Agent Carter is a difficult show to pull off, though Joss Whedon and company did it will enough to come back for a second season. Peggy Carter is a rare female CIA agent (or a pre-cursor to the CIA) in the late 1940s. The difficulty the show has to deal with is that Carter (and her antipode, the KGB villainess Dottie Underwood), are more intelligent, and even better at martial arts, than most of, if not all of, the males around them. In SyFy and fantasty shows like Buffy or Bionic Woman or Wonder Woman, the heroine has mystical powers or high tech upgrades. Agent Carter, played by Hayley Atwell (whose facial perfection is a kind of mystical superpower), is just human – though in the Avengers’ universe she is the love interest of Captain America. So she has to be brilliant without merely looking so because the male characters are all written as stupid. Whedon is succeeding at that.
The two hour premier features a little interracial romance way back in the 40s.
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Billions
Unlike Agent Carter, Billions is all testosterone. Starring Damien Lewis (formerly best known for Homeland) as a Wall Street billionaire who survived 9/11 after graduating from Hofstra as a kid from a working class Irish family and then working as a trader. It will be curious to see what lib-Dem Aaron Sorkin does with this. Since Sorkin’s stock in trade is repeated liberal porn valorizing D.C. insiders, liberals, Democrats, Beltway journalists, etc. it’s hard to imagine he will provide a critique of the criminalization of free speech and information, i.e. “insider training.” One suspects he was forced into this because incumbents, the ruling political class, mainstream media, are just not sexy. Everyone hates them. Not to mention that so many of them are freaks: spitting Chris Matthews, mush mouthed Eugene Robinson, pie cow Claire McCaskill, flop eared Obama, chew baca-ish Michelle, botoxed Andrea Mitchell, closet case Barbara Mikulski, medusa-like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, corpse like Harry Reid, discolored John Boehner, tongue tied EJ Dionne, and the nasally, phlegmatic castrati of NPR.
You can watch the upcoming episode already on Comcast on Demand. So far it’s entertaining but it is all about a developing case where a homunculus Justice Department attorney played by Paul Giamatti tries to keep a perfect prosecution record by taking down a billionaire for insider trading, i.e. making money off tips and info not already available to every potential market participant.
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Supergirl
For all of us Buffy fans still suffering withdrawal over a decade later, Supergirl, along with EXTANT, Agent Carter, and reruns of Emma Peel on The Avengers are our morphine drip. Not perfect substitutes but still welcome and each tasty in its own way. For those entertaining feminist theology we are just seeking splintered reflections of the Goddess. Thank God Sarah Palin has returned to politicking.
But Palin’s not the only starlet to re-emerge. Emma Caufield, a Ron Paul fan, a little more mature and thicker in the (facial) cheeks, who was hilarious as the vengeance demon/vulnerable girl/medieval witch Anya on Buffy, and who has been underused and underemployed like so many talented comic actresses (Madeline Khan), has joined Supergirl as An FBI agent. Let’s hope her role grows if it adds to the show.
The Insomniac Libertarian 