Alan Sepinwall of The Star-Ledger writes about his recent tour of the “Dollhouse” set — guided by the creator Joss Whedon himself — in anticipation of the start of Season 2 in late September.

The articles gives us a lot to look forward to — as well as a reminder to catch the last unaired episode of Season 1 — which is critical to understanding Whedon’s expansion of the show’s mythology in the upcoming season.

But what’s most interesting is the way Whedon articulates the politics of art in the Age of Image:

Whedon talked about how he and Fox both felt the show would be more accessible if they focused on standalone episodes built around Echo’s missions. But both he and the network realized after a while that those simply weren’t working, and that the audience was more invested in the ongoing stories of the characters in the Dollhouse.

“(Fox) saw that when we liked it (ongoing storylines), everybody liked it, so they liked it. So they stopped going, ‘Let’s try this, let’s try that.’ They said, ‘You do your thing, it’s not for everyone, but the people who love it, love it hard.’”

If Fox can come to see the value of a serial story, we might be getting somewhere.

From the files of What Were They Thinking comes news that “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” may appear again on movie screens, but without Joss Whedon at the helm and without the television series’ favorite characters. Borys Kit at The Hollywood Reporter writes:

“Buffy” creator Joss Whedon isn’t involved and it’s not set up at a studio, but Roy Lee and Doug Davison of Vertigo Entertainment are working with original movie director Fran Rubel Kuzui and her husband, Kaz Kuzui, on what is being labeled a remake or relaunch, but not a sequel or prequel.

While Whedon is the person most associated with “Buffy,” Kuzui and her Kuzui Enterprises have held onto the rights since the beginning, when she discovered the “Buffy” script from then-unknown Whedon. She developed the script while her husband put together the financing to make the 1992 movie, which was released by Fox. [...]

The new “Buffy” film, however, would have no connection to the TV series, nor would it use popular supporting characters like Angel, Willow, Xander or Spike. Vertigo and Kuzui are looking to restart the story line without trampling on the beloved existing universe created by Whedon, putting the parties in a similar situation faced by Paramount, J.J. Abrams and his crew when relaunching “Star Trek.”

Linda Holmes explains at NPR’s Monkey See blog why this Very Bad Idea actually has little in common with the newest “Star Trek”:

It’s one thing to use a high-powered guy like J.J. Abrams to reboot Star Trek

daybreakers dvd

more than 40 years after the original show debuted on television, almost 18 years after Gene Roddenberry’s death in 1991.

It’s entirely another to try to do a Whedon-less Buffy movie only 17 years after the original Buffy movie and only six years after the end of the beloved TV series, while Whedon is still not only alive, and not only still making wildly popular projects like 2008’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, but still quite possibly the most cultishly revered showrunner in television.

In response to the news, Whedon said, “I hope it’s cool.”

Meanwhile, in other Whedon-related developments, “Dollhouse” will premiere in Australia on June 9 on cable channel Fox8. The promotional trailer, shown here, highlights the underlying conspiracy and intrigue — a big step up from Fox advertising in the States that focused on the selling of Eliza Dushku.

David Simon, creator of “The Wire,” has been making the rounds lately — and I couldn’t be more pleased.

While I am eagerly awaiting his new TV series set in post-Katrina New Orleans (appearing on HBO in 2010 – already re-upped for a full season!), he wasn’t doing the usual promo cameos. It’s a little early for that, anyway.

No, Simon is testifying in front of Congress — and chatting up the likes of Bill Maher — about the future of journalism and the destructive effects of the drug war, both topics he has experienced and explored in depth in his career as a reporter and in shows like “The Wire.”

Simon’s appearance on Bill Maher shows how comfortable he is walking the line between the entertainment and political worlds. Maher’s show is a strange hybrid of those worlds, but it rarely reaches the level of clarity and insight that Simon provided:

His testimony before the Senate was more direct and elaborate, and its focus was exclusively on the state of journalism. John Nichols, who has written about the demise of newspapers himself, has a great critical review of the hearing over at The Nation — and while he laments that no solution to the journalistic void is clear, Simon seems to be the most lucid deconstructor of why we are the in current mess. I look forward to listening to Simon in whatever medium he chooses.

In an article published in PopPolitics magazine, Sarah Yahm ponders why the reincarnated “Battlestar Galactica,” a show that consistently raised complex and challenging questions over its four seasons, decided to fall back on pat answers in its devastatingly reactionary series finale:

Frederick Jameson, the Marxist literary critic, argues that pop culture consistently provides us with interesting rich alternatives to the status quo and then in the end rejects them. We can escape into alternate (even at times radical) possibilities without actually having to challenge our own cultural system. Because of pop culture, we can go to Oz while simultaneously renewing our commitment to not leave Kansas.

I know I wasn’t alone in hoping that “Battlestar Galactica” was going to break that pattern. Throughout the past four seasons, “Battlestar” has consistently raised rigorous questions about the nature of humanity, the role of government, the importance of community, the definition of family, and the correct relationship between humans and technology.

I had faith the writers were going to resolve these questions in the only way possible — by not resolving them at all and instead forcing us to continue to grapple with them alone. They weren’t going to raise questions and then give us pat answers, I insisted. Frederick Jameson was one smart cookie but he was wrong about “Battlestar.”

But sadly, Jameson was right once again, because Ron Moore gave us some really pat answers. He retreated to an old but faithful amalgam –- the purity of nature, monotheism, the sanctity of traditional hetero families, and, yikes, colonial expansion

Continue reading “Is Lee Adama the New (And Not So Improved) Thomas Jefferson?  Thoughts on the Battlestar Galactica Finale.”

The 15-year run of “ER” ended last week, sparking a number of reflections and retrospectives.

Since I cover health, I especially appreciated this analysis of the NBC series’ influence on the representation of health care in television programming.

It was back in 1996 when The New England Journal of Medicine first took “ER” and other medical shows to task for performing CPR much more frequently — and with much greater success — than doctors do off-screen.

Within a year, the show’s writers, which then included an emergency room physician and a pediatrician who was the show’s co-producer, crafted a scene in which Dr. John Carter (Noah Wyle) broke an elderly man’s rib while performing CPR.

How off were the numbers? A 2006 New Yorker article noted that in reality one in 100 patients undergo CPR or some other resuscitation procedure. Just 15 percent, at most, are successful. On television shows, the success rate is closer to two-thirds.

“ER” has also been the medium for messages about HIV transmission, breast cancer, adoption, domestic violence, elder abuse and drug use. One of the final episode story lines revolved around a teenager who drank too much vodka at a friends’ home, providing Dr. Tony Gates (John Stamos) the opportunity to lecture that only 6 ounces of alcohol can be dangerous.

Adding another layer of real-life complication, the drinking was sanctioned by the friends’ parents. That now translates to “call the police.”

Writing in the Times, Pam Belluck describes the show’s powerful legacy as “a give-and-take between the world of entertainment and the world of medicine that has become stronger and more deeply intertwined with each year that ‘ER’ has been on the air, carrying over to other medical shows.”

One of the first hospital dramas to take its medicine seriously — as the engine rather than the backdrop for its scripts — “ER” caught the attention of the medical establishment as a source of health information for millions of Americans. A 2002 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that viewers’ knowledge of emergency contraception and the human papilloma virus increased after watching episodes that mentioned those subjects; a third of them said the show helped them make health care choices. One in five doctors in a 2001 survey said patients asked about diseases or treatments they saw on shows like “ER.”

Today, a small industry has grown up to influence writers and producers. A program called Hollywood, Health and Society gets money from health organizations and federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to arrange meetings where doctors urge medical-show writers to highlight certain diseases or issues.

“We coach our experts in telling writers real stories of real people,” said Sandra de Castro Buffington, director of the program, part of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication.

Interestingly, the Gates Foundation, best known for funding global health projects, has also helped shape story lines on “ER,” among other shows. Issues include HIV prevention, surgical safety and the spread of infectious diseases.

What I also find interesting about the “ER” postmortem is the shift in attitudes toward doctors. During the days of “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” physicians were revered for their medical skill and bedside manner. The American Medical Association even gave its approval to some shows, but the approval had less to do with medical accuracy and more with how the doctors were portrayed.

[A side note: For a terrific discussion about how "Marcus Welby, M.D." reflected its time period, read this article by Joseph Turow at the Museum of Broadcast Communications. Turow recounts how it addressed medical topics, such as sexually transmitted infections, that up until then TV censors didn't allow. The show was memorable in other ways: Gay rights activists, in one of their first organized protests against a TV show, criticized an episode about about the rape of a teenager by a male teacher. And women's rights activists complained that "Marcus Welby's control over the lives of his patients (many of whom were women) represented the worst aspects of male physician' paternalistic attitudes."]

“These were sort of adoring doctor dramas,” John D. Lantos, a bioethicist at the University of Chicago, told the Times. “My sense is that the medicine was irrelevant and unsophisticated — someone’s lying in a room that looks like your living room and there’s an IV running, the universal symbol that something medical is going on.”

That certainly wouldn’t fly today, when story lines can be fact-checked instantly and the accuracy of medical jargon and physical details is as important as character development.

Speaking of character development, “ER” was one of the few shows that featured strong, complex female characters almost every season. Most everyone I know stopped watching “ER” years ago, but I faithfully TiVo’d each week. I’ll miss the familiar characters, as well as the newer ones, including Dr. Cate Banfield (Angela Bassett, who deserved more air time), and the ones we’ll never get to know, like Dr. Julia Wise (Alexis Bledel); I know, I know — I can’t believe either actress didn’t join sooner.

In recent years my favorite was Dr. Neela Rasgotra (Parminder Nagra). Least favorite: Nurse Samantha Taggart (Linda Cardellini — who had much better scenes as highschooler Lindsay Weir).

But mostly I’ll miss a show that indulged my health curiosity (and anxieties) and made the often arcane and intimidating world of medicine accessible, chiefly by showing that in the end, the characters that compose that world are as human as we are.

Plus: If you’re suffering from “ER” withdrawal, you may want to check out “Doctor’s Diaries.” The NOVA program, which broadcasts on PBS, has been following seven former Harvard medical school students for more than two decades. Pauline Chen has more. (Or you can try to convince me to watch “Grey’s Anatomy.”)

After a few fits and starts, according to Michelle Orange of the New York Times, HBO’s series “In Treatment” begins its second season tonight.  We are back in the life of Paul Weston, a psychoanalyst played by Gabriel Byrne, and his patients, whose individual sessions occupy each 30-minute episode.

You might never have heard of it (since HBO didn’t roll it out with the fanfare of its other big dramas), you might have balked at the unique scheduling of its first season (30-minute episodes every weekday night for nine weeks), or you might have gave it a shot but gave up rather quickly because you didn’t find many of the patients very appealing.

Well, I just wanted to write a quick note to tell you all that you missed some amazing TV — and it’s well worth catching up or at least giving the short, more palatably-scheduled second season a try.  With many of the same writers introducing us to new, but equally complicated characters, the second season doesn’t appear to be headed for a sophomore slump.

The ultimate compliment I can give the show is that, as my partner and I watched it, we felt that we were going through therapy ourselves — or at least we were very involved flies-on-the-wall.

That’s a mixed bag, of course.   Very few shows, no matter how thought-provoking, have asked its audience to explore such personal emotional depths on a nightly basis.  At the same time, of course, I’m of the mind that we can all use some therapy.  Especially at these rates.

The unique weeknight scheduling of season one was an artistic risk — but a big success, in my mind.  It allowed the audience to get into the rhythm of Paul’s life and by extension, the day-to-day struggles to confront his and his patients’ demons.

And, in the end, however personal I make those struggles, there is a distance between audience and characters.  In some ways, the characters represent extremes — with each case by the end revealing a fairly clear neurosis.

But at its best, the characters were also devastatingly ordinary. And I get the sense that realism turned many people off.  Some characters were arrogant, some were blowhards, some were self-pitying, etc.

Of course, in the nakedness of therapy, I’d venture to say we’d all be pretty difficult to watch.

It feels like Christmas morning for sci-fans tonight. Guests are arriving in a few minutes for our Battlestar Galactica finale party. They are bringing their own concoction of neon green ambrosia.

Okay, we’ve just entered a deeper concentric circle of geekdom, didn’t we?

Well, like Christmas, we will soon be experiencing withdrawal, a wave of sadness as we realize the party is over.  But we’ll also be left with a great gift — a sci-fi series that, at its best, had the guts to reflect, on an individual and geo-political level, the complications of life.

We’ve talked a lot about Battlestar over the years at PopPolitics– especially the power of its allegory of a post 9/11 world order.  No need to rehash it here.

But it’s nice to hear that this past Tuesday there was a Battlestar summit of sorts at the UN.  In fact, it’s stunning.  Rarely does a complex allegory like Battlestar have to opportunity to make such a direct impact on its time.

Mary McDonnell, who plays President Laura Roslin, explained the show’s simple but profound goal:

“People who are taking these actions — that are unacceptable — are sometimes in positions where they don’t see the solution,” she says. “The experience of that is what we wanted to expose to our audience.”

McDonnell hopes that dramatizing the way decent leaders can come to wrong decisions intough situations will create more of a dialogue about other ways to use power.

Writing for NPR, Lara Pelligrinelli then wonders what that dialogue might look like:

Although debates about terrorism and human rights have receded to the background for many Americans, Battlestar Galactica may help the U.N. meet the challenge of reaching a broader audience.

Naimah Hakim, a 16-year-old sophomore from Westchester, was one of a hundred New York high-school students in attendance. To her, the show brings home issues in a way that most of her classroom lessons don’t.

“When you’re watching the show, you don’t question why you have to learn it,” she says. “You understand because it’s something that hits the nail on the head.”

Funny how a multi-layered allegory can help us see so clearly.

I’m still watching Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse,” and I’m becoming mildly intrigued. Television reviewers had only been given episodes 1-3 when they made their initial, mixed at best, reviews of the series. I wanted to wait until I got through episode 4 before I starting making any pronouncements.

So now here’s a tepid one. The story has great potential as an allegory for women struggling for agency in a increasingly subtle patriarchal world, but it is fulfilling that potential at a snail’s pace. And the feminist themes are being continually undermined by the marketing of its star, Eliza Dushku, who recently posed on the cover of Maxim.

I don’t agree with Nancy Franklin of The New Yorker that the “primary qualification Dushku brings to the part is that she graduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Cleavage.” In fact, I could easily see her growing into the role or the role growing into her.

Like Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy, Echo, Dushku’s character, is valued by others because of her stereotypical beauty. It’s an explicit part of her skill set, as the operators of the Dollhouse put it. Like Buffy, I’m confident (and I can begin to see the seeds being planted) that Whedon is planning to play off of the stereotype and assumptions — and ultimately play against them.

Franklin misses the point when she continues to say, “In terms of gender studies, it is notable that Dushku’s demeanor as a zombie is much the same as the demeanor many actresses her age resort to when trying to project an image of themselves as unthreatening and ‘feminine’: a slouchy walk, a bobbly head, and ever-parted lips.”

She is that way because the operators of the Dollhouse — and their clients — want her that way. By exposing this gendered system, the show can — potentially — undermine it. But Whedon is clearly walking a fine line here, and when The New Yorker doesn’t get it, you might need to make access to the allegory a bit clearer.

And you might want to have a word with Fox and Dushku herself about the messages they are sending off-screen (or at least outside the narrative of the show).

(more…)

Part of me rolls my eyes, and another part of me cringes when I contemplate the premise of “Dollhouse,” Joss Whedon’s new television series for Fox which premieres tonight. Joy Press at Salon sums up the premise of the show:

It stars former “Buffy” star Eliza Dushku as Echo, a young woman — known on the show as an “Active” or “Doll” — sapped of her memories and free will, who is sold to rich clients to fulfill their needs and fantasies. For each assignment she is imprinted with a fresh personality, complete with new skills, intelligence and neurological information; sometimes she morphs into a sexbot, other times she takes on the life of a highly methodical negotiator. Echo and her fellow Actives live in a giant Zen loft called the Dollhouse, blissfully unaware that they are being remote controlled by a shadowy organization.

It sounds like a science-fiction extension of Law and Order: SVU. Do we really need another show where women = victim — and she looks sexy while she’s being exploited/manipulated/killed?

Even if we see this new show’s lineage more in shows like Charlie’s Angels or Alias, that doesn’t feel any more promising. In some ways, these types of shows are more insidious, purporting to revel in female empowerment and agency while really just exposing how television executives can’t imagine a powerful woman who isn’t a cartoonish, supermodel superhero.

Fox’s marketing of “Dollhouse,” moreover, seems to revel in all of my fears. In combination with their “Terminator” series, Fox decides to evoke 70s sexploitation films as it points out that “Friday’s Got Grindhouse,” starring the “Dames of Deception.” It might be a light-hearted parody, but the satire has no point other than to emphasize that you can “Double Your Pleasure” with women who are “Hotter than Hades.”

In this context, it should come as no surprise that …. I cannot wait to watch the “Dollhouse” premiere.

There’s a new Joss Whedon show on television! Hallelujah!

If you are not familiar with Whedon’s work already, here’s just two things you need to know:

(more…)

One of the most fascinating angles to the Rod Blagojevich saga is the reaction of mental health professionals to everyone calling him “crazy” or “cuckoo.” As the Chicago Tribune reports:

The language offends many and blames mental illness for alleged criminal behavior, they say.

Ann Raney, CEO for Turning Point Behavioral Health Care Center in Skokie, said the center’s board members were so disturbed about the name-calling that they devoted much of a meeting last week to talking about it.

“We need to be clear that unethical or confusing or bad behavior should never be construed as mental illness,” Raney said.

On the contrary, statistics show that people suffering from mental illness are more likely to be victims of crime than they are to be perpetrators, said Fran McClain, program director for the Josselyn Center for Mental Health in Northfield.

Psychologists interviewed by State Journal-Register of Springfield, IL, want to make it clear that Blagojevich might very well have a “narcissistic personality disorder,” but that does not make him crazy.

While Blagojevich’s outrageousness might be funny to some — it’s clearly the greatest thing to hit the cable news networks since the election — the reaction gives me pause. 

Although the articles don’t explicity note it, it seems obvious that these mental health professionals are trying to fight stereotypes and misconceptions of mental illness that pervade our media.  Television dramas and films rarely treat the full complexities of mental illness, choosing to focus the most extreme and sensational cases rather than the disorders that many “regular” people live with everyday. 

That means — more than anything else – a focus on violence and aggressive, criminal behavior of people with mental illness.  It’s the basis, after all, of more than one horror movie franchise.

I have Tivo’d “Wonderland” — a show about the daily workings of a psychiatric ward, which DirecTV is reviving after an aborted run on ABC a few years back.  I’ll report back if I find anything ground-breaking, but DirecTV’s heavy promotional campaign, which has inundated subscribers for months, does little to change any minds.  The chairs are flying, the patients are screaming … and I imagine real doctors and mental health advocates sighing yet again.

Lately, we have been inundated with science fiction narratives that have been exploring our collective love/fear obsession with technology in a new light. “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” “Battlestar Galactica,” and (a little ways back) “The Matrix” trilogy of films all envision a world in which humans and machines — as distinct races — attempt to find a harmonious balance.

While sf has long pondered humanity’s relationship to robots or cyborgs — and has offered individual cases in which they win our hearts (C-3PO or R2D2, anyone?) — it rarely has dwelled on machines as a distinct race, and, when it has, they are the very image of horror: a Cold War nightmare, crushing human individuality and freedom (the Borg, anyone?)

One great exception might be the inventor of the modern robot narrative — Isaac Asimov. The more he wrote about robots — and he wrote a lot — the more complex they became. But especially in his early short stories, such as “The Bicentennial Man,” the sympathetic, feeling robots were the exception.

The most thought-provoking and engaging of the new narratives is the “Terminator” TV series, which just ended its second season last week. I’m a big fan of “Battlestar,” and I still think the first “Matrix” was close to cinematic perfection. But only “Terminator” has built a truly diverse community of machines — with multiple agendas, multiple desires — without resorting to some type of spiritual mythology to explain their existence.

Unlike “Battlestar,” in particular, which kept the origins of the “cylons” a mystery to the very end and hinted that their evolution was rather human-like, “Terminator” builds its robot world — its history, its rules — as a convincing extension of reality.

“Terminator,” especially as it began to hit its stride at the end of its first season, just keeps adding layers to the relationships between humans and machines, relentlessly challenging us to negotiate our preconceived notions about the nature of humanity and intelligence. The allegorical resonance of the narrative keeps the mind humming.

It’s really good. I mean, really good.

(more…)

There has been lots of discussion recently on the NFL television blackout policy that prohibits televising home games in the home market unless the game sells out 72 hours prior to kickoff.

Some, including Richard Sandomir of The New York Times, have suggested that in this time of economic crisis, when it appears that the number of sellouts will drop, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell should end or suspend the blackout policy.

This is a reasonable sentiment, although one might question if offering more blood and circuses offers a viable solution to America’s economic problems, or if it suggests that the NFL should serve as one more version of the opium of the masses.

Rather than simply offering a temporary respite for the unemployed, now might be a good time to look at the history of the blackout, with a view toward ending this economic privilege enjoyed by the NFL by virtue of a combination of court decisions and legislation.

The relationship between the NFL and television goes back to the early days of television following World War II. A number of teams developed their own television arrangements, and some even had their own regional networks. These spotty operations came and went with uneven results.

The first major experiment with television came in Los Angeles, where the Rams allowed local television to broadcast all of its 1950 home games. Game sponsor Admiral Television agreed to make up any losses in home ticket sales. When attendance dropped by 110,000 from the previous year, Admiral had to produce $307,000. The following year, the Rams televised road games only; as a result, home attendance bounced back to 1949 levels.

With this graphic negative demonstration of the power of television, Commissioner Bert Bell moved in 1952 to centralize control of television contracts — televising games on a regional basis, while instituting a blackout of all home games within 75 miles of the team city. The Justice Department moved immediately to challenge the NFL’s actions. However, in 1953, a federal district judge ruled that the NFL constituted a “unique kind of business,” in which classic economic competition would destroy that business. The court upheld the blackout policy of home games and the territorial blackout which made the regional network solution possible.

At the beginning of the 1960s, under the leadership of the new commissioner, Pete Rozelle, the NFL, rather than individual teams, signed an exclusive TV contract with CBS. The court ruled that the pooling of contracts was an anti-trust violation. With a loss in the courts, the NFL turned to the executive and legislative branches for relief. With the strong support of the Kennedy White House and Congress, the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 was passed, authorizing home game blackouts as well as a league-wide television contract. This triumph of the NFL cartel led to even stronger advocacy of the free enterprise system by NFL owners.

This is where the policy stood through the 1960s and the years of warfare with the AFL, which, as a matter of interest, did not have a blackout rule on its telecasts. With the growing popularity of professional football, the merger of the two leagues, and the coming of the Super Bowl, the blackout would again become an issue. Repeated NFL game sellouts led to frustration for home fans who had to travel 75 miles to see their home team play at home — on a television away from home.

(more…)

I am one of those who doesn’t think that the award-winning film “American Beauty,” written by Alan Ball, is that good of a movie. I found it a little too obvious and pedantic in its attempt to unearth the not-so-quiet desperation in late 1990s suburban America. It didn’t move me.

Then came Alan Ball’s next project — “Six Feet Under” — and, putting aside a few lulls in the middle of its run of five seasons, I consider it one of the highlights of 21st-century American culture. Following in the trailblazing path of “The Sopranos,” it used the long-form nature of a television series to develop the subtleties and complexities of its characters with a literary patience and depth.

Alan Ball’s latest project premieres tonight, and from most accounts, “True Blood,” the fantastical story of vampires fighting for rights and recognition in the modern world (based on the Southern Vampire Mysteries of Charlaine Harris), falls somewhere in between the glibness and the richness of his two previous major works.

But even a blatant attempt at political allegory is refreshing, since it signals a thematic ambition that has been missing of late — with a few exceptions — on the small screen.

I’ve written plenty about the power of allegory, from Narnia to “Battlestar Galactica,” from “The Wire” to “Mad Men.” And, at least according to Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times, “True Blood” should be giving us plenty of “pop politics” to talk about:

(more…)

The Olympics in Beijing has been a great disappointment. No one has collapsed into a coughing fit from the air pollution — all but a certainty from the reports leading up to the opening of what are so quaintly termed “the games.” The American cyclists who arrived in the Beijing Airport wearing face masks seemed to have made it through the opening ceremonies without contracting “black lung” or suffering a terminal case of “ring around the collar.” I feel I have been let down yet again by the press.

Not all has gone well, however. In what no one seems to have noticed as a protest gesture that dwarfs Carlos and Smith’s now legendary salute, the women’s beach volleyball venue was the scene of a protest for the ages. The American, Misty May-Treanor bent over with her back to President Bush.

This certainly symbolically summed up what the American people have been doing for the past seven years of the Bush administration. Oddly, there was no comment from the press, no IOC or USOC officials rushed in to put Misty on a plane out of Beijing in disgrace. You can bet that Avery Brundidge would have understood this gesture, and punishment would have been swift and harsh.

Indeed, little Bobby Costas seemed to find the entire episode amusing. Context apparently is everything.

The nightly Michael Phelps show was quite impressive and nearly devoid of any controversy. Phelps’ display in the pool was great television, great sport, and just the sort of thing that brings people to their television sets in big numbers. It will also mean big money for Phelps. He should have been designated an NBC vice-president for programming, rather than being crowned with the understated title of “greatest athlete of all-time.”

While Phelps was dominating prime time, NBC also offered a seemingly endless parade of gymnastics events. The men’s and women’s competitions both provided high quality performances from the U.S. and Chinese participants, and perhaps also from many others nations not deemed worthy of prime time by NBC. In fairness to NBC, they did manage to work in a stray Russian or Romanian now and again.

(more…)

How thrilled are you that political commentator Rachel Maddow is replacing Dan Abrams in the 9 p.m. slot on MSNBC?

“MSNBC has put heavy emphasis this year on presidential election coverage (it has given itself the tag line “The Place for Politics”), and it has turned to Ms. Maddow frequently both as a guest and as a substitute for its most popular host, Keith Olbermann,” writes Bill Carter in The New York Times. “Mr. Olbermann’s emergence as the signature personality on MSNBC has led to its unofficial rebranding as the liberal alternative to Fox News, which is dominated by conservative hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.”

In a story published in The Nation this month about Maddow’s unlikely career path, Rebecca Traister writes:

What’s remarkable about Maddow’s ascension is not its velocity — Hurricane Katrina made Anderson Cooper in less than a week — but the shifts in media it may demarcate. Maddow is one of the few left-liberal women to bust open the world of TV punditry, which has made icons of right-wing commentators like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. Unlike her beautiful, bilious conservative female counterparts or the cocksure boys-on-the-bus analysts, however, Maddow didn’t get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season’s discovery isn’t a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a PhD Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist.

All of which raises a crucial question: does Maddow’s unlikely success, reliant on her ability to defy cliché and categorization at every turn, signal a move in punditry away from the thuggish and the angry and toward the lucid and sophisticated? Or has her powerful charisma and canny career management allowed her to break the rules — without actually breaking a mold?

Plus: We also learn of a new public television show to focus on — wait for it — world news …