What you need to do is have them not be the protagonist at all, but the person who *helps* the protagonist. Sherlock Holmes is never the one to whom the interesting thing happens, he's the one who investigates interesting things happening to others.

If we needed a spinoff I'm not sure why we couldn't have had five episodes starring the Jo Martin Doctor.

I think the main problem is that this is an inexplicably unappealing premise. The current UNIT crew are a low-charisma bunch and only work as supporting characters for the Doctor, and the Sea Devils aren't interesting in and of themselves, either.

Don Draper is a fantasy of being a 21st century man going back to the 1950s and thinking thoughts like "oh but of course a woman is as good at creativity as a man". It's a fantasy of superiority every bit as seductive as fantasies of 'inferior peoples' who 'need to be governed' by colonisers.

and this feels something big that's happened to us as a culture. a total moral superiority to the past (my instinct is that this is technocratic in origin, but interested to hear other explanations) to the point that we really cannot believe it was like that.

(Seen in this light, the way some time travel SF frets about the morality of changing history makes more sense: consciously or not, it's really thinking about colonialism, intervening in other people's societies.)

Rieder connected time travel stories to a style of anthropology that saw social development as teleological, and condescendingly classified other societies as distant in time—previous steps along the road to us.

Tolkien was not, in fact, very interested in realism at all. He was interested in religion, and myth, and language. The mistake people keep making is conflating realism for detail: they're not the same thing, and detail need not be the enemy of imagination.

it's not that you can't give a classic a bad review but there's a certain smugness about the way some people do it that I find intolerable. oh you didn't like the great gatsby? should we throw a party? should we invite ernest hemingway

Basically I think one skill everybody on the left ought to learn is rhetoric.

Also, if you have more than a few dozen followers on social media you’re not just chatting with your friends, you’re a small-scale influencer. What effect do you want that influence to have?

Not that we have the media's ears, but we can talk to people in our communities. If it helps to call Republicans weird, you can call them weird whenever the subject comes up.