cupcakes at a time in a diner. In Up All Night Ava may be demanding and needy, but she acknowledges that Reagan is a genius programmer and ultimately accepts that she needs to accommodate Reagan's family to retain her talents. And in Apartment 23, Chloe brings out strength and savvy that June didn't know she had but that she desperately needs to get a job in a competitive New York economy.

By contrast, sole female leads in The New Girl and Whitney are distinguished less by their abilities than their eccentricities. Jess (Zooey Deschanel) may be a teacher, but she's introduced less in terms of her capacities as an educator than her tolerance for repeat viewings of Dirty Dancing, her inability to choose first-date outfits, and a bad tendency to burn off bits of her hair when distracted. Similarly, we're told that Whitney (Whitney Cummings) doesn't know how to dress appropriately for weddings or play a sexy nurse without making her boyfriend of five years fill out his employer's information on a mock medical registration form (there's something particularly strange about the shows' decisions to make two extremely attractive women as sexually clumsy as possible).

Even with their flaws, all of these shows have interesting ideas about men and women's roles and societal expectations for the established pattern of relationships. Up All Night insists that raising children is just as difficult as a high-powered corporate job, making that message palatable to mass audiences by putting it in the mouth of Will Arnett's stay-at-home father. Whitney insists that marriage isn't—and shouldn't have to be—every woman's dream, even as it spotlights the challenges faced by unmarried couples who may not have the same rights as married couples in situations like hospital visitation. If The New Girl manages to dial back its grating quirkiness, it could be a unique look at platonic friendships with men and women, relationships generally treated as if they're about as plausible as unicorns. And both 2 Broke Girls and Apartment 23 usefully dial back the lavish depictions of life in New York, suggesting that economic hardship may force appealing characters into uncomfortable situations if they're to pursue their dreams.

This being network television, the stay-at-home Dad gets to play high-end video games—there are no broke, emasculated man-children living off of disability checks like in Knocked Up. Recession apartments still come with plenty of sun and space and in Brooklyn, back yards big enough to keep a horse in—no abject business failures have flattened our heroines as they did Kristen Wiig's Annie in Bridesmaids. And sexual exploration and liberation mostly consists of trench coats over lingerie in the back of a cab or a sexy nurse's outfit. But maybe we shouldn't be surprised. Improving women's representation on television is all too often a game of inches.

From 'The Guild' to 'Husbands,' Web TV Comes Into Its Own

2011-09-13T08:00:46-04:00

A new sitcom from Buffy writer Jane Espenson is the latest in a long line of online-only shows trying to build network-caliber audiences

WEYÜME

Today begins a period that's like a secular Christmas for television fans: the time when established favorites return to the air, and channels roll out a cornucopia of new shows. Increasingly, exciting television shows aren't premiering only on actual television networks. Tomorrow Husbands, a new web show about marriage equality from a team that includes veterans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Caprica, and Desperate Housewives, premieres online. The Husbands team took to web television in the hopes that they could lay down a marker for a new kind of gay comedy—and to persuade a network to take a chance on the show.

Web television has been around since 1995, though it took a decade for online shows to become an established medium. Felicia Day's web series The Guild, a comedy about a guild in an online role-playing game who become friends in real life, has been running online since 2007. Now in its fifth season, the show's episodes had been watched more than 45 million times on YouTube. Similarly, Joss Whedon's three-part series, Doctor Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog, created during the Writers Guild of America strike that lasted from 2007 to 2008, sold briskly on iTunes and DVD.

Web shows have increasingly become auditions, testing a concept and building an audience, before making the leap to a television network. Children's Hospital, the darkly satiric medical show created by Daily Show veteran Rob Corddry, began on The WB.com and now airs as part of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup. Friends star Lisa Kudrow started her improv series Web Therapy independent online in 2008, and this summer, it premiered on Showtime.

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The creators and staff of Husbands have learned from their predecessors. Jane Espenson, the Husbands creator and writer who's written for shows ranging from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Game of Thrones and helped create SyFy's show Warehouse 13, funded Husbands herself, just as Whedon did with Doctor Horrible.

"I approached it like someone should approach any kind of game—don't bring more than you can afford to lose," she says. "My plan wasn't really to make my money back on the web, but to make the point that there is an audience for this subject matter."

It helps, Espenson says, that her line producer on the show, M. Elizabeth Hughes, is a veteran of the web TV genre: She's worked on The Guild and other web shows, and knows well the importance of cultivating an audience in a medium where shows don't have advertising budgets or the luxury of hoping people will stumble upon them while channel-surfing.

"Web creators and stars make themselves more accessible than television creators and stars because they know that they need to be active and visible in the medium they've chosen," Hughes says. It creates a community between fans and creators...I think that makes the project sustainable...People will forgive low production values if the story and characters are fresh and engaging."

Fortunately, Husbands has a novel premise and executes it with considerable charm and wit. The season, which follows a gay actor and newly-out gay baseball player who get married on a wild trip to Las Vegas after six weeks of dating, is a step forward in gay marriage stories. It allows a couple to make an irresponsible decision rather than act as role models. Cheeks and Brad, the central couple, may be alternatively flamboyant and buttoned-down, but they're also refreshingly specific, both in their individual presentation and in the way they flirt with and claw at each other as they work through their unexpected newlywed blues.

The Husbands stars and writers have been tweeting and networking aggressively, hoping that on September 13, when the first episode airs, that an audience will show up. But operating without the safety net—and constraints—of a network hasn't only meant a different promotional experience. The veterans of network television who are working on the web for the first time on Husbands are learning to write and act for shorter episodes, and finding out what they truly want to do absent network constraints on content and language.

Cheeks, who also co-created the show, says that starting the series online was the only way to preserve the integrity of their vision for it, and to prove that there was an audience for an irreverent marriage equality comedy that a network would be forced to acknowledge before it had a chance to water the content down.

"The last thing I wanted to do was sell a great script and watch it turn into I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry," he says. "This was an idea that needed to be executed correctly, specifically. We had the know how and the means, so we thought, 'Why not?'"

Espenson says that the first season of Husbands functions like the pilot of a network television show. It's split into much shorter twice-weekly episodes, each two or three minutes long, that end where the commercial breaks would fall in a longer program. She credits Cheeks with finding those natural breaks in the story in his first draft of the first season.

"Producers often make pilot presentations to convey tone and style, then take them to the network as a calling card," Cheeks says. "This is how I see Husbands, more a pilot than a web series."

He's not alone in hoping for big things from Husbands.

"Really, I hope that this doesn't open me up to other things," says actress Alessandra Torresani, who plays Cheeks's best friend on the show. "I hope this is the next thing."

'Husbands': Gay Marriage Gets the 'Mad About You' Treatment

2011-09-12T12:15:52-04:00

A new, Web-only sitcom from Buffy writer Jane Espenson watches a same-sex couple navigate the challenges of newlywed life

WEYUME

Over the last decade, the conversation about equal marriage rights for gay couples has largely centered around responsibility. The push for marriage is about proving that gay people are as—or sometimes even more—capable of monogamy as their heterosexual counterparts. But though setting yourself up as a model minority may be an important way to argue for legal rights, real equality means the right to make mistakes and bad decisions—and to work your way out of them.

That assumption is the basis for Husbands, a new Web television series that premieres tomorrow. The show follows the adventure of two out gay men—Cheeks, an actor, and Brady, a professional baseball player—who after dating for six weeks, get drunkenly hitched in Vegas. They decide to stay together, for the cause of marriage equality, and for each other. While gay couples are increasingly common on television, from the sweet pairing of Kurt and Blaine on Glee, to Mitch and Cam, the settled-but-not-legally-married parents of an adorable adoptive daughter on Modern Family, they largely fit that responsible-pair model. Husbands, by contrast, trusts that its audience won't judge a gay couple for treating marriage as cavalierly as straight couples have been allowed to for decades. By going small on the Web, Husbands can raise bigger questions about the future of gay relationships than its longer and better-financed network counterparts.

"When we did Will & Grace, we were attempting to extend the recent gains Ellen had made when it revealed to America that the spunky gal they were already in love with happened to be gay," says Husbands director Jeff Greenstein, who won an Emmy in 2000 for his work on Will & Grace, and is a writer and executive producer on Desperate Housewives and State of Georgia, which premiered this summer. "Over the course of eight seasons, we were able to gently move both these men into mature relationships. And by that I don't just mean two guys lounging on the sofa watching Funny Girl, but falling in love, planning a life, kissing on the lips and sleeping together. Which for the time was kind of a big deal. It's been six years since Will & Grace, and gay guys on network TV are still lounging on the sofa watching Funny Girl."

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Rather than emulating dramas like The Kids Are All Right or comedies like Modern Family as a way to explore the realities of marriage, the creators of Husbands looked to stories about young married couples no matter their gender. Jane Espenson, the show's co-creator and a veteran of shows ranging from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Battlestar Galactica, took television shows Mad About You and Dharma & Greg as inspiration, while Greenstein looked to Barefoot in the Park. While most looks at gay couples tend to treat them as if they're established, Cheeks, the show's co-creator ,says he and Espenson stumbled on the idea of looking at the beginning of a marriage. "It seemed like such a classic, yet timely, premise," he says, as couples line up to marry in New York.

"Yes, the issue is serious, but every individual marriage is funny," says Espenson. "And just making that point is making a point about marriage equality—look how this is just a normal marriage in every way, including all of its own personal craziness."

In this case, the personal craziness includes negotiating closet space, the adoption of a tiny, overdressed dog, and the brand-new spouses' wildly different approaches to being famous. "From my POV, yay publicity and we look cute in shorts," Cheeks tells Brady after paparazzi video of their tipsy, shirtless nuptials leaks. "And from my POV?" the straightlaced Brady asks his husband, reminding Cheeks to think about what the video of their drunken wedding means for someone without a history of wacky public antics. Suddenly Cheeks gets it. "Remember that 9/11 thing?" he offers, acknowledging that what's funny for him is an epic disaster for his new spouse.

Marriage also means merging friends and family. Among the questions Husbands ask is what role straight women who are close to gay men have in a world where those men can create their own legally sanctioned and supported families. Espenson says that the show actually originated in comedy routine that Cheeks and Caprica actress Alessandra Torresani developed together, and then turned into a story about what happened when a wedding interrupts that kind of friendship.

"She's a girl who has had it all and has gotten it all, but her one form of validation in life is Cheeks," says Torresani says of her character, Haley. "Before she goes out of the house, she needs to know, 'Does he think I look good?' That he goes, without her really knowing, that he gets married...She's like, 'I don't understand...he's awful, he's not funny.'...At this point, Cheeks definitely does not need Haley at much. But still at the end of the day, he would never give her up."

Another kind relationship up for debate in Husbands is less personal and more public—the way role models relate to their fans, particularly when the role model is a professional athlete. Brad wasn't a professional athlete in early scripts, but Greenstein suggested that the character be given a reason to stay in the marriage. By making him an out and active pro athlete, Brad acquired a sense that his life isn't really his own, and a worry that, like Julie and Hillary Goodridge, the plaintiffs in the landmark Massachusetts case that legalized same-sex marriage for the first time in the United States who split five years after they married, he might undermine his own work on marriage equality by getting divorced.

"As a pro baseball player, he feels that he has a responsibility to always put the right foot forward...he feels he must dispel what the 'other side' thinks what a gay man is—[someone who lives]a debaucherous lifestyle unfit for family," says Sean Hemeon, who plays Brady, and grew up playing sports in the shadow of three athletic older brothers before landing the role on As the World Turns that brought him to Hollywood. "When Cheeks and Brady get drunk married, to Brady this just proves what the 'other side' thinks...So it's really important to Brady to keep the image going."

And having Brady be an out athlete lets the show explore not just the pressure gay role models are under but also the culture clashes within the gay community. Cheeks may be better-versed in stereotypical gay culture than his new spouse, more comfortable with outrageousness and high camp—and therefore with his accidental and highly public wedding. But he doesn't know very much about what Brady does or how he'll fit into a world of baseball wives. Brady, by contrast, falls into the idea that gay couples need to subdivide their lives into gendered roles, his traditionalism giving him a sense of marriage that even straight couples might find outdated.

And that's exactly the point of Husbands. No matter the composition of couple—men, women, famous, unknown—no matter how the wedding came to pass—at the end of a long engagement, over cocktails and an Elvis impersonator—nobody knows a foolproof secret to perfect matrimony. Gay couples aren't reinventing marriage. Every couple that gets hitched has to figure out what being married means to them and how to make it work for themselves.

Fantasy on TV: How 'Game of Thrones' Succeeds Where 'True Blood' Fails

2011-08-31T09:40:53-04:00

The two HBO shows illustrate the perils and opportunities of adapting books for the screen

HBO

After a summer when HBO garnered critical acclaim and new audiences with its epic fantasy series Game of Thrones, it's been fascinating to watch True Blood, the show that introduced HBO to the genre, go dramatically off the rails in its fourth season. Both shows face the challenges of mustering very large casts in the service of complex storylines that are not always obviously related to each other, along with detailed magical mythologies and histories. But while Game of Thrones hewed closely to the original plotlines and pacing in George R.R. Martin's book, Alan Ball and his writing staff have diverged wildly from Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire mysteries as they've moved deeper into True Blood. Taken together, the two shows represent the perils and opportunities of adapting an existing fantasy franchise.

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. When Sookie miraculously cured Eric of his witchcraft-induced amnesia with faerie abilities she hasn't bothered to explore and that haven't been mentioned since the first episode of the season, it felt lazy, not exciting—a plot device swooping in when it was convenient rather than after it had been earned.

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Adding to the confusion is the way HBO's adaptation has added characters to the franchise that haven't done much to advance the show's themes. In the books, Sookie's boss Sam was a lone wolf—or collie, depending on what he's shapeshifting into on any given day—with family in another state. In the show, he's been given a shifting but shiftless brother, Tommy, who mostly serves to illustrate, repeatedly and at great length, that Sam is foolish to let him stay in Bon Temps because Tommy constantly betrays him. When Tommy was killed off in Sunday's episode, it was a relief, both in that it cleared out an over-crowded cast, and that it ended a pattern of behavior that had no clear move towards growth or resolution.

Similarly, when it's elevated characters like Tara Thornton, a friend of Sookie's who's plays a minor role in the novels and a more significant one in the show, it's added complications, but not thoughtful complexity. Turning the character African-American might have been a gesture towards progressivism if HBO had preserved Tara as the intelligent, independent businesswoman she is in the novels. Instead, Tara's also become a perpetual victim who never seems to learn from her experiences. She may have more screen time, but she's less of a person.

By contrast, Game of Thrones has stayed very closely to the plot and characterization in George R.R. Martin's first novel of the same title in its first season. That isn't to say that strict fidelity will produce reliable results, or that Game of Thrones makes no alterations to Martin's work.

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. Others give characters like Jamie Lannister, the sworn guard of a previous king who killed him out of fear his madded ruler would destroy the realm, the opportunity to tell parts of their story seasons before they're given an opportunity to speak for themselves in the novels. These additional scenes don't change the pace of events—just our understanding of them.

Just like with True Blood, Game of Thrones expands the roles of some small characters, but it does so with a sense of their function in the narrative and in concert with the core values of Martin's novels. Chief among these expanded characters are two prostitutes, Shae and Ros. In the novels, Shae becomes the lover of a nobleman, but her background and motivations remain fairly opaque. In the shows, on the other hand, she's given a backstory and a sense of agency. Ros, who is barely mentioned in the book except by name, in the show is given a web of connections to other characters and a role as an informant for a scheming nobleman.

It's entirely possible that as future seasons of Game of Thrones tackle Martin's progressively longer and more complicated novels, the show will have to dramatically streamline narratives and make corresponding revisions in plots to tie events together in a plausible way. But thus far, the Game of Thrones showrunners have demonstrated something that the people behind True Blood haven't: a sense of what makes a franchise compelling beyond its basic concepts.

'The Hour' Is Not the British 'Mad Men': It's Better

2011-08-17T09:05:24-04:00

How the BBC show succeeds where its American counterpart fails

BBC

It's not a fashionable opinion in the critical world, but I've never been able to embrace Mad Men. I tried the first five episodes of season one. But I found myself fidgety and distracted by the show's air of remove from everything, whether it's Don Draper's mad dash from his own identity or the ad accounts and campaigns that act as metaphors for social issues while keeping the characters at a distance from them, and couldn't bring myself to continue. When Daniel Mendelsohn blasted Mad Men in the New York Review of Books earlier this year as "a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical 'issues' [that cycles through] successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination," I felt a flash of outlaw sympathy.

The unfortunate coronation of Mad Men as the '60s show to end all '60s shows obscures an important fact. While Matthew Weiner and AMC may have kickstarted the craze for television about the late '50s and the early '60s, that doesn't mean other artists can't play with the formula and find ways to improve it. And BBC's The Hour, arriving on BBC America at 10 tonight, lays down a marker. Set in a BBC studio in 1956 where the staff of a new news magazine program are struggling to make their mark in the face of government pressure to sit on important stories, The Hour is alternately ferocious and tender, and refreshingly clear-eyed about the interactions between gender and class.

The setting helps tremendously in highlighting these issues. In an early broadcast, anchor Hector Madden (The Wire's Dominic West, in his triumphant return to television) flubs the framing of an investigative piece the up-jumped working-class reporter Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) did about the difficulty West Indian immigrants have finding housing in London: He ends the segment with a depressing reaffirmation that in London "If you're white, you're alright." The cast may be all-white, but they're aware of the problems of people who don't share their country of origin or skin tone. Later, their producer, Bel Rowley (an unexpectedly tremendous Romola Garai), kills an interview Lyon gets with a grieving Cabinet minister about a bill to abolish hanging in favor of a live interview Madden does with the Egyptian ambassador to the U.K. after Egypt seizes control of the Suez Canal, while Lyon begins an investigation into the mysterious death of an academic. The compromises Bel has to make are real, and not just because the stories have real impacts. Because the BBC operated under a Royal Charter, and because in 1956, the network was a year into its competition with the newly-created independent competitor ITV, the approval of high government officials wasn't an immaterial concern, and Bel is doubly under pressure as a woman producer.

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There's a real virtue to the fact that the story begins with Bel in a position of power, rather than simply charting her upward trajectory. She can stumble as well as rise, at one point lecturing the show's secretary not to do little extras for the men on the show because "do you want to be taken seriously? Or forever be some stupid little marionette forever fluttering on the arm of every good-looking man in the BBC? First rule, don't make tea." While she has a male mentor in the BBC director of news, Bel has decision-making authority over Hector and Freddie, an old friend with whom she's long plotted a new kind of television show, only to beat him to the job of producer while he's stuck covering domestic news. "They're humoring you," Freddie lashes out at Bel when he finds out she's got the job. "They don't want a woman. A woman is difficult, hysterical. And you can never really find one who'll ever stay. Another couple of years and you'll probably want a baby." He doesn't actually believe any of it, but that doesn't mean he won't use her insecurities to hurt her.

Hector's flirtation with Bel begins with a gentler bit of calculated sexism as they wait in a reception room. "I never understand women and magazines," he says as an opening gambit. "You only ever buy them for the pictures." Bel plays along: "You're so right," she says. "And those things called the novels. Impossible. So many words." But there's a real poignancy to it: When he asks her for a drink to celebrate their new jobs together, Hector wants to know why she lets government officials condescend to her, only to have her point out that he's asked her to a drink in a men's-only lounge. "Well, I'd love to," she tells him, "but beyond that door, women are not allowed. What is it about you men? You always need a tiny corner where we can't quite reach you." Even as he respects her as a gifted news executive and a liberated woman, Hector still woos her with touches of old-fashionedness, telling her, "Military upbringing. Can't help it. I'm pathologically unable to see a woman walking in the rain without holding an umbrella over her." As Jimmy McNulty on The Wire, West was deliberately a bit of a drunken slob, sexually, so it's easy to forget that he can be a seducer, capable of imbuing a light grip on a woman's fingertips or a fumble at the edge of her skirt with a deep eroticism.

Freddie and Hector's competition over Bel is about the woman herself, but it's also a deeply freighted conversation about class. "What is he? Oxford-educated? At least you're with your own kind," Freddie complains when Bel starts demonstrating some affection for Hector, later urging her to side with her journalistic instincts rather than her social connections. And when Freddie dresses down Hector for sailing through life on his status rather than his skills, he explains, "It's nothing personal, I just don't like privilege," only to have Hector laugh at him, "You're a snob." But at a country house party, Hector puts Freddie in one of his old tuxedos rather than let him be embarrassed at dinner even as he acknowledges, "No one's getting married or buried or anything, but we do it."

And though they grapple with their own backgrounds, both men care for upper-crust women. Hector is married to Marnie, the daughter of a fantastically wealthy business-man, and Freddie harbors a childhood crush on Ruth Elms, a gorgeous, depressed debutante. Marnie hides her ennui and insecurities behind elaborate entertainments and feigned enthusiasms for games of sardines, wiping lipstick off Hector's neck and onto her impeccable white gloves without ever saying a word. Ruth, by contrast, gets a nosebleed during a whirl on the dance floor with her fiancee at her coming-out party and wears a moddish leopard-print coat to come see Freddie at his office, telling him "Mother hates it. I wear it to annoy her. One has to find tiny acts of rebellion where one can." It's not simply gender that's trapped these women into their roles—it's class expectations, and Ruth's case, fulfilling them is literally making her ill. "These silent deals are struck all the time," Hector tells Bel at one point. "One learns to recognize it. A slow deadening in the eyes. An acceptance of defeat."

But everyone in The Hour is fighting, whether publicly and passionately for a new vision of the news business, for freedom from a stifling marriage, for a translation of excitable Arabic pouring in over the receiver from the streets of Cairo, or from escape the mail room and the general secretarial pool. Don Draper may fall from his office building in the credits of Mad Men, but the characters of The Hour are already there at street level, scrapping for all they're worth.

U.K. Version of 'Jersey Shore' Is Realer, Sadder Than the Original

2011-08-12T08:31:11-04:00

The working-class weirdness of Geordie Shore

Above: Jersey Shore. Right: Geordie Shore.

The men and women of Jersey Shore touched down in Florence last week to begin the show’s fourth season. But while the Guidos and Guidettes may have single-handedly stimulated the Italian taxicab industry with the volume of their luggage, Europe doesn’t actually need to import hard-partying 20-somethings eager to make fools of themselves on TV. When it comes to wreaking havoc while on holiday, Jersey Shore now competes with its own U.K. spin-off, Geordie Shore, which returns to screens on August 23. But where the Jersey Shore cast is full of professional fame-seekers who just happen to have found their launching pad on MTV, its younger British sibling is more working-class, making for entertainment that’s somehow realer-seeming—but not necessarily more compelling.

England’s always had a fine-grained taxonomy of working-class sub-cultures. Geordies—a term for people from the Tyneside region of Northeast England—may not have always existed in their current form, but the regional nickname stretches at least all the way back to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, and certainly was in current usage by 1793. The stereotype Geordie Shore exploits is, as MSN TV Editor Lorna Cooper puts it in an email, that “all Geordies are thick, drink brown ale, say ‘why-aye-man’, have women that look like brick houses.” Of course, this has driven Geordies who aren’t on TV crazy. Part of the problem, Cooper says, is that the show and its audience have conflated a regional stereotype with a class one: While “Geordie” refers to the many residents of a geographic area, the Geordie Shore stars are all working class people who engage in all sorts of hard-partying anti-social behavior. They’re considered chavs.

“Ordinary working class people abhor both the moniker and the association,” Cooper says. “For us, chavs are akin to a level of underclass we look down on; the type of people that go on The Jeremy Kyle Show (think a British equivalent of Maury) for DNA testing to discover who’s the father.”

Geordie Shore cast members answered phones in call centers or laid tile, while the Jersey Shore cast members were club promoters or DJs or fitness-center managers.

Compared to these deep-rooted attitudes, the Guido stereotype of Italians is a new phenomenon indeed, hailing from the 1970s at the earliest. Once a slur for all Italians, it’s now an ethnically specific variation on a term like “chav,” helped along in that definition by the Jersey Shore cast members who have embraced it and added their own lists of activities and characteristics to it. But when it came to commercializing working-class stereotypes, America beat the mother country to the jump. Jersey Shore had aired three seasons and revitalized MTV’s ratings in the States before Geordie Shore premiered this May in the U.K., where it had a similar effect on the network’s viewership.

The two shows have comparable amounts of bad behavior and the corresponding horrified reaction to it: When one of the Geordie Shore cast members flashed her breasts in the first episode, it sparked outrage. And the job the Geordies are assigned—pulling customers into a party bus in Chippendales-style outfits for the lads and Vegas cocktail gear for the ladies—makes Jersey Shore’s Seaside t-shirt shop look positively demure. But where Jersey Shore can be alternately absurd and uncomfortable, whether the focus is the intense conversations the characters have on the duck phone or the borderline-abusive relationship between Ronnie and Sammi, Geordie Shore can feel almost reflective.

There’s the usual complement of people cheating on absent boyfriends and regretting it, and the number of couples having sex in the same room in the first episode is certainly-eye opening, but Geordie Shore is shot through with moments of ambivalence about the events on screen. When one character declares her Geordie Shore experience to be part of her “Year of the Slut,” another says in the confessional, “Your mom is watching. Would you really say that on television?” While the casts’ relationship analysis usually stays at the level of statements like “He breaks her heart and her vagina, and she’s left with nothing,” on one occasion, a cast member turned to Middle East politics to figure out a fighting couple, noting that “They’re like Israel and Palestine. On paper, they’re very similar.” This self-awareness is morally reassuring (though not to the Newcastle MP who said the show was “bordering on pornographic” and vowed investigations into reality TV producers and alcohol abuse).

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The Geordie Shore crew doesn’t seem to have figured out how to live as cartoon characters as easily as their American predecessors. A Brit’s Veet addiction may be mildly amusing, but it’s nothing to the panic of a Guidette in Italy with only eight cans of bronzer to last her through Grand Tour, or the delights of Pauly D’s blowout. The Geordie Shore cast also has more traditional working-class occupations, whether they answer phones in call centers or lay tile, while the Jersey Shore cast members who worked at all were club promoters or DJs or fitness-center managers. In a sense, they’d been in professional training for their star turn, ready to define Guido-ness for an eager nation. The precise elements of Geordie culture, though, remain something of a mystery after one season.

So it’s maybe wise that MTV decided to up the momentum and send the Geordie Shore cast to the Spanish party town of Magaluf for a follow-up to the first season. Whether that trip will compare to the pleasures of seeing Snooki balance unsteadily on the box she needs to stand on to be tall enough for her passport photo, or Vinny practicing saying “No grenades, please,” in Italian remains to be seen. Behaving badly on vacation isn’t enough to make for deeply compelling television—you need a theory of fist-pumping or hot-tub flashing to turn your holiday into another person’s post-modern performance art.

'The Help': Softening Segregation for a Feel-Good Flick

2011-08-10T09:50:21-04:00

Even more than in the book, the film downplays the ugliness of Jim Crow and fixates on the goodness of its white protagonist

Dreamworks

“How do you try to feel like a good country when you’ve done shitty things as an entire nation?”

That question came from comedian Louis C.K. at the end of a recent episode of his sitcom Louie. He’d been contemplating how to explain to his daughters the many uses of “nigger” in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. But he could have asked the same question when thinking about The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s wildly popular novel about black domestic workers and the women who employed them in 1960s Mississippi, the movie adaptation of which arrives in theaters today.

Stockett’s novel presented a vision of segregation in service of a feel-good story, but the film version of The Help is even more distant from the virulence of American racism. Its villains, Junior League bigots who wear smart little suits to cover their scales, are so cartoonish that viewers won’t risk recognizing themselves or echoes of their behavior in them. The heroines—a privileged, liberal, white Mississippi woman named Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) and two black domestic workers, Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (a particularly good Octavia Spencer)—are much easier to identify with. The project that brings them together, a secret oral history of maids’ lives in Jackson, may spotlight the domestic side of racism. But other than a mention of unenforced minimum-wage laws and a scene of the aftermath of Medgar Evers’ murder, the movie is disengaged with the public legal framework that let white women treat their white servants dreadfully in private. In The Help, whether you’re black or white, liberation’s just a matter of improving your self-esteem.

In The Help, whether you're black or white, liberation's just a matter of improving your self-esteem.

From its initial publication, The Help was met with criticism from writers like the New York Times’ Janet Maslin, although also with upbeat reviews and a rapturous commercial reception (it has sold more than five million copies). The black characters in the novel speak in fairly heavy, sentimentalized dialect. The local civil rights movement originates from a naive white girl, not an organized, black-led movement. Worse, earlier this year, a woman named Ablene Cooper who has worked for Kathryn Stockett for more than a decade sued Stockett, claiming that she had lifted Cooper’s life story in a way that was damaging to her. Whether or not the complaint has merit, it resonated with critics of the novel who see The Help as yet another appropriation of black struggles to heap laurels on a white character.

The problem isn’t that white people weren’t involved in the Civil Rights movement. Stanley Nelson’s marvelous documentary Freedom Riders follows both the black riders who started the historic anti-segregation journey and the white riders who joined them—and who, on some stops, were beaten worse than their counterparts for being supposed race traitors. Janie Forsyth McKinney, who was just 12 at the time, gave water and medical care to the Freedom Riders after the men of her community attacked the activists’ Greyhound bus outside her father’s convenience store. Stories like hers should indeed be told.

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But there’s danger in treating racial discrimination as if it’s equivalent to other forms of hardship, which other recent civil rights movies have repeatedly done. John Waters’ original 1988 dance-competition movie Hairspray was quite pointed in its depictions of racial anxiety: Two anti-integrationists plot to bomb a dance competition, and there’s a very funny scene where several characters talk themselves out of jail by exploiting white fears of miscegenation. But on Broadway and in the 2007 Hollywood musical update, stories about white overweight characters and their self-confidence were elevated to the point where prejudice towards certain body weights appeared nearly as important and deeply entrenched as racism. 2009’s Invictus, far and away the most commercially successful movie about the struggle to overcome apartheid in South Africa (if one doesn’t count Lethal Weapon 2), is concerned less with the people who fought, like activist Steve Biko, than with white South Africans who needed to find a way to demonstrate that they could represent their entire country.

The Help is not the worst offender in this class of well-intentioned but perhaps inevitably flawed movies. While Skeeter conceives of the oral history project, Aibileen and Minny become its real authors. In the novel, though unfortunately not in the movie, Skeeter also comes clean to her editor about the role that Aibileen played in writing her housekeeping columns and gets Aibileen hired as her replacement, quietly bringing down another racial barrier. Similarly, while the novel treats Minny’s decision to leave her abusive husband Leroy as complex and directly related to the financial security she doesn’t have until the end of the book, the movie frames that decision as a simple act of self-determination. And at the screening I attended, the audience actually laughed when Leroy (who is never seen on-screen) began throwing things at Minny as a precursor to her beating (though perhaps that’s because Octavia Spencer is such a strong comedic actress).

Indeed, the movie, which necessarily sacrifices some character development in the name of space and speed, also conspicuously cuts out powerful illustrations of racial violence. While we get soft-hued flashbacks to Skeeter’s memories of Constantine, the black woman who raised her, there are no such flashbacks to the violent, unnecessary death of Aibileen’s son. In another scene, Yule May, one of Minny and Aibileen’s friends, is arrested for stealing a ring from her employer. The shot shows white police manhandling and cuffing her, but when they swing at her head with a baton, the impact of the weapon against her skull is cut out of the frame. An incident of racial violence that illustrates the cost of the main villain’s quest for separate bathrooms for African-American servants is left out of the movie entirely. Even a notably gory miscarriage scene from the book is reduced to a blood-soaked nightgown and an artfully smeared bathroom floor visible only for a moment.

One way to deal with the “shitty things” in our past that Louis C.K. refers to is to downplay their existence and persistence; to cover them up in candy-colored dresses and the memorable sight of Allison Janney, as Skeeter’s mother, in a turban; to tell us that Medgar Evers was murdered but to show us John F. Kennedy’s funeral instead. The film’s timidity shows that we’re not even close to eliminating racism in America. While Skeeter may have Richard Wright’s Native Son and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in her bedroom in Mississippi, The Help is a pastel ghost of those predecessors.

Christopher Nolan Should Break Batman in 'The Dark Knight Rises'

2011-07-21T16:40:34-04:00

A teaser for the third in the series suggests that the script may leave Bruce Wayne incapacitated, a fitting ending to a story about human frailty

Warner Bros.

There’s a curiously definitive tone to the first teaser trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, the final movie in director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, slated for a July 2012 release. “Every hero has a journey,” warns the title cards. “Every journey has an end.” What little we see of the movie itself puts the continuing viability of Bruce Wayne’s Batman project in question. “We were in this together,” Commissioner Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) laments from his hospital bed, speaking between hits on an oxygen mask. “And then you’re gone. Now, this evil rises. The Batman has to come back.” Rather than reassuring him, Wayne asks, “What if he doesn’t exist anymore?” And if the point needed underscoring, the trailer promises that this movie is “The epic conclusion to the Dark Knight legend.”

There’s certainly value to reminding viewers that this is the last time Nolan, who has helmed one of the most profitable and artistically distinctive superhero movie franchises ever, will put Christian Bale in his black mask. But the trailer’s emphatic tone also suggests that Nolan’s going to tackle a uniquely dark story, even in comparison to his previous work: He may be gearing up to put Batman out of action.

Nolan's Batman has been a fragile, limited bulwark against chaos, occasionally surprised by a flash of human goodness

The villain in The Dark Knight Rises is Bane. He’s hardly the most famous of DC Comic’s supervillains, and in 1997’s campy Batman and Robin, he was reduced to a grunting heavy. But in the original comics, Bane’s not just a worthy adversary for Batman—he's his inverse. A political prisoner, educated by a Jesuit, pumped up by chemical stimulants, and a veteran of prison fights, Bane loathes Wayne, a privileged heir who adopts violence as a way of meeting his emotional needs instead of as a way to survive. And Bane, in the comics, does something shocking—he puts Wayne in a wheelchair by breaking his back.

Most superhero stories chronicle the rise of heroes above their humanity. But were Nolan to import the back-breaking narrative from the comics, his Batman story arc would raise Bruce Wayne up only to bring him crashing down. It would be a sharp divergence from recent superhero movies, but one that’s completely in line with Nolan’s pessimism about what superheroes can actually accomplish.

Superhero-movie precedent doesn’t require Nolan to end—or maim—Batman in order to end the series. Both Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and the last crop of X-Men movies ran for three neat films before they were rebooted. There’s a third Iron Man movie on the way for 2013, but after that, the character’s getting diverted into Marvel’s larger Avengers storyline. When the recent Spider-Man and X-Men trilogies came to a close, the main characters had suffered but were left standing. Peter Parker may have lost his childhood best friend, Harry Osbourn, but his relationship with Mary Jane Watson was repaired, and he ended the movies with a new sense of how to use his powers. Jean Grey died at the end of X-Men: The Last Stand, but Wolverine remained around to flash his claws, Storm kept the Xavier Institute running, and Magneto seemed on the brink of regaining his powers. The superhero project goes on.

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Nolan, though, very well may opt to close his franchise on a more chilling note. The Dark Knight is the most definitive artistic statement of the current crop of superhero films—and the most financially lucrative, grossing more than $1 billion internationally. Nolan’s distinguished himself from his contemporaries by taking a relentlessly dark view of classic comic characters and of humanity. Where Spider-Man 2 made Doctor Octopus a soulful scientist to tell a cautionary tale about becoming too enamored of the power of technology, and Spider-Man 3 redeemed the man who killed Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, Nolan’s villains have been less forgivable: Batman Begins made the Scarecrow not just a straw man but a grave-worm ridden ghost, and The Dark Knight turned the Joker from a badly made-up clown into a uniquely horrifying sociopath who sews bombs into convicts and blows up hospitals.

If Batman Begins was about the virulence of criminality, and The Dark Knight was about the limits of government institutions in the face of unspeakable evil, it would make sense for The Dark Knight Rises to be about the fragility of the superhero enterprise as a whole. Batman may be able to stop a small number of very dangerous criminals and terrorists. And society may be able to accommodate his violations of rules—such as bans on electronic surveillance—because he’s one man, and because he isn’t broadly challenging norms. But if Gotham can’t or won’t change its institutions in the name of building a safer, less corrupt city, and instead relies on one man with a limited license to break the rules, then the city is awfully vulnerable to that man’s destruction.

Christopher Nolan’s always been less optimistic than Bryan Singer, who used the X-Men into a major metaphor for social liberation, or Sam Raimi, who had Spider-Man grow up into his powers and into manhood simultaneously. His Batman has been a fragile, limited bulwark against chaos, occasionally surprised by a flash of human goodness. If Nolan breaks Batman, he’ll provide a sharp rebuke to his fellow superhero storytellers. And he’d be the first among them to tell a truly complete story, to make a cohesive argument about superheroism, in the three movies allotted to him. The Dark Knight may rise over its artistic contemporaries precisely by making Batman fall.

The Political Parable of 'Harry Potter'

2011-07-14T13:27:59-04:00

The movies have discarded the moral heft of the books, which were of this world but not in it

Warner Brothers

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 arrives in theaters on Friday with giants, living statues, and an incredibly creepy depiction of a damaged soul abandoned in a train station. But even though the final adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s wildly successful series doesn’t skimp on the action theatrics, it eliminates all the references to torture, abuse of power, and class that Rowling used to illustrate the enormous stakes of her final confrontation between good and evil. All adaptations require cuts, but these were odd choices that misunderstand what’s most powerful about the books: If Harry Potter endures down the years, it will be because J.K. Rowling found sly ways to use fantasy to create a timeless statement about human rights and dignity.

The movies may fade, but successive generations of readers will turn to Rowling’s novels for escape and counsel

While Harry Potter pulled in readers with strong characters and a beautifully-crafted fictional world, the books also functioned as profoundly moral novels, making the case for everything from fair pay to a ban on torture. And while the September 11, 2001 attacks made some of those values the subject of fiercely partisan debates in the United States, Rowling managed to explore these themes without alienating any possible constituency of readers.

Harry’s dreadful relatives mouth vaguely conservative political opinions meant to illustrate their close-mindedness, but fear of magic is their cardinal sin—rather than their behavior at the ballot box. The only real-world political figure to show up in the books is the British Prime Minister, who is understandably nervous about a series of violent incidents, but who doesn’t take political actions. Imagine if Rowling had written that the PM wanted to deport wizards; the move would have been read as an incendiary analogue to true-life policies like the EU's crackdown on radical imams.

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In the novels, the rise of the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald coincides with World War II, which seems fairly uncontroversial—portraying Hitler’s evil through fiction is a time-honored tradition. But even though there are obvious parallels connecting the dark wizard Voldemort and his the Death Eaters with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, the events of the Harry Potter novels take place between 1991 and 1998, slightly apart from our present era. That minor offset means Rowling could write about events like the Ministry of Magic’s harsh interrogations and attempts to push prisoners to despair by using Dementors—without running into accusations that she was taking sides in an ongoing debate.

Of course Rowling, who published the first Harry Potter novel in 1997, couldn’t have predicted September 11, or the Bush administration’s reliance on torture to prosecute the War on Terror. And as Rowling’s commencement address at Harvard in 2008 made clear, her views on torture and human rights were shaped by her work for Amnesty International long before the rise of global Islamic terrorism and the extreme tactics brought to bear against it. Events conspired to make her novels painfully relevant to American politics and ethical debates, but by dint of timing, nationality, and massive, transcendent popularity, Rowling’s novels were never enmeshed in the sharply partisan clashes over those issues (most of the clashes about Potter have been over issues outside the novels, in fact). Given how murky and agonized our debates over torture and extraordinary rendition have become, there’s something useful and clarifying about Rowling’s decision to place these issues in another context. Of course torture drove Barty Crouch, Jr. insane and radicalized him further. Of course good people, like our hero, avoid torture as a matter of strategy and moral distinction.

That political potency may be the most important result of Rowling’s decision to detach her novels from an overly specific timeline. But other things she does that make the world of Harry Potter feel antiquated now also ensure that it won’t feel dated in the future. It might be odd for the books' teenagers not to spend lots of time on computers or with cell phones, but that absence also means that the series won’t feel too tied to a particular moment. Past and present converge in the halls and on the walls of Hogwarts, as ghosts help raise successive generations of students and headmasters linger to offer advice.

It’s striking that is Rowling was so careful to keep modern technology out of her novels given the way they coincided with the rise of the Internet. 1998, the year Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was published in the United States, just 26.2 percent of American households had internet connections. By 2007, when fans got their hands on the final novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, that figure had risen to 61.7 percent of households, and 50.8 percent of American households had broadband connections. The spread of that technology made it easier for love of Rowling’s books to go from a solitary pleasure to an international craze. It doesn’t matter if no one you know in real life likes Harry Potter, or headbangs to “Voldemort Can’t Stop the Rock!,” or is convinced that Harry’s godfather Sirius Black and Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher Remus Lupin are meant to be together, if hundreds of thousands of people who share your passions are just a click away.

But is the embrace of Harry Potter a product of our particular moment, or are the books to be considered a significant entry in the literary canon? J.K. Rowling’s novels are beautifully plotted and full of deft characterization, but she is not a perfect prose writer, and it’s clear that as the series progressed, she was edited less. But taken as a whole, her seven novels are a significant achievement of both storytelling and moral argument. By contrast, the movie adaptations are both artistically uneven and don’t consistently engage with Rowling’s political vision.

That failure to recognize that Rowling’s moral arguments are as important as the visual and emotional spectacle of her novels is particularly evident in the changes David Yates made to Rowling’s narrative in second Deathly Hallows movie. Eliminating a scene where Harry tries to use the Cruciatus Curse on a Death Eater but fails misses a chance to reinforce the basic immorality of torture. Similarly, shortening Neville Longbottom’s account of life at Hogwarts in Harry’s absence cuts out crucial details about how those same teachers forced students to hurt each other, an illustration of how once-aberrant behaviors become normalized. In the novel, Ron and Hermione’s first kiss comes after Ron makes a stirring statement in support of the liberty of the Hogwarts’s house elves, whom he once considered willing slaves. In the movie, it comes after he and Hermione destroy a Horcrux together. And perhaps most crucially, the movie cuts the explanation of who Albus Dumbledore really was, and why he came to consider himself unfit for political office. Rowling’s indictment of love of power for power’s sake is a striking statement about choice and self-control—especially set in a world where almost all the characters have extraordinary abilities.

Potter ’s themes may be painfully salient in the world after September 11, but the present day is hardly the only time that ordinary people will have to grapple with questions about how to use power appropriately and how to confront great evil. And even if the movies fade, it seems likely that successive generations of readers, young and old, will turn to Rowling’s novels for escape and for counsel. The books’ initial wild success may have been the lucky product of talent and timing. But Rowling’s great accomplishment was to make the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry a vehicle for her values and a place that exists in time out of mind, no matter how the years wheel around it.

How 'Torchwood' Found Its Way

2011-07-08T14:55:42-04:00

After two lackluster seasons, the science-fiction series became a success by learning two important lessons

Starz

Torchwood, the BBC Wales spin-off of the long-running science fiction series Doctor Who, had an obvious pitch when the show launched in 2006. The show was meant to add a healthy dose of sex and adult talk about the complexity of relationships to the time-travel-and-aliens formula that has served Doctor Who, which is essentially a family show, so well since 1963. But the show took two seasons of meandering through repetitive plotlines before it found the best way to tell stories about the titular fictional law enforcement agency, which it did in rather spectacular fashion in 2009. With the five-episode season "Children of Earth," Torchwood finally discovered the two things that make it a truly distinct television show: a dedication to finding the number of episodes that fit a given story, and an explicit embrace of political themes and storylines.

Now, BBC Cymru Wales, BBC Worldwide, and Starz have used those lessons to very good effect in their collaboration on the fourth season of Torchwood, called "Miracle Day," which begins airing on Starz in the U.S. at 10 p.m. tonight and on the BBC next week.

"Children of Earth" used its five episodes to follow five days in a deeply disturbing alien invasion. As the mysterious race, known as the 456, demands ten percent of the world's children, the British government embarks on a murderous coverup to disguise the fact that they've been in touch with the aliens—and surrendered children to them—before. The short season lends a nastily propulsive quality to the storyline, which involves the characters racing against a government that's trying to kill them, and aliens with no inclination to alter their timeline. "Children of Earth was a compact little time bomb," says Eve Myles, who plays Torchwood's main character Gwen Cooper.

"Miracle Day" takes on more issues, and it spans twice the number of episodes. This time, instead of a race against the clock, the surviving members of the Torchwood team are facing a rather more open-ended dilemma. Suddenly, no one on earth is able to die, halting executions, spiking birthrates, and sparking a prescription drug shortage. (Just because no one can die doesn't mean no one can suffer pain or contract diseases.) Because that problem has so many more institutional implications and involves so many more moving pieces, the ten-episode order gives viewers what Myles says is important room to absorb the issues and to consider the implications of the unfolding crisis.

Torchwood's decision to vary the lengths of its seasons is a break with precedent, especially for shows in the United States. Shows like 24 have managed to divide up a single day so it fits neatly into the constraints of the American fall-to-spring network television season, which usually consists of 22 to 24 episodes. But most shows can't sustain a single plot arc for an entire season. Take Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was substantially written and produced by Torchwood: "Miracle Day" writer Jane Espenson. That series addressed one major problem or fought one major villain over the course of a season, but it had to include unrelated episodes to make the season long enough.

There are exceptions for under-performing but much-loved shows like NBC's Chuck (which had a 13-season episode first season, then longer second, third, and fourth seasons, and have a 13-episode order for next season) of course, but they're the exception rather than the norm. Premium cable networks like Starz, HBO, AMC and Showtime have shorter seasons, mirroring the British predilection for 10 to 12-episode season orders, but those numbers are standard from season to season, rather than shifting to accommodate the story the characters are addressing in any given season.

"I love the idea of developing stories with an eye toward the number of episodes that fit the story," says Espenson of her experience on "Miracle Day." It's not often that something is both obvious and revolutionary, but that is."

Similarly, "Children of Earth" and "Miracle Day"'s use of science fiction tropes to explore political and moral questions isn't exactly shocking: that's the most logical use of the genre, after all. But where so many shows and movies settle for subtle allusions or take vague stances on the issues raised by the science fictional concepts they employ, Torchwood at its best when it tees off on everything from abuses of government power to prescription company profiteering.

In "Children of Earth," the main theme is the corrupting influence of power and the corrosiveness of state secrets. Rather than moving decisively to assess the risks of an alien invasion they've been warned is coming, Permanent Secretary of the Home Office Peter Frobisher wastes time ordering the assassinations of the members of Torchwood who know about the government's previous contact with the 456—and who might have been able to advise the government. His actions dismay the people working underneath him. "I didn't sign the Official Secrets Act to cover up murder," agonizes Lois, a Home Office underling who decides to work with Torchwood and is rewarded for her concern with imprisonment. "But then I didn't take the job to commit treason on my second day." Eventually, the administration's self-interest leads it to turn on Frobisher—anyone is sacrificeable when it comes to maintaining power.

"Miracle Day" engages a wider range of issues with its core concern as well. The series beings when, in the middle of executing a convicted child rapist and murderer, Oswald Danes, death stops working. Danes successfully argues that because his sentence has been carried out, he must be released—and parlays his newfound fame into a role for a new movement, calling for an end to requirement that medicine be dispensed by prescription, given the overwhelming demand for pain medication, antibiotics to treat spiraling infections, and medical contraceptives. The end of death implicates everything: what does sex in the gay community look like when HIV can ravage you forever? What are the implications for abortion rights when unviable pregnancies won't spontaneously end? Does the end of death mean humanity no longer has souls? And are tactics like extraordinary rendition justified as government faces entirely new constraints and requirements to serve its citizens?

Espenson said that, though Russell T. Davies, the creator of Torchwood, initially decided on the overarching scenario, the writing staff thought carefully about how far they could take it.

"We brought in a doctor and discussed it all again, and every time it just felt better and deeper and more important," she says. "I think it will resonate with US audiences in particular since the warring opinions on health care are so remarkably far apart."

As a backbone that supports all of those other tangents and exploration, the health care storyline asks a particularly prescient question: What happens if everyone has the right to care, but disaster strikes and there aren't enough resources to distribute even though everyone has the ability to pay for them? It's a kind of disaster planning that's several steps beyond our debates about getting everyone insured, and it's exactly why science fiction is a useful tool for thinking through the future.

And Myles says that even if the scenarios are different, Miracle Day shares a theme with "Children of Earth" that directly address contemporary political concerns in the U.K. "With us having a new PM, and David Cameron being so young, it's all about decision-making," she explains, "And what the humans do to each other to get by, and it's disgrace."

It's that kind of darkness, rather than the relationship angst that dominated the first two seasons of the show, that makes Torchwood a powerful show. At the beginning of "Miracle Day," Gwen Cooper's telling her infant daughter stories about her adventures fighting aliens, telling her husband Rhys that their daughter will think they're only fairy tales. "It's a nightmare, Gwen," Rhys tells her. Torchwood's initial slogan warned viewers that "In the twenty-first century, everything changes—and you've got to be ready." It's found its niche warning us that we can't be prepared for what dreams may come.

Read a transcript of Alyssa Rosenberg's interview with Jane Espenson.

From 'The Giver' to 'Twilight,' Young Adult Fiction Helps Teens Grow Up

2011-07-07T14:10:06-04:00

Several stories in the genre feature young people taking on adult responsibilities

Warner Bros

Last week, the news broke about the next big thing in young adult movie gold rush: Jeff Bridges purchased the movie rights to Lois Lowry's distopian young adult classic The Giver and planned to play the title roles. The Giver, set in a future where the remaining citizens of an endangered society have erased any signs of difference between them in the name of maintaining peace and order, follows a year in the life of a boy picked to take on a singular responsibility. Jonas has been chosen to hold on to a few remaining memories of experiences and emotions his society has banned so he can advise them on major decisions—and so he can bear both pain and joy his fellow citizens would find unmanageable.

Though the 18-year-old book hasn't attracted the same fanatical followings as newer series like The Hunger Games and Twilight, The Giver has many of the same themes, and a similar appeal. Rather than continuing trends of infantilizing young adult readers or providing an escape for adults who don't want to face the trials of the real world, The Giver and the most popular young adult books today all give their young protagonists significant adult responsibilities. The books then explore the way the characters rise to the challenge, crumble under their burdens, or learn to share them. These franchises aren't helping readers and viewers run away from the difficulties of adulthood: they're sending the message that with great power comes great cost, and great compromise.

The main characters in an earlier age of YA dealt with realistic adolescent dramas—like Judy Blume's struggling heroines—or slightly exaggerated ones—like the Wakefield twins in the Sweet Valley High books. But the most popular young adult characters today aren't just given adult rules, they fill wholly unique functions in their societies. Harry Potter is fated to face off with the dark wizard Voldemort. Katniss Everdeen volunteers to participate in an annual fight to the death to protect her sister, but she is turned into a potent political symbol by the adults in her life. Bella Swann may be quite passive, her power arising from her body rather than her actions, but she's still unique, and valuable. The Giver is squarely in this tradition: Jonas' job brings him honor, but it isolates him from his family and his peers, expanding his experiences and with them, his moral sensibility.

Being chosen requires that each of those characters take on responsibilities beyond what would be expected of them if they were ordinary teenagers. Harry runs an insurgent organization, studies magic, commits criminal acts, and leaves school a year early, forcing him to figure out how to support himself without food or shelter supplied by adults. Katniss first figures out how to survive in and manipulate a political system dominated by adults, then becomes a war leader and a political figure in her own right, negotiating the conditions of the revolution that happens around her. Bella takes on the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood. And Jonas, who has grown up in a community without choices, must learn the skills of decision, deceit, and judgment—and decide whether to act when he discovers the price his community pays to live without difference, without pain, and ultimately without beauty or honesty.

And even though these novels are fantasies, they ask realistic questions about what happens when children take on adult roles. Harry sees his friends tortured and killed—and it's the adults who coordinate the defense of Hogwarts who buy Harry the time he needs to defeat Voldemort. He may be chosen, but he can only be victorious in concert with others. Katniss can't handle the pressure of being a symbol, becoming erratic and ultimately withdrawing from the struggle. While the horrifying nature of Bella's pregnancy makes troubling assumptions about sex, and she's saved by magic rather than hard work, there's no question that Stephenie Meyer has Bella experience real, if temporary, consequences for her decisions. And Jonas has to face that he can't transform his community except by leaving it. Teenagers, it turns out, are still teenagers.

It might be easy to look at these defeats and compromises and assume that these novels validate helicopter parenting, that they prove that teenagers can't really handle the real world on their own. But instead, the biggest YA smashes of the day—and classics like Lowry's—emphasize that even when they fail or compromise, teenagers come to independent and important moral insights when they're forced to take responsibility and make decisions without adult support.

Albus Dumbledore always understood that Harry Potter's self-sacrifice would be something he'd have to arrive at on his own terms and on his own timeline for it to be meaningful. Katniss's independence, and her refusal to go from serving one regime blindly to serving another with equal thoughtlessness, leads her to take shocking action that upsets the political balance in Panem and forges a new future. Bella's defiance of her parents allows her to step into a wider, more beautiful world. And Jonas's reactions to his new experiences allow him to glimpse a solution to his society's stasis that none of his predecessors dared to imagine. The transition to adulthood isn't easy, these stories argue, but trusting teenagers can bring rewards for both individuals and communities. Sometimes, you need a child to change things.

Alyssa Rosenberg : The Atlantic

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