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Like network TV, I'll be taking a short break until January. Happy Holidays, everyone!

He's ba-a-a-ck!! And I am so excited!!

I first heard about the triumphant return of Joss Whedon (who, in case you're less inclined to worship at the altar of geekdom and are more prone to tune me out periodically, created Buffy) to Fox a few months ago, but I missed this absolute gem forwarded to me by my friend over at Sickpimpin'.

http://www.motherjones.com/arts/qa/2008/11/media-jones-interview-inside-the-dollhouse.html

Because I really needed more reasons to love Joss Whedon.

I sure hope Dollhouse survives the Fox guillotine.

Feminizing the Law and Order Warhorse

Starring long term in Law and Order or one of its spin-offs has long been a sure route to becoming a B-list celebrity: you’re recognizable, you do commercials, you might even get some bit parts in bad movies. SVU’s Mariska Hargitay, who plays Detective Olivia Benson, epitomizes the Law and Order brand of success. A periodic spokeswoman for various campaigns and cover for women’s magazines, she’s even won a Golden Globe.

I’ve often thought that SVU is worth just a bit more than your usual cop drama for the way it compassionately shines light on the uniquely heinous nature of sexual violence, which most of us would like to forget about. And it doesn’t appear to just be an opportunity for fame for Hargitay, who is the founder and president of The Joyful Heart Foundation, a non-profit that aides victims of rape.

This season, which features Olivia’s post-sexual assault perspective on the job she has performed for seven years, is proving that even the most formulaic television dramas (of which Law and Order is perhaps the epitome) can surprise and impress us. Dick Wolf and his supporting writers seem to have finally realized the limits of the stoic, tough character of Olivia’s partner Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni, who plays a great emotionally stunted meathead and little else) and placed him squarely in the background for the majority of the episodes. Lately it has been Detective Tutuola (Ice-T) accompanying Olivia, who is at least written as a less verbose limited range character. The writing finally reflects what has been true for years: Mariska Hargitay carries the show.

Now that Detective Benson is a victim herself, the dynamic between the victims and the police has changed considerably, highlighting the ways that the violence and dominance of sexual assault can be replicated in its very prosecution. “Smut,” aired on December 9, raises this complication in the form of victims drugged to prevent their memory of their assault. In their efforts to stop the rapist, SVU detectives wind up creating victims out of women with no memory of the trauma. Olivia is the only character that pauses to reflect on the unfortunate cruelty of the circumstances… and she’s the one that gets bitch-slapped by one of the new victims when the prosecution goes south.

Rumor has it that Hargitay may be looking to leave the show to spend more time with her new baby. That’s noble, but the show is done when she walks: even the tremendously talented Connie Nielson never really captured the female lead with the range Hargitay shows seemingly effortlessly. And that’s too bad, because it’s one of the only mainstream outlets for promoting awareness of the nightmarish world of sex crimes.

Woman in Crisis

The "quarter-life crisis," occurring a few years after graduation from college, is usually induced by a sense that all the work you put into your degree and the promises it held let you down: you are not making any discernible progress toward landing your dream job (or even a job that you don’t hate), you are drowning under student loan debt, your latest relationship was a flop while all of your friends are getting married and having babies, you’re withdrawing from your friends because you’re so depressed about the state of your life. This phenomenon seems to attack women much more than men—mostly because of the marriage and baby angle, but perhaps also because of this period’s frantic sense that if you debunk “go to college and get your Mrs.” mentality you really have rolled the dice.

This week’s episode of Privileged, November 11’s “All About Insecurities,” captures the confusion and pressure that comes with women’s mid-twenties really well. Megan (JoAnna Garcia), Yale journalism grad-turned-live-in-tutor, is visited by Caryn (Sarah Drew), currently employed as an assistant flunky at an elitist New York magazine that sounds an awful lot like The New York Review. The trip is meant to be a group commiseration session about their respective failures to launch, but Caryn gets a call on the very first night telling her that she’s been promoted to an assistant editor position. Megan then finds herself in that awful position of being happy for a friend but wondering why it couldn’t have been her: The mantra “The race is long and only with myself” doesn’t provide much solace. The reality is that Megan’s most recent project of writing the biography of her employer, cosmetics giant Laurel Limoges (Anne Archer), was pronounced DOA after she uncovered a terrible secret of Laurel’s. Laurel is now making her miserable, the girls have hired a publicist, Megan’s had a fall-out with childhood best friend Charlie (Michael Cassidy), her most recent relationship was a disaster, and she’s still on the outs with her sister. Juxtaposing these life parameters against Caryn’s phone conference with Pulitzer prize winning Michael Chabon, and it looks like Megan has escalated from crisis to nuclear meltdown.

The continuation of the series leaves no other option than for Megan to stay on in the baffling belief that she will somehow be able to write in Palm Beach, an option she sincerely believes more meaningful employment will somehow preclude. It’s a cheap sitcom solution, but in a lot of ways I like that writer Scott Weinger didn’t attempt to put a verbal band-aid on the situation. The drawn out sense of impending doom is the essence of the quarter-life crisis, which makes this “privileged” generation seem just slightly less so.

The show ends with Megan making out with her billionaire neighbor, Will Davis (Brian Hallisay), who used to date her sister Lily (Kristina Apgar). That should make her life less complicated.

Things Fifteen Year Olds Shouldn't Be Able to Do

Taylor Momsen scares me.

Even in Buffy there were the “adult-teens:” high school student characters played by actors in their twenties. Charisma Carpenter was twenty-seven when she started playing the fifteen year-old snob Cordelia; Nicholas Brendon was twenty-six when he played the fifteen year-old Xander; even Sarah Michelle Gellar was a few years older than her character Buffy. At some level it makes sense: the awkward, unrefined demeanor of most teens would probably make teen dramas unable to carry a wide enough demographic for commercial viability.

Gossip Girl mostly follows the casting practices of its predecessors. Leighton Meester plays an eighteen year-old Blair at twenty-two; Blake Lively is a twenty-one year-old playing the seventeen year-old Serena; Penn Badgley is a twenty-two year-old high school senior; the list goes on.

I had always assumed that Taylor Momsen, who plays the youngest principle of the fifteen year-old Jenny Humphrey, was another adult-teen. This week I was stunned to learn that the actress that portrays by the character dealing with the most adult situations on the show is the only member of the cast that is not actually an adult: she really is fifteen!

The show has taken the standard protective father vs. edgy daughter conflict staple of teen drama to a pretty dark place: Jenny has moved out in protest of her father (Matthew Settle)’s refusal to let her gallivant all over New York for the sake of fashion. This left her prey to a head-case model, Agnes (Willa Holland—nice to see that out-of-work OC actors are getting a fresh start on the CW), who reacts quite badly to Jenny’s efforts to launch her label without her participation and torches Jenny’s designs. The major snafu to the label launch is Jenny’s age: she needs a parent’s signature on the contracts. When her to efforts to blackmail her father into signing the papers in exchange for her moving back home fail, Jenny goes to the next level, promising to seek emancipation. Keep in mind that Jenny still does not have any discernible means of supporting herself. No wonder they’re currently advertising Gossip Girl as “every parent’s worst nightmare.”

For some reason, adults playing teens caught up in the psychodrama of adult situations expressed through childish relationships isn’t all that disturbing. But how convincing Momsen is in her portrayals of Jenny’s efforts to be soulless and mercenary is downright creepy. All of which begs the question: where are her real parents?

Life As Unremarkable

This week’s episode of Bones, November 5’s “The Skull in the Sculpture” could not have been more timely with California’s passage of Prop 8, which stripped gays of the right to marry. Angela (Michaela Conlin), the gorgeous artist that does renderings for Dr. Brennan (Emily Deschanel)’s lab, reveals a two-year lesbian relationship with Roxy, who re-emerges in her life as a murder suspect.

Everyone reacts according to their scripted roles: it barely registers for the socially challenged Brennan, it serves as the latest irritation for Angela’s jilted fiancé, Hodgins (TJ Thyne), Cam (Tamara Taylor) acts like she doesn’t know. The one surprise is Booth (David Boreanaz). Sure, his heteronormative biases are immediately revealed when Angela initially tells him, but subsequently, instead of more of the Neanderthal pretending he’s not a Neanderthal routine, Booth becomes genuinely supportive. He explains that his favorite aunt lived with a woman, and once he developed the awareness to understand that they were lesbians, it was a completely unremarkable revelation. “She had box seats to the Phillies,” he explains.

The last moments of the show suggest that the relationship is set to continue as a background plot. But it’s not set to be a source of scandal; it’s just one of those relationships, like Hodgins and Angela were last season. Dr. Sweets (John Francis Daley) kissing the annoying intern Daisy (Carla Gallo) raised many more eyebrows. So Bravo, Bones, you’ve set a plot in motion that embodies the spirit behind the opposition to Prop 8: that relationships among gays don’t inherently need to be singled out for comment.

More on the Political Fate of "Girl Power," etc.

Judith Warner can really write:

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/title/

I was particularly moved by this paragraph: "Theirs [her daughters'] has often looked to me like a world drained of meaning. Girl power put to the service of selling Hannah Montana. Feel-good inclusiveness that occulted the very real conflicts, crimes and hatreds of history."

Let's hear it for finding greater meaning in the everday, and using it to understand and struggle against the inequalities that surround us.