Poor Mojo's Newswire

This structure appears often on 30 Rock: Liz starts from a progressive perspective before coming around to Jack's way of seeing things. In Season 2, Liz becomes suspicious that her new neighbor, Raheem Haddad, is a terrorist. As she walks around the Upper West Side, she passes a series of posters—"If you see something, say something," "if you suspect anything, do everything." Whipped into a paranoid frenzy ("Be an American; call it in," Jack tells her), Liz reports Raheem, a USA-loving innocent who is brutally interrogated and turns against America in the process. Here, we're meant to shake our heads and chuckle—the show, ever slippery, is poking simultaneous fun at the flimsiness of Liz's liberal values, at Jack's callous hawkishness, and at the way both perspectives collude to make the world a worse place.

More often, though, as in the Rosemary episode, we seem meant to accept Liz's Jack-ward drift, if not cheer it on outright, as part of her maturation. Jack is a target of the show's ridicule, but even as his worldview is satirized, it's often presented as inevitable. Yes, he's an unfeeling, creatively inept conservative, but he's also peerless when it comes to real-world maneuvering. When Liz gets in over her head at work, in life, and in love, Jack is both her foil and her life coach, on hand to swoop in and save the day. This can take on an aspect that borders, strangely, on the anti-feminist. Toward the end of Season 1, Liz's hormones get the best of her and she goes on a crazy-eyed, jealousy-driven firing spree. It's up to Jack to coolly intervene, transferring her romantic rival to another city. When the smoke clears, he asks Liz, "You still think our next president should be a woman?" It's a funny, complicated jab. With it, Fey and her team acknowledge the conservative plotline they've written about a woman whose emotions prevent her from doing her job well—but they don't disavow it.

Tom McCarthy has come aboard to direct HBO's fantasy pilot "Game of Thrones," on which the star of his first feature, "The Station Agent's" Peter Dinklage, has been tapped for a key role.

Based on George R.R. Martin's best-selling "Songs of Fire and Ice" novels, "Thrones" is described as an epic struggle for power set in a vast and violent fantasy kingdom. Dinklage will play Tyrion, the Queen's brother who is treated as an outsider because of his size.

Shoot-outs, robberies, gas-huffing, drug-dealing, pill-popping, murders, and tap dancing. From MTV Studios and executive producers Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine comes a shocking and outlandish year-in-the-life documentary about the Whites—Boone County, West Virginia’s most notorious and surly family. Nestled deep in the Appalachian Mountains, the White family lives an existence more like something from the Wild West than modern day suburbified America. The legendary family is as known for their wild, excessive criminal ways as they are for their famous mountain dancing members, including Jesco White, the star of the cult classic documentary Dancing Outlaw. Over the course of one tumultuous year, the Whites deal with a stabbing, criminal sentencing, attempted murder, death, and birth. The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia debuts at the Tribeca Film Festival this coming weekend.

My favorite thought-piece about Ferris Bueller is the “Fight Club” theory, in which Ferris Bueller, the person, is just a figment of Cameron’s imagination, like Tyler Durden, and Sloane is the girl Cameron secretly loves.

One day while he’s lying sick in bed, Cameron lets “Ferris” steal his father’s car and take the day off, and as Cameron wanders around the city, all of his interactions with Ferris and Sloane, and all the impossible hijinks, are all just played out in his head. This is part of the reason why the “three” characters can see so much of Chicago in less than one day — Cameron is alone, just imagining it all.

It isn’t until he destroys the front of the car in a fugue state does he finally get a grip and decide to confront his father, after which he imagines a final, impossible escape for Ferris and a storybook happy ending for Sloane (”He’s gonna marry me!”), the girl that Cameron knows he can never have.