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• Mixed-ish. ABC. Tuesday, September 24, 9 p.m.
• Emergence. ABC. Tuesday, September 24, 10 p.m.
• Stumptown. ABC. Wednesday, September 25, 10 p.m.
• Evil. CBS. Thursday, September 26, 10 p.m.

In the onslaught of stupidity, cupidity and (to anyone who watches it long enough) hyperacidity that is the 2019 broadcast TV season, there’s a brief ceasefire for the next few days.

Four intensely watchable pilots make their debuts in mid-week. In each case, their survivability ranges from questionable to doubtful. But you might as well watch while you’ve got the chance; trust me, the season isn’t going to burst into vivid Technicolor life like The Wizard Of Oz. (And—spoiler alert—no houses get dropped onto witches’ heads, either.)

The best single hour of the fall season is ABC’s Stumptown, a hyperviolent noir which starts with a victim escaping from her kidnappers with not-doctor-recommended usages of a fire extinguisher, a seatbelt and her teeth. It only gets progressively more deranged from there.

Based on a rough-and-tumble comic book of the same name, the sly, pulpy Stumptown features Cobie Smulders (Friends from College) as Dex Parios, back in her hometown of Portland after five tours in Afghanistan.

Once a decorated military intelligence officer, Parios is a PTSD burnout who’s sardonic, drunken, and mostly at the end of her rope. Her main forms of recreation are random hookups and losing her disability check shooting craps at an Indian casino.

About the only thing tethering Parios to the real world is her need to somehow provide for a younger brother who has Down Syndrome (Cole Sibus, A&E’s Born This Way). That’s why she takes a fishy private investigator gig hunting down the missing teenage daughter of the casino owner, and immediately the fists, lead and even cars start flying.

Like any good noir detective, Parios has a past pockmarked with tragedy, a welter of withered relationships and a nasty co-dependence with the local cops, capably played by the admiring Michael Ealy (The Following) and the disdainful Camryn Manheim (The Practice).

Between the intricately staged violence and Smulders’ wonderfully wisecracking, knuckle-busting performance, the Stumptown pilot is an intense experience—so much so that it’s hard to believe the rest of the series can hold up to the same standard. How many errant teenagers are out there? Well … okay, but how many are worth driving your car off a bridge for? How often is a fire extinguisher going to be at the right place at the right time to bash somebody’s head in with it? How many guys’ shirts can Parios rip from their six-pack abs before there’s a shortage?

The problem with ABC’s otherwise entertaining Emergence is similar: How many airline catastrophes can reveal vast, cosmic and hopelessly confusing conspiracies before everybody goes back to taking the train? Count ’em up: ABC’s Lost. Fox’s Fringe. NBC’s Manifest. Airliners have become the Grassy Knoll of conspiracy TV.

Emergence follows a now-familiar pattern: In a weather-beaten seaside town on a remote Long Island promontory, there’s a short power failure, followed by a weird Northern Lights-type display and then, of course, a plane crash on the beach.

When town police chief Jo Evans (Allison Tolman of the TV version of Fargo) arrives at the crash site, she finds a little girl (Alexa Swinton, Billions) with no memory of anything, including her own name, but too unscathed to have emerged from the smoldering plane wreck.

Even more mysterious: the flock of NTSB investigators who show up within minutes of the crash demanding custody of the girl and threatening to arrest Evans’ officers when they don’t hand her over. “NTSB doesn’t have arrest authority,” replies the chief in a wintry voice. “I do.” But she has no answer to the little girl’s warning: “If I remember, I’ll have to go away.”

Emergence‘s pilot is a pleasantly spooky hour, with some not-all-that-faint echoes of Netflix’s Stranger Things. It’s aided immeasurably by the casting of Tolman as a size-16 protagonist who is neither a vixen or a superhero, just a good cop with decent human instincts.

But you can practically hear space aliens whispering in the background of the Emergence soundtrack of time travel and alternate universes to come. Ultimately, Emergence is likely to be an exercise in nostalgia for the Golden Age of air travel, when you worried about your luggage getting lost rather than being sucked through a hole in the time-space continuum.

There was a lot of optimism about CBS’ new crime drama Evil because its production team is led by Robert and Michelle King, who created three of this century’s most intelligent television shows—law-and-politics drama The Good Wife, its spinoff The Good Fight and BrainDead, a splendidly contemptuous vision of American politics in which Washington is taken over by brain-eating parasites. (No, not a reality show.)

Evil, unfortunately for its Nielsen points if not for viewers, takes a more cerebral approach that lacks the snap, crackle and pop of the other King shows. It’s a sort of X-Files in which investigators are troubled by metaphysical questions of morality rather than drooling bug-eyed monsters.

Katja Herbers, lately one of the naked but soulless (or maybe I’ve got that reversed) robots on Westworld, plays forensic psychologist Kristen Bouchard. A frequent prosecution witness against serial killers, she attacks their insanity defenses after administering tests that aren’t exactly subtle. (“True or false: I like the sound of a woman screaming.”)

While pursuing her latest target, a knife-wielder named Orson who has chopped up three families, Bouchard bumps into a couple of men who, she assumes, are defense witnesses coaching up the defendant. To her surprise, they turn out to be Catholic Church investigators who suspect Orson is possessed by a demon.

Many of the symptoms that the Church team associates with demons—say, shouting curses and threats in Latin—are easily faked. Other facts, though, leave Bouchard nonplused. How would Orson know details about her marriage, including her growing estrangement for her absentee husband?

At the same time, she starts having luridly detailed and sexually disturbing nightmares featuring Orson’s purported demon. And as Bouchard’s befuddlement grows, she gets a surprise: an offer to join the church team as a professional skeptic, to be matched against the true-believer investigator David Acosta (Mike Colter, who had a recurring role as a Chicago gang leader on The Good Wife), a priest in training.

“Possession looks a lot like insanity,” Acosta concedes. “And insanity looks a lot like possession. I need someone to help me distinguish between the two.”

Herbers and Colter play well off one another as Evil prowls the borders between science and religion, determinism and morality. And complicating their search is that they both believe in the existence of non-supernatural evil, of “people out there who do bad things and encourage others to do bad things, for the sheer pleasure of it,” as Acosta puts it.

Though Evil manages some truly unnerving moments, particularly the scenes with the lascivious demon, it’s more about ideas than the pea-soup-vomiting stuff audiences usually expect from stories about demons and exorcism. In post-Kardashian America, it may be too late to convince viewers that evil is more than a matter of table manners.

Like Evil, ABC’s Mixed-ish seems redolent of an earlier television time—but in this case, it was inevitable. Mixed-ish is the third franchise in the Black-ish empire that executive producer Kenya Barris launched in 2014. And perhaps Barris (or somebody; the show credits list nine executive producers) has recaptured some of the magic of his original work.

Black-ish started out as light-hearted commentary on the cultural conflicts in homes of the black bourgeoise, and most of the white characters were clueless and bumbling. But in the past couple of years, many of them have devolved to malicious racism. (The change may not be ideological. Barris’ life has been a bumpy one recently; he left his production contract with ABC behind for Netflix last year, and he recently filed for divorce from his wife Rania, upon whom Black-ish character Rainbow Johnson is based.)

Meanwhile, the second franchise—Grown-ish, in which the family’s teenage daughter goes off to college, was so insipidly derivative that ABC demoted it to its kiddie network Freeform, where the audience is too young to have seen the John Hughes films from which it was ripped off.

Mixed-ish has a much fresher feel than the other shows. It’s a prequel to Black-ish, with young stage actress Arica Himmel playing an adolescent version of Rainbow Johnson, who grew up in a racially mixed family in a rural commune.

As the show opens in the summer of 1985, the commune has just been shut down and the family has moved into to the suburban home of Rainbow’s wealthy white grandfather. It’s full of new experiences for the three siblings: Television. Flush toilets. The Second Amendment. (Grandpa, a Reagan Republican, has decreed a constitutional right to bear squirt guns.)

Not everything in Mixed-ish is high-spirited, though. The most startling thing to the kids is not consumerist technology but the rigid identity-politics concept of race, which didn’t exist on the commune. The mixed-race Johnson kids are neither white nor black, in the views of their schoolmates and even some members of their long-estranged families.

“They’re black and white,” Rainbow’s mom pleads with one particularly strident member of her family. “Don’t make them choose sides.” The kids, though, are quick to sense which way the winds are blowing. When Rainbow says the kids should remain above racial definitions, her younger sister retorts: “I think there couldn’t be a whiter thing to say.” Faintly, on the soundtrack, you can hear Cher singing, “Half-breed, how I learned to hate the word… .”

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Robert Hunter, the main lyricist for the Grateful Dead, has died at age 78 of so-far undisclosed causes. Rolling Stone has a decent summation of his life and career.

Hunter’s words were unusual and revelatory for “pop music” and formed a folk philosophy for a large generation of Deadheads who didn’t merely enjoy the band’s music, but made traveling around with them a modern way to emulate America’s grand and troubled tradition of traveling frontier seekers, sometimes helping themselves and the places they traveled, sometimes harming them.

But a certain patriotic vision animated it all. As quoted in a book review on a history of the Dead from Reason back in 2003:

Hunter….found distasteful the fealty to Moscow and Peking (as it was called back then) widespread among prominent ’60s revolutionaries. That fealty, he thought, was why that aspect of the ’60s faded away while the Dead kept on truckin’. “We honor American culture, and what we find good in it,” Hunter said of the Dead. And he knew American culture from many perspectives. As a member of the National Guard, Hunter had been called up to keep order during the 1965 Watts riots.

As Jerry Garcia, Hunter’s old friend and the man who composed music to and sang his lyrics, added, “Our trip was never to go out and change the world. I mean, what would we change it to? Whatever we did would probably be worse than the way it is now.” Why, Garcia asked, “enter this closed society and make an effort to liberalize it when that’s never been its function? Why not leave and go somewhere else?” Hunter was able to take a bemused delight in the country that, as he personified it, “shook the hand of P.T. Barnum and Charlie Chan” and that “lived in a silver mine, but called it Beggar’s Tomb.”

The psychedelic experience that helped launch the Dead as a worldwide phenomenon, was, in an irony Hunter pointed out, pushed along by the U.S. government itself. Hunter once said that the U.S. government “created me…and [Ken] Kesey and the Acid Tests,” since Hunter and Kesey were first exposed to powerful psychedelics as volunteers in government military research in the early ’60s.

In one of their most iconic songs, Hunter wrote of the mysteriously inspirational “Uncle John’s Band” that “their walls are built of cannonballs/their motto is ‘don’t tread on me.'”

The America summed up by that image−rugged, ornery, jealous of its liberty−shows what made Hunter’s songs of enduring interest to those fascinated by the meaning and accomplishments of the American experiment in liberty, in the vices and virtues of an anarchistic American frontier. Despite what the cliched image of a doped-out Deadhead might suggest, Hunter dealt with vice and dissolution with a reasonably brutal honesty—anything that felt like a joyous celebration of decadence is rare in his writing. “Casey Jones, you better watch your speed.”

Hunter’s work, unusual for a career writer of popular song, was also not very heavily focused on romantic love, and his most indelible essaying of the topic, “Scarlet Begonias,” is mostly about how men should realize that the endless quest for new women to win might not be serving those men well. Rather, by Hunter’s constant references to an imagined and mythical old frontier in general, his technique of making modern tall tales and fables out of sometimes warped versions of his, the band’s, or his generation’s own experiences and attitudes, his lyrics became a genuine continuation of the American folklore he drew on.

The historical streams of pre-existing folklore and musical style that fed into his songs such as “Cumberland Blues,” “Casey Jones,” “Jack Straw,” and “Dire Wolf” reveal Hunter and the Dead’s role in the eternal chain of folk music in a modern context. For American kids of the past 50 years for whom talk of “balling the jack” or “a buck dancer’s choice” don’t mark the music as arisen from their own intimate and folksy experience but as something exotic, strange, alien—Hunter’s vivid, complicated, character-filled lyrics sold back to a certain generation of weird Americans a lost and mysterious version of their own country.

His songs will undoubtedly continue to be sung for a long, long time to come, and to impart means of understanding and coping with the exigencies of many of his themes—many uncommon in pop lyrics—of work, responsibility, fate, death, nature, and music itself. Hunter, in combination with his composing partner Garcia and the machinery of touring and recording the band built around their songs, created a semi-coherent artistic universe where the same characters might meet and interact, helping and cheating each other back and forth, a world that’s all difficult and ornery frontier as seen with a God’s-eye view, of what seems a largely Godless universe.

It’s a place for stoic men to struggle with necessity and destiny and the entrapping bonds of character—a world, as Garcia once described it, “where the laws are falling apart and every person is the sheriff and the outlaw.” It’s an America that is rough, challenging, but exciting, adventurous, and well worth living in, and Hunter and the band that sang his songs helped made it all those things.

Hunter wrote in one of his most dazzling lyrics, “Terrapin Station,” that, “The storyteller makes no choice/Soon you will not hear his voice/His job is to shed light and not to master,” a gorgeous and wise summation of his own contributions, and that of the band that sang his songs. We no longer hear his voice. But of course we still do, and always will.

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Does it matter whether President Donald Trump actually supports criminal justice reform as long as he signs the relevant bills into law?

That’s the focus of an insidery Politico piece by Gabby Orr and Daniel Lippman, which features anonymous people connected to Trump saying that the president thinks the important reforms of the FIRST STEP Act are a “dud” because it doesn’t motivate his voters and the Democrats want credit for the bill.

The FIRST STEP Act was a bipartisan affair, signed into law by Trump, but hammered out by reform-minded members of Congress and pushed by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and celebrity Kim Kardashian. The FIRST STEP Act reduced some federal mandatory minimum sentences, including some retroactively, and increased the amount of “good time” credits inmates can earn to get out of prison earlier (the federal prison system does not offer parole).

The law has benefited thousands of federal prisoners, according to stats released in July by the Department of Justice. Trump has made note of the FIRST STEP Act in some speeches. But according to Politico, he doesn’t actually care that much about it and is not happy that he might not benefit politically from its passage, while Democrats might. As Politico notes:

Kushner, whose own father spent more than a year in federal prison, worked closely with Democratic and Republican senators to get the criminal justice reform bill over the finish line last year—often telling his tough-on-crime boss it was worth expending political capital to seize a rare opportunity to overcome the deeply partisan divide on Capitol Hill and solidify his image as a pragmatic dealmaker.

But now, Trump “is telling people he’s mad” at how criminal justice reform has panned out, according to a person close to the president. “He’s really mad that he did it. He’s saying that he’s furious at Jared because Jared is telling him he’s going to get all these votes of all these felons.”

Color me less than outraged. Trump is only saying the kind of thing out loud that other politicians would have the good sense to keep to themselves, even though their motivations would not be that different. Trump is an openly transactional politician—he wants to benefit in some way from his political decisions. Certainly, the members of Congress who actually hammered out the FIRST STEP Act are also hoping to get credit from voters when re-election time comes around. And Democratic challengers to Trump are wheeling out their own criminal justice reform packages in the hopes of winning over voters.

CNN pundit and criminal justice reform activist Van Jones sees these anonymous whispers as coming from folks in Trump’s orbit who never supported the FIRST STEP Act in the first place and are happy to put out the message that these types of bills are not in Trump’s interest. Here’s what he told Politico:

“There’s always been a bunch of people in the building, they didn’t like it before, during or after, and they’ve always been able to leak out anonymous bullshit quotes that then very quickly have egg on their faces because Trump does something else positive in this direction of throws in another line in a speech,” said Jones, who confirmed that Trump has been frustrated with the lack of credit he’s received.

It may be true that Trump is unhappy that his signing of the FIRST STEP Act doesn’t give him political ownership of criminal justice reform, and it may well mean that we’ll see no more such reforms under Trump. But the FIRST STEP Act did, in fact, get signed, and it has made life better for thousands. That’s what matters. Let’s not clutch our collective pearls that a president’s support for a law is significantly influenced by the political advantages he hopes to gain from signing it.

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A San Francisco Superior Court judge has tentatively sided with tech company Salesforce in a civil lawsuit brought by 90 women who claim they were sexually exploited. The suit is the first of its kind since last year’s passage of a federal law called FOSTA, which widened punishments for web companies that promote or facilitate prostitution.

The case highlights both the limits of FOSTA and the importance of another federal law—known as Section 230—that is currently under siege from both left and right.

As a large business-to-business software company, Salesforce counted Backpage among its clients. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Salesforce allege that Backpage—a classified-advertising platform popular with sex workers—enabled them to be trafficked for sex.

But Backpage was seized by the U.S. government last year, making it a moot point for purposes of seeking civil court damages. And, hence, lawyers got to work targeting Salesforce.

They should have known better. With respect for the plight of victim-plaintiffs in this suit, their lawyers have led them astray, big time, while marking a new low in attempts to assign legal liability to internet companies for their users’ actions and words.

See, this lawsuit—as with many similar cases before it—hinges on Section 230 of federal communication law, which specifically shields internet companies from being treated as legally one with every user. And under a large body of legal precedent, Salesforce would be unequivocally shielded by Section 230 in this case.

Section 230 does not apply where federal criminal prosecutions are concerned. And it doesn’t apply when websites and tech companies are directly implicated in crimes themselves. But this isn’t a criminal prosecution, and no one is claiming that Salesforce directly participated in illegal activity, conspired with Backpage users who committed sex trafficking, or had direct knowledge of any specific crimes that may have occurred. Salesforce simply provided software to Backpage. And other courts have repeatedly said that Section 230 shielded Backpage from legal liability in similar circumstances.

Yet FOSTA, signed into law last April, poked a hole in Section 230. It created an exception to its protection for digital actors where allegations of forced or underage prostitution (i.e. sex trafficking) are concerned.

FOSTA was “enacted to ensure that courts would no longer rule that claims like Jane Does’ were barred by Section 230,” argue the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Salesforce suit.

They’re half right. The trouble is that these Jane Does’ claims are based on alleged violations by Salesforce of California state law. And FOSTA does not actually apply to private civil lawsuits based on alleged violations of state law.

Under FOSTA, Congress carved out a Section-230 exception for three kinds of actions: 1) state criminal cases, 2) civil enforcement actions brought by state attorneys general, and 3) private civil lawsuits alleging a federal cause of action. None of these three exceptions applies in the suit against Salesforce.

“Even apart from Section 230, Plaintiffs have not pled any viable claim against Salesforce,” the company’s lawyers argued to the court—and they are probably right. However, due to Section 230, this point is likely already moot.

Section 230 bars the claims in this case, Judge Ethan P. Schulman said in his tentative ruling.

None of this is too terribly heartening; after all, the damage was done by FOSTA’s very passage, which seems to have frightened many online actors into more censorship and driven sex-related industries further underground. But at least this preliminary ruling shows there may be some limits to the ludicrous actions that will be permitted under FOSTA’s name.

In any event, the plaintiffs may still contest the tentative ruling, and their lawyers told Bloomberg that they plan to do so. In that case, Judge Schulman will be forced to go ahead with oral arguments. But even so, a ruling in the plaintiffs’ favor seems unlikely based on the plain facts of the case.

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A House subcommittee hearing on the allegedly harmful effects of e-cigarettes took a bizarre turn when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.) asked the panel’s only pro-vaping witness, Vicki Porter, whether she was a conspiracy theorist.

Tlaib had apparently noticed Porter winking at one of the Republican participants, and thought this was possibly indicative of something nefarious. Porter patiently explained that she knew this man personally, and was just saying hello.

Tlaib’s larger concern, of course, was that Porter had directly and quite pointedly challenged the tortured logic of the Oversight and Reform subcommittee hearing. Contrary to the other participant’s assertions that vaping was bad, full stop, Porter thanked e-cigarettes for helping her to quit smoking—and reminded Congress that there were millions of other adults just like her.

“Vaping is a health miracle to me,” said Porter. “Not safe, but less harmful.”

Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Shultz (D–Fla.) dismissed Porter’s comments, saying, “I want to confirm the testimony of Ms. Porter is anecdotal, related specifically to her opinion, and she is not a public health expert.”

Tlaib celebrated the anti-vaping witnesses for “speaking truth about this, because the long-term effects are very dangerous” before attempting to discredit Porter with the conspiracy-theorist-smear.

.@RashidaTlaib attacks conservative vaping advocate Vicki Porter: “Are you a conspiracy theorist?” pic.twitter.com/Czf5cALRks

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 24, 2019

Moments before, Tlaib had asserted secondhand smoking was “worse than directly smoking cigarettes.” This, of course, is not true—indeed, it’s utterly ludicrous. Who is the conspiracy theorist, again?

For more on Tlaib’s fact-free anti-vape agenda, read the Reason Foundation’s Guy Bentley.

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