Portside

Outlander returns on April 4, 2015 with new episodes to finish out its inaugural season. While it’s difficult to label neatly, there’s much to both enjoy and analyze in the complexity of Outlander, even as that very quality is likely to earn it foes. Its feminine focus and occasionally disconcerting sexual politics may earn it rejection from both sides of the gender discussion—some because it is “too feminist,” others because it’s not feminist enough.

With AMC's Halt and Catch Fire's second season arriving soon, a reflection on the first. Halt and Catch Fire's finale reveals it was anti-capitalist all along. For all the early technical bells and whistles, Halt has a straightforward, pleasing story arc—a ragtag team that against long odds and many obstacles does the near impossible—that toward the season’s end ran into a genuinely thought-provoking hurdle: capitalism.

Popular culture may be getting more diverse in terms of gender and skin color, but it's still mostly flat in presenting diverse human qualities and differences. Few characters play against type, which makes the exceptions all the more remarkable. Part of the power of characters playing against type is simply their insistence, humorous and without qualified explanation, of their existence. In other words, like most of comedy, its power is better experienced, not explained

In criticizing capitalism for mass consumption instead of exploitation, The Americans uses Soviet characters to valorize austerity.