My favourite thing about Portlandia is how it’s always entertaining even when I’m not finding it funny. The best sketch comedy is always weird little short stories, right? It’s great when there are laughs, but laughs aren’t the only thing…

I find that too. I went back and watched Kids In The Hall, and I sometimes found that I wasn’t laughing. When you think of something being funny, you think: “This must be something that makes me laugh.” But I realised that wasn’t the only way I was responding to the show. I think our intention is not always to make people laugh – we’re okay with sometimes making people feel a little uncomfortable, or making something last a little too long. I appreciate what you said in terms of ‘short stories’. There are moments of surprise or entertainment or discomfort. You’re not just laughing. You’re going on a little journey. We credit that to our director, Jonathan Krisel, who approaches everything like we’re making a bunch of short indie films.

Can you predict the scenes or characters or lines that might explode in popular culture? Or is it always a surprise?

It’s a surprise, of course. I don’t think you can go into a creative endeavour with any kind of assumption about how other people will understand it – or whether people will understand it. I don’t think that’s a good place to start. It’s a backwards way of looking at it. You have to go in knowing your intentions, having a point of view, and then all you can do is hope it will capture the imagination of others. We never go in thinking: “This is a phrase people will quote back to us!”

In fact, one of the most pleasant things about meeting fans is how everyone has an individual experience of the show. Even though ‘put a bird on it!’ might be the most ubiquitous line, others will come up and repeat back an obscure line from some sketch we’d nearly forgotten about. That’s very rewarding. Not only can you not predict what people are going to enjoy, it also really differs from person to person. Even sketches you think weren’t as successful as you wanted them to be – somebody finds them applicable to their lives.

You’ve also managed to avoid the thing that kills so much sketch comedy: when something is successful, running it into the ground. How do you resist the urge?

I’ll tell you. We fight against the network. We have a wonderful network in IFC, and they give us a lot of creative license and freedom – but everyone gets excited about something and wants that thing to keep happening. You just have to convince yourself and others that it’s best to keep it rare, and try for something new instead of repeating the old. I think that’s something I learned and remembered from music. You don’t want to just keep putting out the same album.

Actually, as we went into the second season and now the third, the analogy we used was a record. Your first album can be a series of singles – like “here’s our opening thesis” – and you have a couple of hits. It might not be cohesive as an album, but we had ‘Dream of the 90s’, or ‘Put A Bird on It’. And then, for the second record, it’s okay if it’s a little more complicated. It fits together better as an album but might not have the same sort of singles. We talk about that all the time, and it’s very intentional not to go back and retread territory we’ve already gone over.

I love this analogy. So does that mean we’ll soon get Portlandia’s ‘difficult’ album? Just weird instrumental tones for hardcore fans or something?

Hopefully not yet. That’ll be a spin-off show. But let’s see – traditionally, the third album tries new things. And the third album is a good one because you can mine some of the things you know how to do, but you can hopefully do them better. And people also allow for some experimentation, some artistic deviation, from what you did on the first and second records. I know we’ll be trying some new things this season.

You once said that you didn’t want to keep climbing up on stage and “mimicking your younger self”. How is that different now with Wild Flag? How is this Carrie different from that Carrie?

That’s hard to say because I’m just myself. But I do think that having a new relationship to something, having the actual endeavor be new, helps you get out of any nostalgic sentimental trap. Nostalgia can be so comforting – but then you realise it’s actually a deceptive feeling because you feel almost dirty afterwards. Stuck in a weird loop of sadness. A weird, dreamy melancholy. The person I am on stage with Wild Flag is just someone trying to enjoy it, in the moment, feeling connected to it. Not trying to emulate or repeat something I did in the past.

Is Portlandia in part addressing that kind of nostalgia?

A little bit. I think the cycle of nostalgia definitely gets shorter and shorter. It used to feel like the cycles came further apart – like we were mining something twenty years ago, then ten years ago, and all of a sudden you almost feel nostalgic for yesterday, or this morning. There’s something about that sense that yesterday might have been better, or our childhoods better than now. I think a lot of the characters on Portlandia are grappling with that. Trying to find meaning in the here and now. But now I’m talking really big – obviously we’re not a drama! We approach a lot of our themes in a really absurd way, but I think the grounded premise is often: “Who are we? Who are we supposed to be? Are all the choices I’ve made the ones I intended to make when I was young? Am I doing what I set out to do?” That’s part of what ‘Dream of the 90s’ is about.

And talking about choices made when you’re young – you once said that punk was a “salvation” to you. So what’s comedy to you now?

I’d say comedy is a way of getting out of my head. Music is as well, but comedy’s a way of embracing frivolity that music can’t be for me. I take music very seriously. Obviously there’s a lot of joy and elation surrounding music – but I don’t find it funny, and I don’t necessarily like ‘funny’ music. Comedy sometimes stems from dark inclinations, but I love trying to find the levity in a situation, and having that be the way to tell a story. Finding something surreal or absurd about something serious. It’s definitely a good outlet for me, I think.

Last question: earlier you mentioned the restlessness you have, always looking for what’s next. So… what’s next?

I’d like to continue to do more writing. There’s a book I’m working. It’s more of an isolated pursuit, but I do really enjoy writing, and I’d like to do more of it. But for the time being I’m trying to just be in the moment with music and with Portlandia, and to embrace it as long as it will have me. And then, once it spits me out, I’ll find something else to do.

Maybe you’ll be the one to spit it out instead.

Yes, that’s a good way of looking at it. I will reject it, just like a relationship. I will reject it before it rejects me. A preemptive rejection. I’ll break my own heart. That’s what always happens.

Your Tucker and Dale co-star Alan Tudyk [from Firefly and Dollhouse] has that crazy Joss Whedon love behind him!

We just went to Comic-Con. I’d never been before. It was nuts there. I was like a superstar – and Alan is like the God of Comic-Con. It was insane! Those fans are the best fans you could have. If you get in with them, you’re good for life.

Was it particularly hard seeing Reaper cancelled when you knew this passionate audience was out there? Absolutely loyal to the show?

We were really hitting our stride, critics were pricking up their ears, our ratings were actually really good for the CW – so we were like ‘what the hell was the problem?’ To this day, I still don’t know. We didn’t fit into the idea of what the network wanted and got the axe. And it sucks because when a show’s cancelled, the actors are the ones left to deal with the fans. I ended up on another show right away, and to some fans it looked like I’d jumped ship…

Like you’d betrayed them?

Yeah. These people who’d been my fans were suddenly, like, “you suck! You’re an asshole! I can’t believe you have another job!” The show had been canned for months – they just didn’t know it yet, because we weren’t allowed to announce it. It sucks. And I myself was a fan of the show, regardless of my involvement. I thought the show was supercool. I would’ve watched that show even if I wasn’t in it. So that kind of pissed me off. But also Reaper was like my fifth television series, so I understood how TV is a fickle bitch. Onwards and upwards I guess, you know?

The problem with loyalty is how it can so quickly sour into feeling betrayed. Fans give so much to these stories. They just expect the cast and crew and creators to do the same. Treating a role just like another job won’t cut it: it has to be a passion, a calling, the dream of a lifetime. Everyone on set must be the best of friends, too.

Remember the  outpouring of anger  when Michael Rosenbaum said he wasn’t going to appear as Lex Luthor on the final episode of Smallville? Or the ire directed towards George R. R. Martin for not writing his next Song of Ice and Fire book fast enough? At least that resulted in Neil Gaiman’s fantastically quotable clarification of the contract between writers and readers: ”George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.”

Neither’s Tyler Labine, damn it.

TWILIGHT ZONE SEASON ONE

Creator: Rod Serling

Starring: Too many to name

Country: USA

Commentary tracks and deleted scenes seemed so entrancing when DVDs first appeared, huh? Man, the novelty wore off fast. Occasionally, though, pop culture archaeologists dig up something that makes it all worthwhile. The new Twilight Zone set, collecting the first season from 1959, is a time capsule: commentaries, lectures, old sponsor advertising, and creator Rod Serling’s original pitch to the TV networks. He sells his show like a pre-Mad Men Don Draper.

Unfortunately, those extras are only on the fancy blu-ray collection, but show itself is available on DVD. And it’s more than just a time capsule. It still feels alive today. Watching it will make you embarrassed for a lot of the TV we’ve made since.

The Twilight Zone took the burbling anxieties of the time – alienation, nostalgia, war – and turned them into 20-minute nightmares, week after week, aided by some of the best science fiction writers of the day. They created little morality plays with limited budgets, gorgeous black and white photography, and narration that sounds like poetry.

Other reviews this month: The Adjustment Bureau and Never Let Me Go in cinemas; the probably-better-than-the-original Let Me In on DVD.

Issue #48 on sale now.

Two: the subsequent episodes never quite lived up to the pilot, but remained pretty entertaining.

Three: it’s fascinating to watch how Mad Men-style classiness pops and fizzes when it comes into contact with the staples of cheesy, late-night genre TV.

I was already a fan of Robert Kirkman’s comic book. In fact, it’s about the only zombie narrative that still remotely interests me. I, officially, have zombie burn-out. I flinched when I saw that three of the unproduced screenplays on the annual ‘what’s hot’ blacklist contain zombies, so Hollywood’s obviously betting their popularity will last a few more years yet.

(Imagine dying, right now, and reanimating as a zombie. You stagger up off the ground, holding in your intestines, moaning incoherently… only to find that you’ve missed the zeitgeist and everyone’s moved on to being terrified of other, cooler monsters. You’d be so embarrassed you’d be glad that your higher brain functions were gone.)

I think I’m just tired of cannon fodder. Of zombies – dull as individuals, frightening as crowds – existing only to provide opportunities for what Zombieland called its “Zombie Kill of the Week”. The final battle of Zombieland was set at an amusement park for a reason, right?

Whatever resonant metaphors zombies usually provide seem to have grown stale. I did enjoy Chuck Klosterman’s recent piece in the New York Times, however, where he turns the metaphorical focus onto the audience, pointing out that a “lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies.” And, riffing further: “Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have.”

So far, The Walking Dead focuses less on killing and more on character. (Or, less favourably, more on bickering and camping and soap opera.) Despite some hackneyed dialogue and odd pacing, though, there’s one thing I really admire about it.

From the legless woman Rick (Andrew Lincoln) puts down to the once-mother, still scrabbling at the door of her family home on blind instinct – The Walking Dead’s zombies are just so goddamn sad.

Here’s the worst of it: Andrea (Laurie Holden) waits by the corpse of her just-bitten sister, Amy (Emma Bell). She refuses to let anyone dispose of the body. Eventually, her sister ‘wakes up’. Her eyes open. Her limbs twitch. Amy reaches out to Andrea, lost, childlike. We’re all waiting for the horror-movie moment where the reanimated Amy flies into furious action and chomps down on Andrea’s neck, but the moment doesn’t arrive. Instead, Amy claws ineffectually at Andrea’s hair, until Andrea says that she loves her, and then shoots Amy in the head.

It’s not like George Romero’s classic zombies were all opportunities for happy headshots, either. I feel like the satirical subtext of 1978′s Dawn of the Dead has been overstated over the years. The mall-bound undead riding escalators are good for a chuckle, sure, but it’s mostly just awful to see them blindly wandering the aisles. When the living clean out the mall, turning live corpses into dead ones, it’s hardly a victory. And it’s the polar opposite of Zack Snyder’s trigger-happy Dawn of the Dead remake.

The Walking Dead’s zombies stand for something other than contagion or consumerism or unwanted conversations. They’re your mourning; they’re your grief; they’re your old life and loved ones, kept alive by your wish to have them back.

My zombie apocalypse is a total buzz-kill, isn’t it? If it makes you feel better, here’s every zombie kill of The Walking Dead’s first season condensed into little more than a minute of mayhem.

You’re welcome.

This is an extended remix of half my presentation from last week’s

Did you see the Twin Peaks homage-slash-reunion on this week’s episode of Psych?

The fact that it’s so odd to Peaks’ actors, all grown up, shows how few have had successful post-Peaks careers. Kyle MacLachlan might’ve been on Sex and The City and Desperate Housewives, but it’s always a little sad to see Agent Cooper playing these neutered, neurotic characters. Ray Wise has fared better, with memorable roles including the Devil himself on short-lived slacker comedy Reaper.

Sometimes this curse that follows cult TV stars can almost seem like a gift to that show’s fans; it lets the characters freeze, unaging, with the men and women who embodied them tucked out of the public eye like they’re trapped in Dorian Gray’s attic.

The fact that the New York Times considered this Psych episode newsworthy shows how Twin Peaks still circulates strongly through popular culture. Recently, there have been a bunch of twenty-years-later articles, all unearthing fun facts about the show; like the fact that it was David Lynch himself who placed the sand, grain by grain, on Sheryl Lee’s face for the infamous ‘wrapped in plastic’ moment.

She said: “It was a great learning experience playing a corpse. I got to be a sponge and soak up everything.” I always wished Sheryl Lee – as Laura Palmer, and later, her cousin Maddie – deserved to be bestowed the status of full-blown Scream Queen, equal to Fay Wray or Jamie Lee Curtis.

But I’ve also made the case – in print, no less – that Twin Peaks is a much more satisfying show if you see it as a soap opera, and not a mystery. Laura is just a reason to kick off the plot. She gives some characters something to hide and others something to uncover. Sure, we’re told Laura is “full of secrets” – but when we look deeply into her eyes on video tape, it’s not to see into her soul. It’s just to see the reflection of something else in the same scene.

What if Laura’s not just wrapped in plastic, but made of plastic, too?

Today, though, I think I’ve changed my mind, and misjudged Laura Palmer by labelling her an easy narrative excuse. The follow-up movie Fire Walk With Me (infamously booed on its premiere at Cannes) is a Herculean attempt to turn Laura back into a human being. It acts as a kind of retroactive apology for how Laura was treated throughout the show.

Fire Walk With Me begins with the destruction of a television set; a not exactly subtle way of violently highlighting that what you’re about to watch will be different than anything you saw on TV. While Twin Peaks was regularly terrifying – in fact, I still believe it’s the most frightening thing to ever appear on network TV – the movie is relentless. It’s the kind of film that leaves you wanting a shower afterwards.

(I’m going to tread carefully from this point to avoid spoilers for a twenty-year-old show. That’s how much I care.)

Just as Laura can be seen as an excuse, so can some of the show’s supernatural elements. It never sat right with me how Laura’s killer was, in essence, forgiven for all crimes by Peaks’ possession plotline. Fire Walk With Me, however, strips those excuses away again.

After the Black Lodge and the backwards talking and the David Bowie cameo and the inexplicably chilling monkey-face that appears from behind a mask, Fire Walk With Me shows us the psychic toll of all this horror on Laura herself.

And it leaves us with a broken young woman who – despite all those TV Guide cover stories and I Killed Laura Palmer T-shirts – finally finds some kind of peace.

At the excellent panel on Breaking Bad at ACMI a few weeks ago, one point became alarmingly clear: everybody hates Skyler.

Skyler is the long-suffering wife of Walter White, Breaking Bad‘s chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin. She can be whiny, and moralistic, and passive-aggressive – but others on the show are overtly horrible and aggressive-aggressive, and they’re not attacked in the same way. Lurk on any online discussion of the show and you’ll find furious ranting about how Skyler is a stupid bitch who should, like, die.

Is this sexism? Well, yeah, of course. But I’d argue it’s sexist for more complicated reasons than you might expect, and that characters like Skyler are being badly served by the basic building blocks of their respective stories.

First, families – mostly wives and children, of course – are often on these shows to motivate their men. To give them something worth fighting for. Although, as David Surman pointed out at ACMI, one of the fascinating things about Breaking Bad is how Walt’s protests that he’s doing everything “for his family” so quickly become unconvincing.

Beyond that, these women can exist as a show’s voice of morality – and unfortunately, the alchemy of TV dialogue seems to inevitably transmute this into ‘nagging’.

Rita on Dexter, for example, began as an interesting character in her own right. She was a broken woman, and romanced by the emotionally-dead Dexter specifically for that fact; as an easy cover story for his serial killer’s lone wolf tendencies. As she became more confident, though, her character broke in a different way. By the end of season four, she only existed to tell Dexter that he needed to pick up the kids from school, and maybe look disapprovingly afterwards.

(An aside: was this same sort of hate circulating for Carmela on The Sopranos?)

Anyway, being nominated as a show’s moral guardian just a side-effect of these characters’ primary function: to stop the protagonist doing things.

Apparently, Billy Wilder once explained a three-act story like this: in the first act of a story you put your character up in a tree and the second act you set the tree on fire and then in the third you get him down. I think TV morality is often just another way of setting the tree on fire.

So Rita prevents Dexter killing. Skyler prevents Walt cooking meth. And this is where the hate comes in – because death and drugs are exactly what people want to see! I mean, it’s like a whole issue of Spider-Man where Peter Parker is trapped in the house by Aunt May and doesn’t get to punch Doctor Octopus in the face, right? God, I hate Aunt May!

There’s another common role for women, and it’s one especially prevalent in superhero comics. Years ago, Gail Simone referred to it as “Women In Refrigerators”. She realised how female characters always seemed to be injured or killed – just so their heroes had a reason to seek revenge. (A dead wife is even better motivation than a live one!)

The sexism, though, kicks in before the female characters are butchered. It starts when the hero is created. Male heroes tend to have female love interests; those love interests are the easiest to maim for maximum emotional impact; voila! Dead superwomen.

If we had more female superheroes, wouldn’t their boyfriends be the ones in danger? And the same goes for Breaking Bad and Dexter. If we had more females in active leading roles, would there be men doing the nagging-but-necessary plot-blocking?

Maybe. Or maybe gender is now so deeply embedded in these narrative structures that writers simply wouldn’t allow their male characters to fulfil the same function. And even if they did, I suspect that male Skylers simply wouldn’t generate the same levels of hate.

But why don’t we give it a try?

Back in 2007, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan said: “The disturbing thing is that, although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.” When even the military asked producers to tone down torture on 24, it’s sometimes difficult to explain why I watched all eight seasons.

In fact, I confused some of the ACMI audience by accidentally sounding so pro-death penalty. In fiction, it’s surprisingly easy to say that some people ‘deserve to die’. In reality, I’m a bleeding-heart liberal crybaby. But I still enjoyed much of 24’s car crashes and inexplicable traitors and clenched fists and, yeah, even torture scenes. I guess I’m with Sarah Vowell, who wrote back in 2006 that “…there is a jarring disconnect between what I want my real-life intelligence officers to be doing versus what I want my fake TV intelligence officers to be doing.”

My lecture mostly focused on Showtime’s Dexter as the pin-up boy for loveable murderers everywhere. (Come on, he’s pretty dreamy.) But what’s the real difference between Dexter Morgan and Jack Bauer? Is there a slippery slope between how Dexter justifies his kills with ‘Harry’s Code’ and how Jack Bauer tortures in the name of patriotism?

I asked Dr. Jessica Wolfendale. She’s an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at West Virginia University, and the author of the book Torture and the Military Profession. You can listen to her response here:

Jack vs Dexter

In essence, what separates these men is that Dexter enjoys what he does, and Jack does not.

Further, as Derek Johnson noted recently, 24 does happily suggest torture results in “actionable intelligence”, but it also shows us what it does to the torturer. “Jack may repeatedly stop terrorist attacks,” he writes, “but at the expense of his loved ones, the health of the American political institution, and ultimately, his own humanity.”

As it continued, it was fascinating to see 24 slowly begin a new war – one against its own perceived politics. Season seven introduced a barrage of ways to address qualms over Jack’s actions. Jack was called to government hearings to justify his violence; he offended and befriended an Islamic imam; he explained that while he knows that laws have to be the most important thing, his heart won’t let him stand back when he thinks something needs to be done.

The series’ final shot – Jack, staring up into the camera of a high-flying spy drone, saying goodbye – was a suitable finish. Jack doesn’t get a happy ending. No well-deserved peace. Like John Wayne, walking away from the family he’s helped reunite at the end of The Searchers, he’s got too much blood on his hands to re-enter civilization.

(And the surveillance aspect was fitting, too, considering the obsession with mediated communication required for 24’s real-time gimmick to function.)

But it’s the ending of the penultimate episode, though, that might’ve sealed Jack’s fate. Pushed too far, out for revenge, Jack gets an old enemy in the crosshairs of his sniper rifle. Just before the familiar ticking clock ends the episode, we see him smile.

Jack’s enjoying himself. Suddenly, he’s Dexter Morgan.

A random New Yorker finds a corpse. That’s the strict formula for the opening of an episode of NBC’s Law & Order. Do the math. 20 seasons, 22ish episodes a season. That’s at least 440 bodies. It’s a mountain of victims that any serial killer would be proud to claim.

And that’s without any of the Law & Order spin-offs, too. Now add in the death toll of the zillion other murder-focused TV shows currently on air. It seems reasonable, somehow, because murder isn’t like other crimes. In fact, on TV, it’s almost considered victimless – even when the victim is lying right there on the floor.

Murder is everywhere in popular culture, and it’s often presented as a clean and simple – if not bloodless – crime. When I was a kid, I’d get nervous every time there was the tiniest hint of sex on TV while my parents were in the room, but a corpse? No problem!

Take Murder She Wrote. It has ‘murder’ right there in the title, and yet it’s somehow the most family-friendly show imaginable, featuring Jessica Fletcher quietly solving crimes with common sense and folksy wisdom. But think about how many bodies she must’ve seen. Every town she visits, every holiday she takes…

The fact that Jessica Fletcher is a famous mystery novelist, of course, links her back to Agatha Christie – and Christie is emblematic of how murder often isn’t crime of passion. It’s a drawing room mystery. Her victims weren’t really people. Just puzzles to be solved. Similarly, these murder shows never contain much grief, do they? Their funerals are just informal line-ups to see who’s acting guilty.

As an aside, I can think of two pieces of fiction that turn this on its head. One mainstream, one otherwise, but both decidedly subversive. First, Mike Myer’s Austin Powers. There’s a running gag showing Austin killing a random henchman – before we cut to that henchman’s family or friends, devastated as they hear the news that their loved one has been unceremoniously killed.

Grant Morrison’s insanely experimental conspiracy comic, The Invisibles, dedicated an entire issue to the life story of a man who’d previously served as nothing but cannon fodder. We see his childhood, his motivations, his relationships – and then the issue ends back where he first appeared, killed in an instant by our uncaring heroes.

Anyway, in 1950, Raymond Chandler responding to the rise of bloodless murder mysteries with an essay called The Simple Art Of Murder. He was sick of the way that murder had become – in essence – sudoku with corpses. Praised the writing of his literary predecessor, Dashiell Hammett, he wrote:

“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.”

The murderers mightn’t have good reasons to kill, but their stories sure do. Killing is a great structural gimmick. Kill someone and suddenly everything’s in motion: stakes are raised, friends are serving up big chunks of exposition, there’s a murderer to catch for dramatic tension, and so on. Twin Peaks is hardly the only soap opera to kick off with a killing.

This same storytelling principle was applied to dinner parties in real life, too. Remember the How To Host A Murder game of the mid-1980s? Everyone would be given characters and clues to be acted and read out throughout the meal. It’s an interesting thought experiment to plug other crimes into the title instead of the word ‘murder’ and see how they instantly become unacceptable.

I mean, I can pretty much guarantee that no one would have come to my lecture if it was on ‘Loveable Rapists’, would they?

Glee prides itself on its underdog status. It’s constantly announcing that the members of the Glee Club are losers and outcasts. One promotional tagline was “A biting comedy for the underdog in all of us.” They’re even planning an upcoming competition to find new castmembers via Idolish auditions; one of the show’s creators, Ryan Murphy, told Variety that “anybody and everybody now has a chance to be on a show about talented underdogs.”

Blame my own torturous high school years, but I wholeheartedly empathised with the pain inside every single character in Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks. And before Josh Schwartz’ The OC pulled off the unlikely feat of transforming Seth Cohen from a friendless nerd into a bonafide heart throb, Seth’s hatred of high school felt genuine, too.

(There’s a heartbreaking moment near the end of The OC season two where Summer – the school’s resident princess and now, amazingly, Seth’s girlfriend – is looking through their yearbook with fond nostalgia. Then she notices that Seth is friendless in every single picture, and that she’ll never understand.)

I don’t feel any actual high school angst sitting under the loser-labels that Glee loves to throw around. The show effectively mines emotion out of Kurt’s coming out to his working-class father, yes, but otherwise it relies on its powerballads as sentimental shorthand. The slushie-to-the-face is meant to be quick visual iconography for unpopularity – but it’s a mostly empty gesture.

The recent movie Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief pushes this desire for a token underdog even further. We’re told Percy’s a loser. He admits it. We get one short scene of him supposedly struggling in school and, uh, that’s it. Other than that maybe half-a-minute of film, he seems like a together, popular, even cocky teenager. The screenwriters might as well have just given him a t-shirt with UNDERDOG written on it, dusted off their hands, and considered Percy’s backstory complete.

Do we like the idea of rooting for the underdog, but find actual losers a little too… loserey?

Jennifer’s Body – the teen horror film penned by Diablo Cody and starring Megan Fox – made a massive miscalculation when it choose its victims for Jennifer’s demonic tendencies. When Carrie eviscerated her prom back in 1976, it was the bloody revenge of the powerless against the powerful. Jennifer, however, is the most popular girl in school. Where’s the joy in watching her horribly maim her unpopular classmates? That’s not fun, fantasy, or vicarious thrills. That’s just high school.

(There is, however, plenty of fun to be had in seeing Adam Brody – The OC’s Seth Cohen – all evilled and eyelinered as the film’s true villain.)

Glee is witty and good-hearted enough that I do still enjoy it, despite the hesitations above and many others, too. (Lazy writing! Haphazard plotting! Bizarre song choices with nothing to do with the scene at hand!) After all, Jane Lynch’s delivery as the surreally wicked Sue Sylvester is enough of a reason to watch.

Even if it never becomes the Heathers: The Musical like I secretly desire, I hope it lives up to its potential. Don’t stop believin’ just quite yet.

Jack’s fate is typical of how the never-ending stories of TV series and comic books guarantee these violent heroes will never know peace for more than a few minutes or pages at a time. At the end of 24’s (admittedly terrible) season six, Jack Bauer had had enough. After all these years of torture and gunplay, he wanted his “life back”. He was told in no uncertain terms:

“Jack, simply getting your life back isn’t gonna change who you are… and you can’t walk away from it. You know that. You’ve tried it. Sooner or later you’re gonna get back in the game…”

We’ve seen this in endless Hollywood Westerns: the hero, the only one capable of Doing What Must Be Done, has to walk away from the domestic life he dearly desires. In 1992, Clint Eastwood’s meta-mythic Unforgiven bundled up every cowboy he’d ever played into the story of William Munny, dragged inexorably away from his family and back to the gun. The coda says that he returned home, sure, but I’m not entirely sure we’re meant to believe it.

At least once the credits roll, William Munny’s story comes to an end. While ratings hold, Jack doesn’t have the same option to put down his gun. Somehow I don’t think Jack Bauer: Kindly Grandpa has the same network appeal. (Opening voiceover: “The following visit to the zoo takes place between 11am and 12pm.”)

It’s worse for violent comic book characters – and aren’t they all? Wolverine, for example, is basically immortal. His mutant healing factor keeps him in fighting shape, year after year, so he looks just the same now as he did fighting in World War II. In New X-Men #148 (2003), there’s an example of how all this death has taken its toll. “All I’m good for’s killing,” Logan thinks at the telepathic Jean Grey. “If you knew what I was, you’d hate me.”

Recently, he too had a moment of peace, albeit in a story called ‘Old Man Logan‘ set in a grim possible future. And he was older, too, finally, a grey-haired pacifist and family man. But – you guessed it – he was forced away from his spartan home for one last job. It’s an utterly shameless steal of Unforgiven, except with all Eastwood’s well-earned heartbreak replaced with pointless Marvel Comics trivia for long-term fans. I don’t think William Munny would approve.

Back in regular comic book continuity, the needs of the status quo have been crueller to Wolverine than most. After his debut in 1974, he seemed to be on a decades-long character arc to a better place. He turned from an amnesiac, animalistic killer to a more noble sort of warrior: self-controlled, samurai-influenced, and even a mentor to young X-Men like Kitty Pryde. Wolverine’s readers don’t want to give up their favourite hack ‘n’ slash antihero, though, so Logan is never allowed to put his berserker rage behind him once and for all.

But Jack Bauer’s lack of a mutant healing factor is, in fact, his secret weapon. Day by day, his mortal host – Kiefer Sutherland – is getting older. At some point, suspension of disbelief will snap and he’ll be judged too decrepit to be kicking ass on 24. Only then Jack will get some well-deserved peace.