All eyes will be on Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes tonight given his celebrity-skewing last year. But in his appearance at the Television Critics Association Press tour on Friday, I was most struck by how he discussed a theme that came up again and again across panels and networks; the challenges of targeting your jokes so you lampoon people’s prejudices and assumptions rather than the people themselves.

“I think some people confuse the target of a joke with the subject of a joke. You can have jokes about race without being racist,” he said at the panel for Life’s Too Short, the HBO show he’s doing with Warwick Davis. “And I think sometimes people flinch too soon. And very often the target is people’s prejudices or stupidity…We’re not trying to be outrageous for outrageousness’s sake. It’s churlish…I think the job of a comedian isn’t just to make you laugh, it’s to make you think as well. I have to be able to justify myself.”

The question of whether you can justify yourself is hard. I thought Gervais was funny but not always a particularly profound truth-teller in last year’s Globes—making fun of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s pandering is a worthwhile thing to say in public, while suggesting that Tom Cruise is gay is less so. We’ll see how he does tonight.

Rob Schneider, in however limited a fashion, did pull off his promise on the first episode of Rob. At the CBS session on Wednesday, he told the audience “There are still race problems in America…If anything bad happens, it’s mostly to my character.” And at least in the scene between Rob and his new father-in-law, that’s true. I don’t necessarily trust Rob to do this, but I think it’s critical for somebody to be pointing out that our race problems in the United States are problems caused by folks who are unfamiliar with or hateful of people of different races, ethnicities, and cultures, not by members of minority groups.

And finally, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele in a wonderful session promoting their very promising new Comedy Central sketch-and-standup show, Key & Peele (which premieres on January 31 at 10:30PM) said that they thought if people were merely offended, they weren’t doing their jobs. And they suggested it was important to trust the audience to see what they were doing.

“Why be offensive for no reason? And I never got a comedian who went ‘well, if you didn’t get it, whatever’ Maybe you weren’t funny,” Key said. “We’ll try to make a grand, thematic point in a scene, a social point. But our hope is that the audience is astute enough to say ‘this scene is about this even though it’s in this frame.’ And I’m sure sometimes people are going to be offended by the frame and not get what we’re going for in the scene.” Peele added “If we feel we have to go somewhere extreme, we will force ourselves to bakc it up with the comedy.”

The sketches they showed us, including one with Key out on a date who wants him to act blacker (both comedians are biracial) and be more aggressive with a rude waiter, and Peele doing his (very good) Obama impression with Key acting as “his anger translator, Luther,” demonstrate the challenge of what they’re trying to do. There’s no point in creating a space that’s safe for frank conversation if you’re not going to do it. And as Don Cheadle suggested on Friday, sometimes you can achieve more in opening up conversations about race by coming at them sideways with comedy. Even if the quality varies, it’s nice to see so many comics trying to come at the problem of how to create those spaces and what to say once you’re there from so many different perspectives.

I’ve only ever been an occasional watcher of The Closer, but I thought the presentation of its spin-off, Major Crimes, did something very smart today: TNT said the show would, in part, be about how California’s fiscal crisis has affected its criminal justice system.

“We’re about to release 30,000 prisoners in the state of California because we can’t house them in a humane way,” said Executive Producer James Duff. “Last year in pursuit of the death penalty, the state of California spent $172 million.”

This, of course, is true—Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget is projected to bring the state’s deficit down to $9.2 billion, which is not small potatoes, and leaves the state with a long way to go. And that fiscal crunch and prison overcrowding are a tremendous problem that has a real impact on how people carry out their duties, whether it’s prison guards using different tactics on maintain control on unit, or the situations in which prosecutors are willing to cut deals and how they think about probation versus jail time. It’s intelligent to have a show acknowledge that, and to draw its drama from the ongoing structural problems of the state. It’s not exactly Tony Kushner’s East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis, which is about the reasons California is broke and the tax-dodging mentality that crops up like an infectious disease. But it’s still a decision that reflects a sense of both time and place, that actually makes use of the fact that the show is happening in California instead of just being there because it’s easy.

It says a lot about Work It that the way the show dealt with cross-dressing was so misguided that I didn’t even get around to writing an extremely angry post about the show’s poisonous sexism before it was cancelled due to faith-in-humanity reaffirming low ratings. But every silver lining has its cloud, which in this case were the strong initial ratings for Rob. Whether the latter continues to hold those numbers is a very interesting question, but I think the fate of each of these critically-savaged shows says something about the stories Americans want to here, and what compromises they’re willing to make to them.

I think there’s no question that the impact of the recession on gender and economic power has been important and thought-provoking for a lot of people. If you’ve been a provider, and see that role tied up with your gender, and then lose that role, I imagine you have some thoughts about manhood, womanhood, etc. But I don’t necessarily think the recession set off a gender war. And the wildly aggrieved nature of Work It was sour beyond being interesting or resonant. On the show, Lee, the main character, complains bitterly about how much better his friend Angel is at selling pharmaceuticals in drag, calling her a whore, not that the experience leads him into clarity or sympathy for women who can’t or won’t let a man get a leg over to get a leg up in business. Lee’s toxic brother in law rants endlessly about how women are emasculating men. All three men appear to meet at the bar where they hang out because they want to escape whatever women in their lives, and those women are set up in a way to make that escape possible. They’re wretched people to spend time with, and even worse tools to get at the painful truths of the American economy through humor.

Rob, on the other hand, is not a good show either. The “shucks-I’m-sodomizing-Grandma” scene in the pilot will justly go down in infamy. But there is a real need for a show about American Latinos, and for a show that satirizes the efforts of white Americans to understand their changing society that opens up more space for conversation and shutting it down. Is Rob that? It’s not particularly clear yet. But the design of Cheech Marin as a conservative immigrant small businessman who wants to defend the border with cannons and employs undocumented immigrants himself is intelligent in intention if not in execution: not all non-white people think alike, and not all of them hold positions that we think of as progressive. His interactions with Rob, who tries to ingratiate himself by supporting immigration reform and talking about how much he likes guacamole, are probably the parts of the show that work best: the target is Rob’s desire to be accepted even though he hasn’t tried hard to be knowledgeable, and the jokes don’t suggest that he should try less hard, just try better.

Where Work It was hostile in its proud ignorance, Rob is amiable in its attempts to get at something true. Neither of them are good shows, but Rob could become a decent one with the right intentions and some heavy lifting. Work It never would have been. It’s too bad ABC didn’t realize that before airing it.

After a lot of seriousness over the past few days, there was something amusingly wacky about the presentation by Paul Fisher, the model scout who is revamping his network on the CW’s new reality show Remodeled. Even in Hollywood, the man has a world-class ego. Particularly when he started talking about how he’s going to put together a mental health program for women in the industry because “There are 7 million kids around the world who are sticking fingers down their throats…Our industry must take responsibility for the images they’re putting out,” while promoting his show with footage that shows him mercilessly dissecting candidate’s looks. Me being me, I had to ask about the contradiction.

He told me that the best way to fix the problem was “Step one is get in the game. Step two is when you have the muscle,” and said that “One of my dreams, ma’am, is to be able to sit front row at the Calvin Klein show, that Versace show, and not see those size zero, size two models walking down the runway…I promise you everything in my power and my ability, I’m going to try to never see a girl with a size zero or a size one walking down the runway again.” And he suggested he’d die trying to change the industry.

Perhaps I should be less skeptical. But this is coming from a man who talked about how virtuous modeling is because of the charity work models with big deals do, and linked the expansion of his empire to changes he swore would be inevitable in the industry as he gained power. There is something good though about the idea that the culture’s bent enough that charity for the rich is compulsory, and that it’s cooler to argue that models should be healthy and representative as possible instead of embracing heroin chic. That said, I will be sure to poke Mr. Fisher to see if he’s keeping his promise. If he’s going to offer me the moon, I might as well keep after him to deliver it.

I went into this thinking I was going to write about Gemma Teller Morrow, and the Queen herself will definitely get plenty of attention in an upcoming Sons of Anarchy week. But I’m not quite caught up on the show yet, in part because I got distracted along the way by a woman who reminds me a lot of Gemma: the Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham. Maggie Smith is a genius, of course, and the Dowager Countess has become one of the most famous and impressive zinger machines in any form of popular culture. But beyond the barbs, Violet is a fascinating model for women in television that upsets the norms on everything from age, to sexual involvement, to deployment of power. Watching her grapple with modernity is one of the most creative and moving long arc plots any network’s put on television in years.

The first and most obvious thing that makes Violet—and consequently her storylines—so different from almost anything else we see on television, is her age, and the corollary to it, her widowhood. Every other woman we’ve talked about in this series has been in her teens and twenties. I spend a fair amount of time arguing that we need to tell stories about women who are single or prioritizing their careers or intellectual commitments over the search for romance, or who are confident who they are instead of going on heroes’ journeys. But it is absolutely true that there are common experiences and processes that people tend to go through during those years, simply by virtue of leaving high school, going to college, and entering the economy. And those stories can vary broadly in the details, but there are powerful tropes about all of those processes, and it’s extremely hard to find something new in them or achieve escape velocity from them. The easiest way to tell different kinds of stories about women is to tell stories about different kinds of women. And while we often talk about different kinds of women in terms of race or class, telling stories about women in different stages of life opens up different arcs and issues.

Unlike questing twenty-somethings, the Dowager Countess of Grantham has a sense of herself that’s been fixed by time and consolidated by money and position. Violet’s beyond sex and marriage—at least for herself—though she’s manifestly confident in the wisdom that experience has given her about both. When she says things about Sybil not being entitled to her opinions “until she is married—then her husband will tell her what her opinions are,” it’s an example of retrograde thinking, but it also comes from a set of developed convictions about how to preserve harmony. Her instruction to Cora that “We are allies, my dear, which can be a good deal more effective,” comes from the same place. She didn’t have the opportunities that her granddaughters do to make errors and recover from them. The rules that govern her life are the result of figuring out what makes life, if not easy, less emotionally difficult.

And it’s fascinating to see what happens when, after someone’s gone through the process of being uncertain and crafting an iron-clad self, the world changes and makes those rules less necessary, even ridiculous. When Violet and Cora talk about how angry Violet gets when her rules are violated, that anger comes out of two very different places. First, breaking the rules by doing things like having premarital sex with Turkish diplomats who die in your bed, carries greater risk in Violet’s world than it does in, say, her granddaughter Mary’s. It makes sense that Violet would be not just disturbed by the mess her granddaughter’s created, but afraid for her. The world is changing such that Mary may survive it (based on what we’ve seen in the American air schedule), but neither she nor Violet know that for sure yet. And second, it must be terrifying to see the world order change around you and to realize that your rules may not be relevant, they may not guide you correctly any longer, and to face, at an advanced age, the prospect of reinventing yourself. That process in your teens and twenties is fantastically difficult, and we like to think that we only have to do it once.
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David Bowie suggests copyright is over, or near enough:

I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity… So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.

I don’t really think this is true. There’s no question that we need a good, smart, comprehensive look at both copyright and patent law, but I doubt we’ll entirely eliminate either.

And I think “music itself is going to become like running water and electricity” is the kind of thing that people say, along with occasionally arguing that content should be free, that really merits more serious and critical examination. Given the opposition to public funding for the arts (at least above current levels), I think we’re unlikely to see a scenario where people are willing to pay tax dollars or a small fee each month to create utility-like backing for artistic creation. Maybe we’ll see more non-profit fellowships, but probably not enough to make up for the total collapse of a music market in a world without copyright. On the other hand, metered-usage models like Spotify may provide a way forward for people to pay to access a service rather than for individual tracks, which might mean we end up with a more electricity-like approach to music consumption. But of course that model requires someone to have copyrights in order to get paid.

And while labels may be irrelevant for someone like David Bowie, and while tools like Kickstarter may help people get the capital they need to record the tracks that will make it possible for them to make a living out of touring, I still think that labels will continue to exist in some form even if the relationship between them and artists shifts over time. I think it’s possible that the roles of labels and managers and publicists will collapse into each other, much in the same way I’m told agents now often do a lot of the initial heavy lifting in the book editing process.

This post contains spoilers through the January 12 episode of Parks and Recreation.

If there’s been a theme to this season of Parks and Recreation, it’s accepting who you are, and all the gifts and limitations that come with that state. It’s a theme that was fully on display tonight in a somewhat subdued return for the show, as Leslie tries to figure out how to run a campaign, Ben tries to figure out life after Pawnee government, and Local Hero Pistol Pete comes to terms with his Roman Catholic childhood as the son of a single father.

After the loss of her campaign team, Leslie’s trying to convince them — and herself — that her staff represents an ass-kicking All Star team, even though it consists of a man who lines his shoes with red carpet, a man who thinks he can drive trucks (rented, hilariously, from a firm called Sissman), a campaign manager who Googlesources her wardrobe, and Andy, who rushes into Leslie’s confrontation to tell her, “Leslie, I tried to make ramen in the coffeemaker and I broke…everything.” It turns out that may be what happens when you try to turn a local election into an extravaganza. Leslie’s planned relaunch ends with a too-short red carpet, a stage out of Ron’s workshop, and a group effort to get a three-legged dog across a vast expanse of ice that was supposed to be a basketball court. The moment when Leslie admits to the increasingly disconcerted crowd (pulled together by Jerry, getting a rare, and though mixed, welcome, win), “This is the worst political event ever in history” was the best part of the event. But whether she realizes that simply being Leslie Knope — someone whose accomplishments with the parks pulled Pistol Pete out of a self-imposed exile from pubic attention and the memories of a tough childhood — is enough remains an open question.

The two people who did have come-to-Jesus moments about themselves in this episode, Ben and Anne, ended up switching jobs. Leslie roped Anne into running her campaign with a typical dose of hyperbole, telling her “Anne, you beautiful tropical fish. you’re smart as a whip and you’re cool under pressure. You’ve resuscitated a human heart in your bare hands…You haven’t? You will. You’re that good of a nurse.” And if anything, this episode proved that Anne’s a really good nurse. She listens to Pistol Pete, and figures out why he’s reluctant to take on his mantle of glory. “Right now he’s curled up in the back seat of my car,” she explains to Leslie. “Who sounds like a piece of work. But I think maybe he did the best he could as a single father. I don’t know. I might be too close to the situation.”

Then there’s Ben, who’s trying to fill post-political life with plans to revolutionize Italian cuisine with “The Low Cal Calzone Zone” and claymation projects. When he sees the latter, he’s shattered. “In my head I compared it to Avatar, Chris!” he wails. “And how could it not be longer?” I think it’s a little cheap to have Leslie keep resolving the issues with Ben and her campaign by saying things like, “I don’t care if you’re poison to my campaign. This team has a lot of heart and zero knowhow.” But if she’s going to win this thing on evidence of her hypercompetence, she’s sure setting up a lot of things that she can tell voters don’t matter because she’s so good at her job.

Slammed at TCA today. But since it’s HBO day, have a trailer for Veep, which I saw the pilot episode of last night. Thoughts to come, but it is excellent. Get excited:

This post contains spoilers through section 7 of A Visit From the Goon Squad. For next week, let’s finish the novel.

Perhaps it’s because I’m writing this at the Television Critics Association press tour, but A Visit From the Goon Squad feels more like a television show than almost any novel I’ve ever read. Normally, that comparison goes in the opposite direction to compliment and elevate a television show, but in this case, it shouldn’t feel like a demotion. Do you remember that opening tracking shot that begins the Battlestar Galactica miniseries that kicked the whole shebang off? Where you skip from one character to the next, and in a couple of minutes, you learn an enormous amount about who’s going to matter and get an initial sense of who they are? A Visit From the Goon Squad feels like that. And much like Battlestar Galactica, this is a novel about climactic moments, both when everything changes for everyone, and little things when people get set slightly off kilter in ways they can only recognize with hindsight.

First, the big thing. This is a New York novel without being heavy-handed about it, and because of that, it’s a September 11 novel in a way that I suspect that terrible day will figure in many events in the future. The references to it will be glancing, not all events will be organized around it, and yet, September 11 will be recognized as a moment that sent almost all of us off in different directions, however slight the course correction. Sasha “hated the neighborhood at night without the World Trade Center, whose blazing freeways of light had always filled her with hope.” For Jules, September 11 is a way of expressing his profound dislocation from the world after his release from prison. He tells Stephanie “I go away for a few years and the whole fucking world is upside down. Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched every time you go to someone’s office. Everybody sounds stoned, because they’re e-mailing people the whole time they’re talking to you. Tom and Nicole are with different people.…And now my rock-and-roll sister and her husband are hanging around with Republicans. What the fuck!” And Stephanie finds a conversation about al Qaeda in New York a symptom of the awfulness of her new life in the suburbs with Bennie, proof of the blinkered nature of the people around her.

That same deftness shows up in the revelations the characters have that aren’t connected to major world-historical events, that might, in fact, be inexplicable to anyone else. There’s Sasha’s realization about why she steals:

It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman’s blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand—it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously (“I get it,” Coz, her therapist, said), and take the fucking thing.

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In his review of Rob, Todd VanDerWeff says something: “Everybody’s trying to figure out the way to do these vaguely politically incorrect shows where the characters talk about race and culture and so on frankly and honestly. Everybody’s chasing that whole envelope-pushing thing that cable does so well because they vaguely sense that this is something network could do well, too.” In that case, they might well look to David Nevins and to Showtime for tips on how to do those things right without being obvious, or without making a hash of things trying to represent the full range of a debate.

At his executive session yesterday, one of my fellow critics asked if he thought House of Lies glorified the 1 percent and the people who produce their wealth at a time of rising anger against them. “House of Lies is all about excess and confronting the contradictions of it and the hypocrisies of it. I think House of Lies is an incredibly timely show,” he said. “We’re not really about taking the sanctimonious, obvious route to confront those issues of income disparity. But I think it’s got very interesting things to say about how business is run.” He trusts his audience to see something on screen and to interrogate it, rather than to simply accept that because it’s on screen, it must be good.

When I asked him about whether, given the nice ratings for Homeland and House of Lies, he thought there was an unmet appetite for shows that took on the issues of the day, he agreed heartily:

Relevance is a big deal for us. I want to do shows that resonate in the wider culture. I think theere’s a huge opportunity to challenge the world that we live in. Relevance, timeliness, is, I think, one of the things that can define Showtime…I feel like that’s a big part of what happened with Homeland. I got to Showtime the summer of 2010. My first day was in August. And that script showed up. I’d had conversations with Howard [Gordon] and Alex [Gansa] back when I was a producer. They gave me the script within my first week there…we started talking about what the pay cable version of that would be. I realized we didn’t have a show that played in the fall with Dexter, and a year from then, the fall of 2011 would be the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and her was a script that if we were smart about it, was going to resonate with a lot of the things that were going to be occupying journalists and pundits. It’s rare that something lines up like that…In a similar way, House of Lies, some of it is by coincidence but some fo it is by design.

The political cycle moves much faster than the television development process, so Showtime would have be unusually good at forecasting to have shows land in the same way that Homeland and House of Lies have. But I appreciate hearing anyone say that trying is worthwhile.

One of the things that works best for me about House of Lies is something that’s coming up in subsequent episodes: its intense bluntness about race and the racism that persists at the highest levels of corporate America. And it was exciting to hear Don Cheadle, who plays high-powered consultant Marty Kaan, and Glynn Turman, who plays his father Jeremiah, talk about the show’s racial politics—and to promise more explorations of those themes if they’re lucky enough to get a second season.

“I want to commend the producers, showtime, for taking on the elephant in the room. This show addresses racial situation like no other show,” Glynn Turman said at the House of Lies panel during Showtime’s presentations at the Television Critics Association press tour today. “From the very opening scene, it’s smack dab in your face. It has never been presented so up front in the history of television. This is a bold step in treating a black man like a person with dimensions…The reason you know it is he is the guy he’s playing. That’s a racial attack. That’s an attack on racism in order to bring the walls down in itself. So at every turn, this show is addressing something that is a taboo.”

And he’s right. Reverse racebending happens occasionally, but it’s hard to imagine another show that would take a book written by a white guy about skulduggery in the world of business and cast a black man in the lead role, and do it without comment.

But it’s not simply a matter of making Kaan black instead of white. This wasn’t so much an issue in the first episode, but the show is very blunt about demonstrating racism and calling it out. Among the things coming down the pike: a client mistaking every white member of Marty’s team for Marty before turning to the black man in the room, and a very honest conversation between Marty and an African-American recruit. I asked Cheadle about whether we need humor that exposes racism more than we need the gentle humor of reconciliation.

“I think the best way, sometimes to deal with things of that nature that have so much gravitas is to come at it sideways,” he told me, saying that making people laugh can open up conversations that might not be possible otherwise. “If you can find a comedic way in, it’s more difficult to do and it’s dangerous to because the subject matter is so fraught with perils and traps. But you can sometimes make even more headway than if you confront it head on.”

And in the scrum afterwards I asked him what it was like playing a role that—in his capacity as father to Roscoe, who may be questioning his gender identity and his sexual orientation— both pushes back against images of woman-headed African-American households and the idea that black communities are homophobic, one of the more unfortunate and difficult political memes of the last few years.

“It’s a real unconventional take on all of those sorts of tropes,” he told me. “Is even there another show on television with a black male lead? Anywhere? The fact that it even exists and the fact that we get to deal with things in the way we get to deal with them…is a new take, which is crazy in 2012, but it’s kind of a new take on all of that stuff…There’s a moment in one of the episodes where [Roscoe] comes to me and says ‘what do you do when you like a boy and a girl?’ And I’m like ‘I don’t know.’ Marty doesn’t know how to deal with it. He’s not sure what to do. I think if he didn’t have his father in his ear saying’ let him do what he wants to do, he’ll figure it out, he needs room to individuate,’ if he wasn’t giving him all that Jungian psychobabble, he’d be like, ‘like the girl.’…he’s just tying to understand and roll with the punches.”

No one show is going to roll back decades of reluctance to give black characters leading roles in movies and television shows. But Marty, Jeremiah, and Roscoe Kaan are all roles that feel like they’ve been delivered to us from a promising future.

So, Are You There, Chelsea? is not a good television program. It’s yet another show that mistakes raunchiness for meaningful displays of individuality. It saddles Dot-Marie Jones with a deeply embarrassing side gig as a butch lesbian Chelsea (Laura Prepon) meets in prison. The wig Chelsea Handler wears to play Sloane, Chelsea’s sister (of whom Handler said earlier, “everything I’ve been accusing her of my whole life I can now reenact before her eyes”) is deeply unfortunate.

But especially after a fall of awful Asian stereotypes on 2 Broke Girls, I actually thought the one OK spot on Are You There, Chelsea? was Chelsea’s best friend and roommate, Olivia (Ali Wong), who happens to be Korean but doesn’t appear to be solely defined by her ethnic background. Sure, she makes jokes about her ethnicity, but they’re a means of allowing her to defined what role being Korean plays in her life, not of other people defining her by her Koreanness. Olivia snarks about her clothes smelling like kimchi from living at home. And when she and Chelsea talk about Olivia’s striving even though the only jobs available to her as an aspiring journalist are unpaid internships, Olivia deadpans “It’s the American dream. You people made it up.” When Chelsea explains how she and Olivia meant, her memories are of Olivia protecting her from a bully in a nice reversal of passive Asian stereotypes.

Is she perfect? Nah. I don’t really need to hear her ask their new roommate “You’re a virgin? Everywhere?” or talk about how the African-American gentleman she runs into the elevator is the source of her current ladyboner. But that’s part and parcel of the show’s trying-too-hardness, rather than big flaws in her character.

Parks and Recreation comes back tonight*, and to celebrate, I’ve got something special! I talked to Nick Offerman at the NBC party about Ron Swanson, feminism, libertarianism, and an upcoming episode of the show he wrote that happens to deal with all those gender issues.

There’s an ongoing conversation about whether manliness is on the run in American pop culture, and I feel like I always end up holding Ron as proof it’s not true. How do you think he fits into current trends in masculinity on television?

Well, I also have felt a dearth in manliness over the years that I’ve been in the business. Men, action heroes have shaved chests now. There’s been a real sort of denuding of the man’s man. And I feel like maybe that’s why people are responding well to Ron because he’s the plumber that we all know and love. The guy who goes back one too many times at Thanksgiving to load up his plate.

But Ron also likes strong women. Do you think the character suggests that there’s no contradiction between being masculinity and feminism?

Well, yeah. There’s an episode coming up that I actually wrote that kind of touches on that. With modern feminism, we’re sort of seeing the backlash of feminism where all these powerful women are in charge of things and they’re saying, “Oh wait a second, these emasculated guys are not nearly as handy as we were at running a household, so now I’ve got to take care of the kids and be an executive.” And you know, I think Ron, also speaks to that issue because he despises weak women in the exact same way he despises weak men.

So the show’s calling for a gender truce.

Absolutely. The show and Ron, I think, declare that everyone should be allowed to just do their thing and we can all get along and get kissed once in a while.

I live and work in Washington, and I have libertarian friends so I love seeing a libertarian represented on television. Where do you think Ron fits in to the political spectrum?

Well, it’s a good question. I think Ron is a little too cartoony to fit into the real political spectrum. There’s way too much gray area in any political affiliation in modern America. And I think if Ron were really a living, breathing American, he wouldn’t have any time for American politics. He’d probably end up in a cabin in Montana with his guns and just wanting to be left alone, and not wanting to hear about, not wanting to be bothered to have to think about the political race every four years.

But Ron’s libertarianism also seems undercut by Leslie’s competence and enthusiasm. Do you think Americans would be more enthusiastic about government if they saw more out of it?

I suppose. I think the message is that, and it’s one that we could all really use, that being a good neighbor should come before your politics. No matter how you feel about fiscal issues, you should still be willing to lend a hand so we can all exist in a community and have a happy life.

*My recap will be up tomorrow, though a bit late: I’m seeing Veep and Game Change tonight, so I’ll have to catch the episode after the HBO panels in the morning.

By Kate Cox

When Alyssa graciously invited me to hang out in her space again (thanks!), I happily accepted, and then reached out to some wise friends for topic ideas.

A non-gaming friend who is regular reader of my blog said to me, “I would really love to know your thoughts on gamer culture.”

At the very moment she was writing her message to me, the internet was exploding with the story of one man who was very, very bad at his PR job, one customer who pushed buttons, and one webcomic author who decided vengeance was a tool he enjoyed employing. The Paul Christoforo situation rapidly went from bad to worse and by the next morning, a true mob mentality had taken over in many forums.

There I sat, horrified and depressed. When the entitled mob begins to feel wronged, when the legions of Reddit and the armies of Twitter mobilize… bad things happen. Home addresses get published, threats get made, and lives get ruined. I firmly believe that two wrongs don’t make a right, and siccing hundreds, thousands, or even millions of angry nerds on one bully was surely an uncalled-for thrashing.

Is this disaster, I despaired, what gamer culture really looks like?

But then, a couple of days later, Child’s Play announced their 2011 fundraising total. Child’s Play is a charity that the very same webcomic authors started, back in 2003. The core idea? “Gamers give back.” Players and now publishers come together to donate toys and games to children’s hospitals: the grown-ups are reaching out to kids in need. Every year, these efforts bring in more charity than the year before, to more hospitals nationwide and around the world. And every year, I’ve seen more and more gamers and more and more huge companies leap onboard to do good for others.

2011’s total was over $3.5 million.

That’s more like it. Charity! Giving! Maybe this could be what gamer culture really looks like?

But of course, the reality is neither so bleak nor so noble. I am forced to concede a point. Emily, this is what gamer culture really looks like:

Because the internet is for cats. (Avenue Q notwithstanding.) And because this cat is named Guybrush Ulysses Threepwood Cox (usually called “Cat” or “Damncat”). That’s gamer culture, right there and purring: a permanent, nerdy reference in our house.

It’s like the rest of geek culture, really: mixed good and bad, but enthusiastic and devoted either way.

At Showtime’s panel for Shameless this morning, John Wells (who gets his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame today) suggested that the aperture of network television has narrowed such that he wouldn’t be able to sell some of his most popular shows today.

“It took us a long time to sell West Wing and it would be increasingly impossible now. You would take it to cable,” he said, suggesting that he also wouldn’t have been able to get China Beach on the air. “We never would have been able to sell ER…I can tell you that even at the time it was turned down by all the major broadcast networks twice before we actually got NBC to make it.” But he suggested that the combination of a return to profitability and the rise of smart, sophisticated storytelling on cable might pry the doors open again. “I’m hopeful about the network business,” he said. “They’re starting to see the competition for high-end programming, programming that’s going to be watched by a more sophisticated and affluent audience, that they have to compete with cable. I find it to be a very good time to have ideas that are different.”

He also suggested that even if the Supreme Court declined to overturn the rules against indecency on network television, the key to pushing the boundaries was to provide clear context and emotional basis for both events and language, pointing to ER as an example.

“We spent a lot of time intentionally pushing against where we knew the fence to be because we knew the audience was ready for more than what the government was prepared for us to do,” Wells said. “The audience is always very prepared to accept something that is done within the context…It was an episode I wrote and directed in which Anthony Edwards was dying and fell out of bed and started screaming ‘Shit!’ because he was so frustrated with where he was in his life…We didn’t get a single letter because the context, people understood.” In a different philosophy than that laid out by CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler and 2 Broke Girls executive producer Michael Patrick King yesterday, Wells questioned indecency for indecency’s sake. “Is the audience going to understand what we’re trying to get at, or are we trying to inflame or do the thing that you do in elementary school where you wave around words and try to get a reaction?” he asked.

Wells also spent some time discussing the role of Ian Gallagher, the young gay character on Showtime who is not just romantically, but sexually active. He said that Cameron Monaghan’s turning 18 meant that Shameless would be able to be somewhat more explicit about Ian’s sex life without having to worry about violating federal child pornography laws. And Wells said he’d been touched by how the story had resonated with young gay teenagers who told him and Monaghan that they appreciated how the show reflects the complexity of their lives. Especially given the role of Roscoe on Showtime, it will be interesting to see if the network is digging in as a grittier alternative to shows like Glee, which focus more on the emotional lives of teenagers than the details of their sex lives. That’s not to say that you’ve got to be explicit to explore emotion, but it’s true that sometimes the details of sexual experience (or of exploring gender identity) do create specific emotional reactions, and it’s nice to have a commitment to exploring that.

By Rowan Kaiser

I must admit that I have some wariness about talking about the better female characters of the past for the purposes of laying the groundwork for female characters to compete with the masculine anti-heroes who dominated discussion of “quality television.” It’s not that I don’t want there to be more, better women in important roles on television, but instead that I don’t think female characters have lagged all that far behind men on the best shows of recent years.

However, I do think that the way we define “quality television” indicates a bias that leads towards critics thinking that those masculinity-examining shows are the best. They’re all serious dramas, they’re all on cable, and they’re all (with the exception, perhaps, of The Sopranos) in more traditionally acceptable genres. If we expand out definition of quality to include shows with strong comic elements, shows that aired on networks or netlets, and shows occur in less highbrow settings, things look a lot different. Generally speaking, we can many more fantastic, quality televisions series that feature stronger women than The Wire, etc. Specifically, that criteria opens the door for Veronica Mars to be considered one of the great series of television.

After all, Veronica Mars aired on UPN, a network not historically known for its critical acclaim. It balanced drama with humor, with plenty of quipping as well as some ridiculous premises. And it was about a private investigator who worked in a high school, navigating social strata and relationship drama. It’s also one of the most intelligent shows I’ve ever seen, with one of the strongest protagonists, male or female, in television history.

Three things make Veronica Mars a stellar character: she’s strong enough to be respected, she’s vulnerable enough to be human, and she’s played marvelously by Kristen Bell. Certainly, the show’s writing and supporting cast add to it, but it’s Veronica’s show, even beyond what you might expect from her name adorning the title.
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The bridge is yours.

-Tim Tebow: powered by elves.

-Poor, sad Ben Stein.

-Teaching Fight Club.

-I am also pretty excited about these sci-fi and fantasy movies.

-Branding AIDS.

-I just really love listening to Jay-Z rap about how much he loves the women in his family:

I sat in on a bit of Alan Sepinwall’s interview with Cougar Town co-creator Kevin Biegel, and I’m particularly intrigued by the idea that what the small, scrappy shows are doing to fight for audiences will be what everyone has to do in the future:

TV now doesn’t just exist from the writers room to the television. People like to be engaged. People like to know that you care about them caring. I really believe that…If I can do these little events and people actually respond to it and feel like they’re getting something special, I think that’s awesome. And I don’t understand why other TV shows don’t do this. And I literally think – I don’t care if I get in trouble; fuck it – there’s a laziness on the part of a lot of TV writers, where they think, “My job is just to write the show and produce the show and that’s it.” Bill and I are on the same page: “Fuck that. That’s not true. Your job now is to go out there and sell the show and tell the fans how much you appreciate them.” Because one little spark – like Katniss in “Catching Fire,” book 2 – can really start a whole big thing…What’s the alternative? I sit on my own in the writers room and the show goes away? That’s so lame! That’s so defeatist! That’s so 1980s, “Okay, we’ll just write a shitty sitcom, and people will like that.” Fuck that! That’s not the world anymore.

In the ABC executive session yesterday, Paul Lee joked that he loves Cougar Town‘s Bill Lawrence because he’s a “pirate,” when it comes to roguishly and independently promoting his shows and “I used to be a pirate when I was a showrunner and now I’m the Navy.” I think the interesting question will be whether all shows, hits and scrappy underdogs alike, have to do this, or whether the willingness of creative folks like Lawrence, and Biegel, and Dan Harmon on Community to fight for their shows mean networks will simply be willing to do less work to support them.

I’m super-excited to be judging the quarterfinal round of this year’s Tournament of Books at The Morning News. For those of you who haven’t done it before, 16 critics read through 16 of the top books published in the previous year, and they advance through the brackets in concert with the NCAA season. So if you’re looking for a good read, check out State of Wonder, The Sisters Brothers, Swamplandia!, The Cat’s Table, The Marriage Plot, Green Girl, The Art of Fielding, or Open City. Their fates will be in my hands!

“I’m fat. That’s not lost on us…Everyone on TV’s 78 and a half pounds, so we have to address it.” -Billy Gardell