Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 306

From a Prison ​Cell​ to the Mayor's Office

The most irresistible storyline in politics is the comeback. Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 six years after California voters rejected his bid to be governor. Bill Clinton earned his famous nickname “The Comeback Kid” after the New Hampshire primary in 1992, a contest he didn’t even win. (He finished second.) More recently, Mark Sanford resigned as governor of South Carolina in an adultery scandal but won back his old seat in Congress just two years later.

Yet as comebacks go, none of those guys have anything on Joseph Ganim, the once and future mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

On Tuesday, voters in the Nutmeg State’s largest city picked Ganim from a field of seven candidates for mayor. When he takes office in January, it will be 13 years since he last ran the city. He spent seven of those years in federal prison, serving a punishment for convictions on 16 felony counts of racketeering, bribery, mail fraud, conspiracy, and tax evasion. As the Hartford Courant reminded its readers on Wednesday, Ganim accepted more than half a million dollars “in cash, diamonds, expensive wine, tailored clothing, high-priced meals, and home renovations in a widespread kickback scheme that led to the convictions of 10 of his associates.” All that occurred during his first three terms as mayor. When he got out of prison, the state supreme court refused to return his law license. And yet improbably, the voters of Bridgeport took him back.

"Some will call this a comeback story. For me it is a city that I never left,” Ganim told his supporters. His victory was his second shocker of the season. In September, Ganim knocked off the city’s two-term incumbent, Bill Finch, in a three-way primary by a margin of 400 votes. After Finch failed to make the November ballot as a petitioning candidate, Ganim beat back a university executive, Mary-Jane Foster, and a Republican candidate to claim victory in Bridgeport, which is overwhelmingly Democratic.  “I couldn’t be more surprised,” Foster told The New York Times.

She wasn't the only one. Dannel Malloy, Connecticut’s Democratic governor, issued a terse statement of congratulations after repeatedly refusing to endorse Ganim. For his part, Ganim has promised to lower taxes, create jobs, and bring down crime—perhaps by not contributing to it himself this time around. Along with Connecticut’s other urban centers, Bridgeport has long struggled with high crime, poverty rates, and poor public schools.

Ganim’s victory is a glaring exception in the Year of the Outsider.

And like the neighboring states of New York and Rhode Island, Connecticut is plenty familiar with corrupt politicians. A year after Ganim’s conviction, Governor John Rowland resigned in the face of charges that he accepted free work on his vacation home from contractors doing business with the state. (Don’t expect a political comeback from Rowland anytime soon: He was recently sent back to prison for the second time in a decade on charges that he hid payments he received for working on congressional campaigns.)

With his victory Tuesday, Ganim joins the late D.C. Mayor Marion Barry and Providence’s Buddy Cianci in the annals of American municipal comeback stories. Washington voters returned Barry to City Hall in 1995 after he served a six-month sentence for cocaine possession, and Cianci served as mayor of Providence for a second time years after pleading no contest to an assault charge. (He didn’t spend time in prison until after his second stint as mayor; he lost another comeback bid after that.)

Ganim’s victory is a glaring exception in the Year of the Outsider. Yes, Bridgeport voters tossed out an incumbent mayor, but only to give a king of corruption a second chance in office. As with Barry and Cianci, Ganim’s moral and legal failings mattered less than his loyalty and familiarity to voters who often feel neglected. “He was just one of the ones that got caught. He didn’t hurt anybody but himself. He didn’t take anything from me,” one Ganim supporter, Louise Gregory, told the Times in September. It’s a message that might explain Ganim’s hard-to-fathom comeback, even if sounds far too empathetic for the anger-fueled politics of 2015.

The Logic Behind the Sky-High Candy Crush Deal

The fact that Activision Blizzard bought Candy Crush creator King Digital startled people less than the sheer size of the deal: $5.9 billion. As many noted, that’s almost $2 billion more than Disney paid for either Marvel or Lucasfilm. It’s more than twice the $2.5 billion Microsoft paid for Minecraft maker Mojang, a property that feels like it has more long-term staying power than Candy Crush. And it’s about nine times the $650 million Electronic Arts paid for PopCap, creators of Bejeweled, the game whose underlying behavior lies at the heart of Candy Crush.

Six billion dollars is a lot of money, but all dollars are not equal. Activision paid $3.6 billion of the sum in offshore cash. Some analysts say it would have cost Activision nearly a third of that to repatriate that money, which means that the company “saved” $1 billion just by inking the deal.

The remaining $2.3 billion is financed by long-term loans, paid back against the very low interest rates common in the present market. So in real, immediate terms, King cost Activision a lot less liquid cash than the $5.9 billion price tag suggests.

Some have rightly observed that at $18 per share, King is is being bought for roughly 20 percent less than its initial public offering price of $22.50 back in March 2014. But as the investment manager Dan Tubb observed, King’s profit is a more important figure than its share price.

King is currently trading at about 10 times earnings, while Activision’s stock trades at well over twice that figure. The acquisition adds King’s $0.6 billion annual profit to Activision’s current $1.1 billion, a 50 percent bonus. Earnings per share are usually calculated against the previous four quarters, and Activision’s valuation before the deal was about $25 billion. That means that if the street is willing to sustain Activision’s current multiple, a year from now Activision could add something like $12 billion to its value. Not bad for an outlay of $2.6 billion in cash today, factoring in the hypothetical offshore shelter premium.

The fiscal implications of the deal are a reminder that businesses are financial instruments as much as or more than they are providers of goods and services. In the case of digital entertainment, companies like Activision Blizzard and King Digital speculate on the public’s current and future interest in digital-entertainment trends. Whether or not Candy Crush sticks around might be less important to Activision than capitalizing on it before it falls out of favor.

Corporate valuations measure the acceleration of value more than its reality. That’s why hot tech companies sell for so much more than their staid, established brethren. Companies like Marvel and Lucasfilm are worth “less” partly because they are no longer increasing in value rapidly. The cognitive dissonance the public experiences when hearing about these deals derives from an intuitive sense that longevity matters—or that it should. But market value is driven by short-term thinking.

It’s fitting to consider these bigger dynamics in relation to a game that is itself about financial speculation. Candy Crush Saga is a free-to-play game; you download it for nothing, and then the game invites you to spend money on bonuses to make it easier. Back in 2013, King acknowledged that at least 70 percent of its players never spent a dime on in-app purchases. To play King’s flagship game is to attempt to get the most benefit for the least financial outlay. And that’s just what Activision has done.

Stabbing on California College Campus

Five people were injured in a stabbing attack Wednesday on a college campus in California, according to the school.

The University of California, Merced, said on its Twitter account around 8 a.m. local time that a stabbing had been reported outside of the school’s Classroom and Office Building. The suspect was shot by police and died from his injuries, according to the university’s police department.

Two victims were transported by helicopter to a local hospital and three were treated “on campus,” the school said in a statement. “All victims were conscious,” the school said.

The school initially said all five victims were students, but later said it’s waiting for confirmation on whether that information is correct.

Merced has canceled all classes for Wednesday and advised students to stay away from the campus. The school is offering counseling services to students and staff.

The Los Angeles Times spoke to Daniel Garcia-Ceja, a Merced student who found the campus closed when he arrived for class Wednesday morning:

“Some of my friends wanted to cry. Some were upset. Some were in shock. It was insane to hear that this happened in general,” Garcia-Ceja said. “You know it's happened at other universities, and you know schools have been through these situations ... but I don't think anybody would have assumed it would happen here. We knew it could happen, but nobody thought it would.”

Merced, located in the San Joaquin Valley, is the 10th and newest of the University of California campuses. It opened in 2005. In the fall of 2014, the student population was 6,268.

The Nuanced Tragicomedy of You're the Worst

Relationship sitcoms as a subgenre usually stick to a limited number of formulaic storylines—something that You’re the Worst has dodged again and again. Midway through its stellar second season on FXX, when Gretchen (Aya Cash) started sneaking out in the middle of the night without telling her live-in boyfriend Jimmy (Chris Geere) where she was going, the implication that she was cheating seemed clear. But when Jimmy finally caught on, he tailed her and found her not with another guy, but sitting alone in her car, crying—a symptom of her clinical depression, which she confessed was beginning to surface again. It was an audacious twist, but one the show had carefully built toward, and has sensitively explored in the following weeks.

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'You’re the Worst'' Demonstrates How to Subvert the Rom-Com

You’re the Worst’s first season was a surprising hit—pitched as an acidic sex comedy about the union of two narcissists, it immediately felt more than the sum of its parts by having such a firm grasp on its central pair, their fear of growing up, and what it means to embark on a serious relationship. In the second season, its creator, Stephen Falk, could have turned to the kind of stories that have waylaid classic sitcom couples like Ross and Rachel or Jess and Nick—jealousy over exes, or meddling parents—but has instead burrowed deeper into what makes his lovably unlovable pair so self-destructive in the first place. Gretchen insists to Jimmy that he can’t cure her depression and that he can only help her weather the storm, but Jimmy pledges to try anyway. It’s painful to watch, but the way You’re the Worst remains true to his and Gretchen’s characters, shunning the devices of typical relationship sitcoms, is its greatest strength.

Equally as impressive is how the show has managed to be funny through these darker moments. As even the most popular sitcoms have found, sustaining a relationship on TV is tricky because of the inherent lack of conflict that comes with a stable couple. Which is why shows often invent implausible scenarios of temptation, or out-of-nowhere pregnancies, or why they quickly break up couples only to reunite them again. But Gretchen’s depression feels like a real-world problem rather than a TV problem. She makes it clear to Jimmy that there’s nothing to be done about it, and all she needs is support, but part of Jimmy’s humorous appeal is his overinflated ego and the hero complex that comes with it.

Last week’s episode was a rehash of “Sunday Funday,” a season-one favorite in which Gretchen, Jimmy, and their friends tore through a wild Sunday brunch adventure in Los Angeles. This time, the stakes were higher and it was Halloween-themed, as Jimmy tried to give Gretchen the scary night of her life to shake her out of her reverie—but once she realized his intent, the plan backfired. Jimmy’s unsubtle efforts are as sweet as they are hopeless, and a testament to the tragicomic balance You’re the Worst strikes better than any other show currently on air: Viewers know he’s doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons, yet they can’t help but root for him anyway.

Gretchen’s depression feels like a real-world problem rather than a TV problem.

The show’s first season ran at breakneck speed, charting the progress of Gretchen and Jimmy’s relationship from a drunken one-night-stand to co-habitation. Falk has since wisely slowed things down, with one episode taking place during a mundane trip to the mall (where Gretchen tries to buy things she believes most adults should own), and another unfolding entirely in the couple’s house when they’re boxed inside by L.A. marathon runners. Wednesday’s new episode focuses on a slightly older married couple who live across the street. They’re faded hipsters who constantly reference the music and TV of the mid-aughts while tending to a fussy kid and fussier pug, and Gretchen becomes transfixed by their outward happiness and tries to mimic it herself, with mixed results.

If the first season was about arrested development—Jimmy and Gretchen are both adult-children trying to do whatever they want even as they enter their mid-30s—this season has been about the brutal flip-side of those choices. Jimmy, a published author struggling to write a follow-up, fancies himself a raconteur but does all his “work” at the local bar. Gretchen, a flippant but self-possessed slob, has always seemed like she’s running from something that’s finally caught up with her this season. You’re the Worst slots firmly into the developing “sadcom” genre, a group that includes Netflix’s Hollywood satire BoJack Horseman (also praised for its handling of depression), Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s acidic sci-fi comedy Rick and Morty, and the brutally funny mockumentary series Review.

But while shows like Rick and Morty and Review have outlandish plots revolving around murder and mayhem, You’re the Worst is terrifyingly real. Its biggest villain is the fear of growing up, its scariest ailment is a chemical imbalance, and the stakes all ride on one rocky relationship. It’s a union that’s looked disastrous from the start—but that’s been all the more compelling for its refusal to be disastrous in the typical ways. It’s the kind of thoughtful, unexpected deviation other romantic sitcoms should learn from.

How a Nightclub Fire Brought Down a Prime Minister

On Wednesday, less than a week after 32 people died in a massive fire at a nightclub in Bucharest, Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta resigned from office.

That a deadly conflagration could hasten the downfall of a sitting head of state (along with the mayor of Bucharest and the country’s interior minister) seems remarkable and unlikely, but the tragedy that drew 20,000 protestors to the streets of Bucharest on Tuesday was an extension of a greater national frustration.

As hospitals continue to treat hundreds of people injured in the fire, many have pointed to the incident as evidence of government corruption and incompetence. Collectiv, the nightclub where the fire occurred, was permitted to host a large, indoor concert that featured pyrotechnics despite having only one exit. As the BBC noted, protestors on Tuesday “chanted ‘shame on you’ and ‘assassins,’ and carried banners reading ‘corruption kills.’”

In a Facebook post on Tuesday night, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis offered his approval of the demonstrations.

It is a street movement that comes from the desire of people to have their condition and dignity respected. I understood that they ask and expect, rightly so, for someone to assume political responsibility.

Hours later, Ponta, who had been in office since 2012 and had previously been accused of graft, resigned.

“I have the obligation to acknowledge that there is legitimate anger in society,” he said in a statement. “People feel the need for more, and it would be wrong of me to ignore this.”

An interim prime minister will be named by the Romanian president before a new government is formed.

Friday’s fire began when sparks from a fireworks display on a stage at a heavy metal concert made contact with flammable foam decor. Nearly 200 people were injured, and half were hospitalized. Three of the club’s owners were questioned by investigated by prosecutors on Monday.

‘A Drop in the Ocean’: The Transfer of 30 Refugees From Greece

Thirty refugees have been sent from Greece to Luxembourg as part of the European Union’s plan to relocate 160,000 people across the bloc.

Together with the first group of #refugees that will be relocated from #Greece to #Luxembourg pic.twitter.com/FSMqj0wltn

— Alexis Tsipras (@tsipras_eu) November 4, 2015

Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, said the refugees—six families from Syria and Iraq—were making a “trip to hope,” but pointed out the scale of the issue that Europe is dealing with.  

“Thirty in the face of thousands who have fled their homes in Syria and Iraq is a drop in the ocean, he said. “But we hope that this becomes a stream, and then a river of humanity and shared responsibility, because these are the principles upon which the European Union was built.”

Indeed, an estimated 608,000 people—nearly two-thirds of them Syrian—have crossed the Mediterranean to Greece in order to seek a better life in Europe.

The Guardian reports that with Wednesday’s transfer of 30 people from Greece, in all, 116 migrants and refugees have been relocated across Europe. Previously, 86 were moved from Italy to Sweden and Finland.

The EU’s plan to relocate 160,000 people was agreed to in September—but not without exposing deep divisions within the bloc. Germany, the largest recipient of the migrants and refugees, has an open-door policy for Syrians fleeing the civil war in that country, but it wants other member states to do more. EU members, like Hungary and other Central European states, have been less welcoming, erecting fences to slow the flow of the newcomers.

Europe is in the midst of the most severe migrant and refugee crisis since World War II. The Syrian civil war, which has created 4.2 million refugees, and unrest in Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea, and elsewhere have accelerated the flow of people into Europe. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 218,953 migrants and refugees reached Europe by sea in October alone; 216,054 arrived all of last year.

In Luxembourg, the BBC reported, the 30 refugees who were relocated Wednesday will first be registered and then spend about three months in temporary housing, while authorities help them to find permanent homes, schools, and jobs.

Who Is the Actual Worst?

From time to time, at happy hour or by the proverbial water cooler, the thoughts of The Atlantic’s culture team return to one timeless question: Which character in the rich, complex, antiheroic world of modern television is the actual worst character ever?

“Worst,” by its nature as a superlative adjective, should be easy to define, but TV’s Golden Age being what it is, there’s a lot to consider. Should the title of actual worst go to someone like Game of Thrones’s Ramsay Bolton, a psychopath and sadist with an almost unparalleled propensity for cruelty; or to House of Cards’s Claire Underwood, who threatens an employee with what amounts to infanticide? Or should it go to Homeland’s Carrie, for being a terrible spy and sleeping with all her sources, or Scandal’s Fitz, for being the worst president (and married lover) in recent memory? Is the #actualworst character someone viewers love to hate or hate to love? Is it Lucious Lyon or Piper Chapman? Hannah Horvath or Walter White?

In September, we asked you to send us your suggestions, with the proviso that characters must have appeared on television within the past three years, and have to be nominated for the (awful) tenor of their character rather than the dastardliness of their deeds. We tallied the entries and came up with a list of 32 names who’ll go head to head over the next four weeks.

The bracket is divided into four quadrants, with four matchups being published every day over the next four days for readers to vote on. Voting for round one runs through Sunday November 8; round two commences November 10 and runs through November 15; round three runs November 17 through 22; and round four is live November 24 through 29. The final pair will face off on November 30, with the winner announced the following day.

Read the character summaries, vote at the end, and then tell us why you voted on Facebook and Twitter. We’ll be collecting comments and reactions throughout the month and publishing the best ones along the way. And don’t forget to use the hashtag, #actualworst.

Round one, day one (November 4)

Jim Moriarty (Sherlock) vs. Claire Underwood (House of Cards)  
Gemma Teller Morrow (Sons of Anarchy) vs. Tyrell Wellick (Mr. Robot)
Tammy ‘Two’ Swanson (Parks and Recreation) vs. Pete Campbell (Mad Men)
Gustavo Fring (Breaking Bad) vs. Wilson Fisk (Daredevil)

Round one, day two (November 5)

Frank Underwood (House of Cards) vs. Hannibal Lecter (Hannibal)
Hannah Horvath (Girls) vs. Robert Crawley (Downton Abbey)
Piper Chapman (OITNB) vs. Carrie Mathison (Homeland)
Walter White (Breaking Bad) vs. Lucious Lyon (Empire)

Round one, day three (November 6)

Ramsay Bolton (Game of Thrones) vs. Mason Verger (Hannibal)
Black Jack Randall (Outlander) vs. Vee Parker (OITNB)
Joffrey Baratheon (Game of Thrones) vs. Fish Mooney (Gotham)
Rowan Pope (Scandal) vs. Todd Alquist (Breaking Bad)

Round one, day four (November 7)

Marnie Michaels (Girls) vs. Carl Grimes (The Walking Dead)
Jonah Ryan (Veep) vs. Matt Bevers (Broad City)
Fitzgerald Grant (Scandal) vs. Jeremy Jamm (Parks and Recreation)
Andrea Harrison (The Walking Dead) vs. Elsa Mars (AHS: Freak Show)

#ActualWorst Round One: Gustavo Fring vs. Wilson Fisk

Throughout the month of November, we’re soliciting readers’ help to definitively answer an age-old question: Who is the actual worst character on television? We reviewed your submissions, did our own research, and came up with a list of 32 characters across four different categories, who’ll go head to head over the next four weeks until one of them is crowned as the most despicable, unlikeable, flat-out awful (fictional) person on the small screen.

See the bracket in its entirety here.

The Case for Gus (Breaking Bad) AMC

Why this character is the actual worst: He’s an international drug lord responsible for mass distribution of methamphetamines across the Southwestern United States, so that certainly counts against him. Behind a placid exterior, Gus nurses a ruthless acumen for business and organized crime, and is happy to murder anyone who defies him, even if they’re making him money, like the show’s antihero Walter White.

Worst moment/s: After his loyal assistant Victor makes a mistake cleaning up a crime scene and is spotted by civilians, Gus decides to make an example out of him. He calmly dons a hazmat suit and picks up a box cutter, seemingly preparing to get rid of a stammering Walter, who caused the crime scene Victor cleaned up, but then wordlessly draws the knife across Victor’s throat. “Well, get back to work,” he says.

Worst trait/s: He bears grudges. Gus’s undoing is his unending vendetta against the Mexican cartels, which gets him to drop his cool exterior and eventually leads to him making some stupid decisions. But also, for such a good manager, he could value people’s loyalty a little more. Poor Victor.

Redeeming moments/qualities: He’s a polite man, and seemingly a good business owner: His legitimate business is the fried-chicken chain Pollos Hermanos, and darn if Gus isn’t nice to the customers, fair with his co-workers, and the kind of manager who does shifts behind the cash register just to stay in touch with everyone. Maybe he just should have stuck to chicken. —David Sims

The Case for Wilson (Daredevil) Netflix

Why this character is the actual worst: There are plenty of good reasons to despise Wilson Fisk. He successfully embodies corruption and intimidation. He’s also a sociopathic murderer. But perhaps the thing that really makes Fisk so awful is his warped sense of self. Even without the nuance provided in the comic, Fisk’s difficult start—he was a bullied, chubby child with an abusive father who he winds up murdering—makes it easy to feel for him. So does his love for Vanessa, his mother, and his right-hand man, James Wesley. But the tenderness he shows those closest to him only makes his brutal methods of dealing with just about everyone else even more heinous. Fisk commits unspeakable crimes but severely punishes even the most minor of transgressions against his loved ones. He’s at once overly sensitive and almost completely unfeeling.

Worst moment/s: The time he used a car door to liquify the skull of an associate after he was embarrassed on a date with Vanessa. Or the intensely personal and devastating murder of the journalist who unwittingly visited Fisk’s ailing mother along with Karen Page and learned about Fisk’s violent past.

Worst trait/s: Violent, murderous temper tantrums. The hypocrisy with which he defends those he loves while carelessly tearing others apart.

Redeeming moments/qualities: Just about any interaction he has with his elderly mother. —Gillian B. White

The Joy of Charlie's Angels

Toward the end of the 2000 reboot of Charlie’s Angels, Drew Barrymore’s secret agent Dylan sits tied to a chair, muzzled by a piece of duct tape upon which Sam Rockwell’s villain has drawn the outline of what he calls “the fullest, sweetest, most luscious lips I have ever kissed.” Rockwell later tears the tape off, and five henchmen enter the room. “You guys like angel cake?” he asks, casually.

Barrymore deals with this implied threat of gang rape by splaying her legs in the air and giving a fun speech. “By the time this is over, every one of you is going to be face-down on the floor, and I’m going to moonwalk out of here,” she says with a cat-ate-the-canary look, giving specifics about whose back she’ll flip over, whose nose she’ll break, etc. She then makes good on her promises in an acrobatic fight scene, periodically pausing to announce the names of her kung-fu positions. “And that’s ‘kicking your ass!’” she shouts once she’s finished, before moonwalking—enthusiastically but poorly—out of the room.

It’s the signature scene of Charlie’s Angels, which was released 15 years ago today and now stands as a landmark of Y2K excess, cheer, and contradictory politics. The very premise—three awesome female cops employed by the unseen Charlie—would seem to necessarily comment on gender roles, but the new-millennium version of the ’70s TV show mostly came across as unweighted by social concerns. Its director McG Nichol, who’d only made music videos before, slathered on hyperactivity, gloss, and drum-and-bass songs while also not seeming too worried about plot coherence or the optics of objectification; he ended up with the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2000. Watched today, its carefree aura is so distinct, so winning, that it’s hard not to use dubious terms about simpler eras—pick either “pre-9/11” or “pre-social-media”— to describe it.

Barrymore co-produced the movie, and her shyly sweet personal vibe seeped through the entire thing; David Edelstein’s Slate review at the time called the film “so, so Drew” and said that “when she leaps into a battle you can see in her eyes that she’s amazed—and thrilled!—to be playing a kung-fu superhero.” This description also mostly applies to Cameron Diaz, whose character is meant to be a brilliant airhead, socially inept but well-read and very fond of disco dancing. Lucy Liu cuts a slight contrast; she’s in black leather a lot, and is the one Angel who airs inner angst, chaffing against the fact that she has to hide her accomplishments from her movie-star boyfriend played by Matt LeBlanc. If you wanted to make the argument that this characterization derives from typecasting—Liu has notoriously been asked to play “dragon ladies” throughout her career—you could find evidence in the scene where she becomes a brusque Japanese masseuse, or to the one where she plays a dominatrix-esque efficiency expert.

Then again, all of the movie’s many instances of dress-up would come across as degrading if the Angels seemed to feel degraded by them. Instead, they grin irrepressibly whether pretending to be Formula One drivers or dirndl-decked singers or other professionals in skin-tight/skin-baring uniforms. A shocking number of scenes revolve around girls creating sexual distractions, licking steering wheels and belly-dancing as helpless male onlookers more or less have steam shoot from their ears. McG’s camera always inhabits those guys’ sightlines and desires—this is a remake of an iconic “jiggle TV” series, after all—but the trio seems to be having a ball seducing men, which is either an example of empowerment or of the kind of porny fantasy that Gone Girl’s “Cool Girl” speech made fun of. Regardless, romantic warfare is just one tool in the Angels’ arsenal. The thrillingly fake Matrix-esque fight scenes telegraph that these women have brawn; a few hard-to-follow sequences involving foreign languages or ornithology expertise are meant to show that they also have very powerful brains.

The movie many scenes of dress-up would come across  as degrading if the Angels’ seemed to feel degraded at all by them.

If they could get their romantic lives in order, you’d say the Angels are Having It All. But in addition to Liu’s tensions with LeBlanc, Barrymore’s character seems to have questionable taste in men—first there’s a tryst with Tom Green’s moronic tugboat captain, and then one with the secretly evil Rockwell—and Diaz’s crime-fighting career keeps getting in the way of her courtship with the bartender played by Luke Wilson. Oh well: The film crushes the Bechdel test by having the three women act like genuine friends to one another, and their most important male relationships are either professional or paternal. Bill Murray’s Bosley is their beloved assistant/boss who becomes the traditional damsel in distress (complete with castle) in the film’s last act, and the yet-more-beloved Charlie is clearly a father figure, though he never makes it onto screen. It’s a creepy premise, really, having the three kickass women serving the whims of a shadowy, cigar-smoking gentleman, but again, the heroines don’t seem to mind at all.

It’s perhaps regressive to praise the film’s smiling obliviousness, but 15 years later, something about it feels refreshing. Maybe it’s just the total lack of darkness. Today, the most exciting female action stars are defined by Katniss Everdeen-style seriousness; the most exciting comedy women have Amy Schumer’s self-deprecating edge; even Pitch Perfect and Bridesmaids boast a level of drama and genuine conflict that Charlie’s Angels doesn’t bother with (men now more often get to have pathos-free fun—see 21 Jump Street and Magic Mike XXL for example). Recent reports say that Elizabeth Banks may direct a new Charlie’s Angels, and it’s easy to imagine all the ways she might try to improve upon the 2000 version: more body-type diversity, smarter jokes, filmmaking that doesn’t resemble a string of beer and car commercials. But it’d be heartening if, amid the changes, there was still room for Angels who get to be, for the most part, angelic.

Katie Nolan's Garbage Time Is the Future of Sports TV

There’s no sphere of television more depressingly homogenous than sports broadcasting, not only in demographics, but also in formatting. Ninety percent of the content on channels like ESPN involves ex-athletes and talk-radio hosts batting around scripted talking points, and the lack of new voices is one reason there’s so little real discourse about controversial issues in sports. But since it debuted in March, Fox Sports 1’s Garbage Time With Katie Nolan has broken that pattern. Nolan’s freewheeling talk show, airing every Wednesday at midnight, stands out as much for its humor as it does for its willingness to tackle tough topics such as domestic violence and mental illness.

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The 28-year-old Nolan is still in the “up-and-coming” bracket: Fox Sports 1 remains a junior competitor to the ESPN behemoth and Garbage Time is nestled deep in its schedule. After starting a sports blog while bartending in Boston, Nolan began hosting and producing shows on YouTube for Fox Sports. She graduated to “digital correspondent” for the network in 2013 before getting her own show this year. Garbage Time is a distillation of Nolan’s witty, sometimes sarcastic, always hyper-knowledgeable sportscaster persona: a kinetic mix of commentary, scripted comedy, and interviews peppered by off-screen laughs and jeers from her production crew. In the way it seamlessly and energetically switches from funny to serious, it feels more like E!’s long-running hit The Soup crossed with The Daily Show than typical sports commentary.

If you’ve heard of Nolan, it might be because of her coverage of the Dallas Cowboys defensive end Greg Hardy’s return to the game after serving a four-game suspension for domestic assault. Hardy was found guilty of assaulting his ex-girlfriend in 2014, but he appealed the decision and reportedly settled the case out of court. When his ex-girlfriend didn’t appear to testify at the appeal, the case was dropped, and a 10-game NFL ban was reduced to four on internal appeal. Nolan’s reaction to Hardy’s return was measured and all the more powerful because of it: Though she called him a “garbage human,” she spent as much time excoriating the media’s soft endorsement of his behavior. Many journalists asked him softball questions in the locker room about his return to football, while others even defended Hardy’s flippant attitude toward the case.

If it seems like Nolan is picking on an easy target, that only underlines how weak sports broadcasting is when it comes to domestic violence. When Terry Bradshaw ripped into the NFL on FOX NFL Sunday for letting Hardy back on the field, his co-hosts gazed at him uncomfortably. Nolan herself is subjected to online abuse from fans for daring address the topic, a depressingly predictable state of affairs in the world of sports fandom. But what stands out most about Garbage Time’s segments on the Hardy issue is the nuance Nolan injects: In a subsequent bit, she noted that Hardy exhibited all the signs of a mental-health problem (his anger issues on the field have only increased since his return).

“Don’t let ... anybody in the Cowboys organization fool you into thinking they support Greg Hardy. They don’t,” she said. “They support sacks. They’ll say and do whatever they can while he’s in Dallas to get him to keep devastating offensive linemen, and when he’s done doing that they’ll shove him out the door a worse man than he was when he got there, thanks to their years of enabling him.” Referencing past NFL players with histories of mental-health issues, Nolan turned a simple direct-to-camera rant into a look at a wider systemic problem in a sport that’s just beginning to emerge from its prehistoric thinking on its players’ well-being.

Mostly, Garbage Time has a looser feel, and is happy to indulge silly comedy bits as often as in-depth reporting. Its time slot works as a fun perch from which to razz the rest of sports media. After Bill Simmons’s much publicized departure from ESPN, Nolan had him briefly “take over” her show for a hastily staged bit that was as funny as it was amateurish. (Simmons has long touted Nolan as a rising star in sports media and reportedly tried to poach her for ESPN while he was there.) When Deadspin’s Greg Howard published a searing take-down of Jason Whitlock’s disastrous tenure at the ESPN site The Undefeated, Nolan had the writer on to talk about his reporting process, something that couldn’t have happened on ESPN (Fox Sports 1 now, ironically, employs Whitlock and Colin Cowherd, another ESPN cast-off Nolan has been happy to mock).

For now, Garbage Time is a lovable underdog, and Nolan is the ideal host, but she’s definitely on the rise: She just launched a popular new podcast and currently boasts 158,000 followers on Twitter. Sports broadcasting often softens the edge of its renegades, especially those climbing into higher positions—Simmons, for example, never seemed comfortable hosting NBA broadcasts for ESPN, and remains at his best when hosting a podcast. Nolan may have to strike a tougher balance in the future, but for now Garbage Time should be celebrated as the much needed rebel in the otherwise uniform world of sports TV.