I like the idea of Agents of SHIELD. I might be the easiest sell in America for the pitch that goes, “It’s episodic superhero TV, but in the style of Joss Whedon.”

In fact, I kind of wrote the pitch back in May of 2012:

I ended the movie wanting to see not Avengers 2 but a Black Widow/Hawkeye spin-off. Call itAgents of SHIELD and just have the two of them going after non-super powered terrorist bad guys.

But after two episodes, I’m basically done with the show. It’s not terrible, exactly. But it has lots of problems. In no particular order of importance:

* The f/x are terrible. Unexcusably so. This is prime-time, network TV in the year 2013 and the effects look like something from the mid-’90s. If you can’t bring the same level of believability that was inherent in Heroes or Fringe (or even Firefly) then there’s a problem.

* Tonally, it’s all over the map. Some people find the Whedon tongue grating. I am not one of them. But SHIELD feels like it’s getting maybe 15 percent of Whedon’s attention, meaning that you’re in pure Whedon wiseacre-ville one minute, and then in CW-style, ham-handed earnestness the next.

* There are too many characters and too few interesting characters. Stop trying to make Fitzsimmons happen. Fitzsimmons is never going to happen. And the hacktivist girl rocking the Shannon Dougherty thing is (a) less believable as a hacker than Elizabeth Shue was as a nuclear physicist and (b) less effective as an audience surrogate than, well, pick your own spectacular failure here (Shia in Transformers; Kitty Pryde in Inception).

I’d argue that SHIELD doesn’t need someone to stand in for audiences–we’ve had a slate of feature films which have grossed something like $17 billion to prepare us for the Marvel world. We’re not noobs anymore. We get it. Everyone gets it.

* I won’t complain about SHIELD being a monster-of-the-week show because most fantasy shows start out that way and I suspect that, given time to flower, it will develop its own arcs. But did SHIELD have to go through this awkward process? Couldn’t they just cut right to the Big Ideas?

I do wonder if the success of long-form TV (Justified, Breaking Bad, Sopranos) has built into audiences an expectation of narrative ambition that makes it possible to skip the episodic-baby-steps phase.

* Finally, I have a semi-major concern about the decision to ground SHIELD in the Marvel cinematic universe. Marvel has three coherent universes: The comics, the Ultimate comics, and the movies. They borrow from one another, but they all have their own continuity, more or less.

What happens if SHIELD fails? Does that tarnish the luster of Marvel movies? Or what if it succeeds, and has to pump out 23 episodes a year for 15 seasons. Does that hem in the writing for the movie universe?

Compare Marvel’s decision to integrate SHIELD into it’s movies to DC’s decision to wall off its TV shows–Smallville, Birds of Prey, Arrow–into a little garden that exists independently of either DC’s comics or  movies. I’d argue that this maximizes both creative freedom and financial safety.

I understand why Marvel/Disney/ABC did what they did. I just don’t know that it seems wise.

* Really finally: Watch the pilot for SHIELD and compare it with the pilot for Arrow (airing on CW, now available on Netflix streaming). SHIELD has more money, a bigger creative playing field, a more established group of characters, and, I suspect, more corporate support.

Yet Arrow is superior in every facet. I’m not saying that Arrow is great TV. I’d posit that it’s the superhero equivalent of Burn Notice: Minimally serviceable, disposable entertainment.

If SHIELD could rise to that level, it would be a breakout hit.

Erick Erickson has gauged the dynamics of the CR/shutdown fight and the looming debt ceiling fight pretty much perfectly, I think:

Republicans are winning the shutdown fight, and Democrats know it.

People turning on the news this week came away with the knowledge that it was about Obamacare and kept hearing that Democrats wouldn’t negotiate. They also learned that for some reason the President didn’t want Word War II veterans to tour their own memorial, and Harry Reid won’t turn the funding on for cancer clinical trials at the NIH. Oh, and the rollout for Obamacare is one big glitch.

Late yesterday came word that the Amber Alert system has been shut down, but Barack Obama’s federally funded golf course remains open. Catholics are openly fretting that priests on military bases could get arrested for performing mass — at the very least they are prohibited from doing so. . . .

So the question is do we want to stop Obamacare or do we want to stop the debt ceiling increase? My view is that we cannot do both at the same time. We might dare to dream, but the debt ceiling will be increased one way or the other.

Right now the GOP is holding up very well in the press and public opinion because it is clear they want negotiations. The GOP keeps passing legislation to fund departments of government. It has put the Democrats in an awkward position.

But the moment the GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, we are going to have problems. . . .

I think somebody like Steve Scalise, who chairs the Republican Study Committee, needs to propose a short-term debt limit for a few weeks and attach to it the Full Faith and Credit Act that ensures the Treasury Department prioritizes interest payments in the event the debt limit is ever not increased. This would buy us some time to finish the fight to defund Obamacare and set us up well to fight the next long-term debt limit increase to the death by removing some of the President’s scare tactics. How do Republican Leaders not adopt and push such a proposal? How does Obama not accept it without looking completely unreasonable?

To my eye, this is very shrewd. Republicans wanted a shutdown less than Democrats (or at least less than Harry Reid and Obama) did. But, as it turned out, the politics of the shutdown were unpredictable. They haven’t been particularly good for Obama and because of the way the field was shuffled, my guess is that they’re going to get progressively worse as the days go on.

The only exit available for them is the debt ceiling. Republicans ought to close that door pre-emptively and keep pressing the advantage on the question of Obamacare and the continuing resolution.

Courtesy of Galley Friend M.L. comes this documentary, North of the Sun. Looks pretty great:

NFS TEASER 13ENG from weggebros on Vimeo.

Here’s lawyer Jason Mazzone writing about a recent Matt Yglesias column on Obamacare and John Roberts:

In an article called “The Millions Left Out of Health Reform by John Roberts,” Matthew Yglesias reports that the fact that working poor in certain states will not benefit from the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion is “due to the actions of Chief Justice John Roberts” who, in NFIB v. Sebelius, “burnished his conservative cred by striking down the penalties portion of the Medicaid expansion.” As a result, Mr. Yglesias says, “[t]here are going to be pockets of the country where poor people continue to lack insurance for quite a long time, all thanks to Roberts and the stubborn intransigence of conservative politicians.” The Chief Justice certainly enjoys some special powers. But who knew he could singlehandedly invalidate an act of Congress? He can’t, of course. Even in the world of Slate reporters, one plus zero doesn’t equal five.

And for the record, Slate readers, in the portion of Sebelius dealing with the Medicaid expansion issue, seven Supreme Court justices, including those notorious Tea Party heroes Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, “burnished” their “conservative cred” and should therefore be blamed for depriving poor people of healthcare.

I don’t know much about Mazzone, but he sure doesn’t seem like your normal right-wing critic.

So I have no insights about the politics of a government shutdown tomorrow–maybe it would be bad for Dems, maybe it would be bad for the GOP. If anything, my guess would be that shutting down the government over Obamacare could be hugely destabilizing (politically) and that the results are actually pretty unpredictable. (If this view was correct, though, then both sides would have incentive to avoid a shutdown. The GOP looks to have pretty good positioning for 2014; Dems want to try to preserve Obamacare. The status quo has a lot to offer both parties.)

That said, what I’m really struck by is the nearly unanimous chorus from the left about how awful a shutdown would be for Republicans. If they really think that the GOP will be devastated by a shutdown, then wouldn’t they be welcoming it, instead of lamenting all the awful, no-good extremists which have hijacked the party?

(That is, hijacked it in the wake of the last hijacking in 2012. And the one before that in 2010. Which came after the hijacking in 2008 and  . . .)

Update: Galley Friend X offers some smart thoughts:

My guess is the Ds are talking up the horrors so much because they suspect the impact will not be felt very far beyond Fairfax and MoCo. Nevertheless, they know that “shutdown” polls miserably for the GOP.  So if they gin up the horror story ahead of time and then the media report “shutdown” it’ll hurt the GOP via political narrative as opposed to by actually having the GOP harm people. This strikes me as a pretty good strategy on one level. On the other, it’s possible that people will wake up and realize the government does a lot of useless shit (as with the sequester) and not mind the actual shut down.  I think that gets hard to predict–especially what that does in terms of party negotiations is highly variable. E.g. Durbin is now willing to talk about the medical device tax, which I think is a surprising admission of weakness on the Ds’ part.

I just think the GOP misplayed their hand because of the Obamacare mania.  Instead use targeted poison pills in the CRs aimed at 2014 democrats to get clean admissions for the elections on their support of discrete and unpopular policies like the individual mandate, congressional Obamacare perks, carbon regs, med device tax, whatever. But that would help win elections beyond just Iowa….

Cue Redskins playoff talk in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

One of the small annoyances of living in DC is being around what I suspect might be the most Pollyanna-ish fanbase in all of sports. Yankees fans think they’re entitled to success. Lakers fans expect success. DC sports fans think that success is always just around the corner. I think I’ve told this story before, but if not, here’s the perfect distillation of the difference in mindset between Philly and DC:

On Monday, December 20, 2004, I was driving from New Jersey to DC. The day before, the Eagles had beaten the Dallas Cowboys, giving them a record of 13-1, the best in the league. The team was a buzz-saw, having gone to three consecutive NFC championship games in the preceding seasons and now, loaded with Terrell Owens and Donovan McNabb having a quasi MVP season, they were dominant.

However, in the course of the Dallas game, Owens broke his ankle while being horse-collared by the filthy, cretinous Roy Williams. On sports-talk radio, all the way through Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and northern Maryland, caller after caller and host after host rent their garments and caterwauled about the end of the Eagles’ season. The Super Bowl dream was over. The Eagles wouldn’t win another game. It was, people pretty much agreed, nearly impossible to envision them scoring again.

Yet once I crossed the Susquehanna River and tuned into DC sports-talk, it was like phasing into an alternate universe. That weekend, the Skins had just beaten the hapless ’49ers who, at the time, had 2 wins and would finish with the worst record in football. This glorious victory left Washington sitting at 5-9. And what did the good people of Washington think?

Playoffs!

As hosts and callers carefully explained to one another, if the Skins just won out (even though they hadn’t won consecutive games all season long) and they got some help, then they could easily slip into the playoffs at 7-9. But Redskins fans weren’t just thinking playoffs. They were thinking Super Bowl!

Washington fans believed that the Eagles were now mortally wounded without Owens. And with a weak top-seed in the division, Washington could easily pick them off. And then the NFC was wide open. With their victory over 2-12 San Francisco, the Super Bowl was now within reach.

This is how sports fans really think down here. And it hasn’t much changed. Both fans and the press in DC have been itching to put Robert Griffin into Canton since his first game. To say these people are in love with Griffin doesn’t begin to describe it. I’ve been in towns with Mike Schmidt, Dr. J, and Michael Jordan (during his Wizards incarnation) and I’ve never seen a city fall this hard for an athlete. To live up to the woo they’ve been pitching, Griffin would have to win three rings, post Elway-like career numbers, and build a children’s hospital.

So now that Griffin has got his QB rating up to a lofty 84 and the Skins have moved into second-place in the division standings with their 1-3 record, let’s help our Redskins fans plot out their path to the 2014 Super Bowl in Jersey:

Technically, you can take your division with just three wins. If all the teams in the division lose all of their out-of-division games, and then split their division contests, then a 3-win team can totally make the playoffs.

This year, the NFC East might be almost that bad. As of today, there are three NFL teams that are 4-0. The entire NFC East has 4 wins right now. And if you only really need 3 wins for the playoffs, the Redskins are actually ahead of the game because they’re on pace for 4 wins and they already have a win out of division! If anything, they seem like a lock for 5 wins (at least!) with 6–or even 7–a real possibility. After all, they still have New York (twice), Dallas (twice), Philly, and Minnesota. Every one of those games is winnable. And the way the NFC East looks this year, a 7-win team will probably run away with the division.

So the Redskins are now it perfect position for the playoffs.

And once you’re in the playoffs, anything can happen.

The real question in Washington this week should probably be about 2015: When the Redskins start their quest to defend their Super Bowl title, should Griffin be favored to win his second MVP?

Redskins fans discuss!

At the risk of treading on Harvey Mansfield’s turf, the story about 51-year-old comedian Dan Nainan punching out the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin is a pretty depressing indictment of manliness on all fronts.

You can read the particulars if you want but the short version is this: Rogin was at the DC Improv sitting in the back while Nainan was performing. Rogin tweeted a bunch of insults about Nainan. After his set, Nainan immediately checked his Twitter feed.

Nainan then went and found Rogin, decked him, and walked away. Rogin sat there. Thinking better of it, Nainan went back and took another swing or two (reports suggest he took two more swings, one of which connected) and was then removed from the premises.

Rogin, did not retaliate, but immediately tweeted about the incident. He then pressed charges when the po-po arrived. The next morning, Rogin told the Washington Post, “My face hurts.”

Really? This is how men conduct themselves in 21st century America?

* On the one hand, if you sit around insulting a guy standing 30 or so feet from you, do you not expect a reaction? Rogin’s taunts probably don’t rise to “fighting words” but it says something really weird when people are so wedded to virtual space and divorced from meat space that they think spouting off insults about people near them is polite, acceptable behavior that will be universally accepted with bon homie.

* On the other hand, what sort of guy finishes a piece of work and immediately rushes to see what people are saying about him on Twitter?

* And what sort of guy gets so cheesed off by Twitter that he gets his Irish up?

* But on the third hand, what sort of guy gets punched by a 51-year-old, sits there, and then instead of defending himself, tweets about it? I can understand Rogin not going Chuck Liddell on Nainan. Maybe he was in shock. Maybe it didn’t register. Not everyone’s first instinct on getting cocked is to cowboy up. But tweeting about it?

* Finally, let’s stipulate, for the litigious among us, that violence is never the answer and that, when another man punches you in the face, it’s more honorable and civilized to call Judge Wopner, rather than punch him back. (I don’t think this is necessarily true, but let’s stipulate to it anyway.)

In that case, wouldn’t it be better form just to take the punch and suck it up rather than complaining to the media about how much your face hurts? Who admits that?

I don’t know either of these fellows and I’m happy to assume that they’re both solid guys who just got caught on a bad day. It happens.

But I do worry that in certain circles of American life people have lost sight of the fact that the real world is real.

Well, that was fast.

The problem with using fingerprints instead of passwords, is that if there’s any breakdown in the system, you can’t just issue a new one.