A new study from the University of Virginia suggests that fast-paced television, defined by the researchers in the following way — “To quantify pacing, the 2 television episodes were viewed for the number of times a complete scene change occurred (eg, from swimming pool to bedroom). For the fast-paced show, the scene completely changed on average every 11 seconds; even within the scene, characters were almost constantly rapidly moving through space. The educational television show had a
complete scene change every 34 seconds on average” — has a negative impact on children’s self-control and attention span. I’d be curious to know, though, how much that has to do on whether the information conveyed from scene to scene builds on information you’ve received previously. If the Ghostwriter kids are bopping from the community garden to the bodega to Lenni’s studio to Jamal’s townhouse because they’re putting together clues in a case, wouldn’t that make viewers tune out distractions and focus on what the kids are learning along the way? I guess Ghostwriter and Sponge Bob, which the study used as a test show, are aimed at different ages when kids have different levels of cognition. But I’d be curious to know at which age kids start to be able to follow a narrative, and what kinds of narratives are a reach that help them learn versus which sort of narratives are just too complicated for them.

A.W. Merrick’s been a cheerful if somewhat marginal figure in our story up until this point. And so the journalist in me was delighted to see A.W. stand up for himself in matters of business and the heart, and to call out Cy Tolliver for interfering with him. First, Commissioner Jarry shows up in A.W.’s office, thinking he can boss the jovial newsman around with a mere “Great respect for the fourth estate. Here’s a statement to be printed.” But A.W. may back down to Al Swearengen in matters of phrasing, but he is no fool about the nature of his community, especially when he sees how meaningless that statement on property rights is. He is, after all, an investor in Deadwood himself. “What will exactly will or won’t qualify or mitigate the presumption of ownership eludes me,” he warns Jarry. “Without an accompanying explanation this statement may work an unsettling effect.” When Jarry tries to bully him, A.W. sticks to his guns and rather than puts out the paper, prints the notice, and sticks around to interpret it.

And when Cy Tolliver, snakelike as always, has A.W.’s press smashed (“Got any sledgehammers?” asks his goon. “Always,” Cy replies, very nearly twirling his moustache.), A.W. confronts him, declaring “We differ, Mr. Tolliver, on the function of the press.” Cy may think he’s being smooth when he mock-queries “Ain’t the lesson for you in this, Merrick, that with fucked-up machinery the press can’t function.” But I don’t think we’ve seen the last of A.W. Maybe it’s that he’s energized by the presence in town of the new schoolmarm (“How I revere your, your profession,” is the new best dorky compliment a guy can give.) or maybe it’s just that he’s found an issue that galvanizes him. But it’s nice to see the president of the Ambulators get his chance to be a hero.
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There will be a lot of new television shows competing for your attention over the next couple of weeks, but there’s only one that will only take a couple minutes of your time each week and is pushing forward the pop culture conversation about marriage equality, sexual orientation in sports, and the relationships between gay men and straight women. That’s Husbands, a new web series from Jane Espenson, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica and director Jeff Greenstein, a veteran of Friends, Will & Grace, Parenthood , and Desperate Housewives . I spoke with them and the rest of the show’s cast and crew for a two-part series about the state of web television, and the state of gay relationships in popular culture:

“When we did Will & Grace, we were attempting to extend the recent gains Ellen had made when it revealed to America that the spunky gal they were already in love with happened to be gay,” says Husbands director Jeff Greenstein, who won an Emmy in 2000 for his work on Will & Grace, and is a writer and executive producer on Desperate Housewives and State of Georgia, which premiered this summer. “Over the course of eight seasons, we were able to gently move both these men into mature relationships. And by that I don’t just mean two guys lounging on the sofa watching Funny Girl, but falling in love, planning a life, kissing on the lips and sleeping together. Which for the time was kind of a big deal. It’s been six years since Will & Grace, and gay guys on network TV are still lounging on the sofa watching Funny Girl.”

Rather than emulating dramas like The Kids Are All Right or comedies like Modern Family as a way to explore the realities of marriage, the creators of Husbands looked to stories about young married couples no matter their gender. Jane Espenson, the show’s co-creator and a veteran of shows ranging from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Battlestar Galactica, took television shows Mad About You and Dharma & Greg as inspiration, while Greenstein looked to Barefoot in the Park. While most looks at gay couples tend to treat them as if they’re established, Cheeks, the show’s co-creator, says he and Espenson stumbled on the idea of looking at the beginning of a marriage. “It seemed like such a classic, yet timely, premise,” he says, as couples line up to marry in New York.

“Yes, the issue is serious, but every individual marriage is funny,” says Espenson. “And just making that point is making a point about marriage equality—look how this is just a normal marriage in every way, including all of its own personal craziness.”

The show premieres at 9:30 EST/6:30 PST tonight on its website. I’ve read through the first season’s worth of scripts, and it’s a fresh, funny show, a genuine bridge to something new and different. And more to the point, Husbands is effectively a pitch to a network. This first season is really a first-episode pilot. If an audience comes together around the web series, a network won’t have to speculate about whether there’s an viewership for an irreverent equal marriage comedy — they’ll know for sure that audience exists. Tuning in is mostly an abstract way to show support for something fresh and different unless you’re a Nielsen viewer. This is a time when we can actually cast countable votes with our mouses.

Nancy Franklin, who has been the television critic at the august weekly for 13 years, is leaving the magazine. I don’t know that it’ll happen, but this seems like an interesting and potentially important opportunity for the New Yorker to rethink the way it does television criticism.

More than any other form of criticism, television criticism has changed. A small percentage of it is devoted to telling readers if they ought to watch a show or not, but that’s far from its most important function. Instead, whether writers are recapping individuals episodes of shows, writing meditative essays on the course of single shows, or juxtapositional pieces that put television in a broader context, they are setting the stage for conversations between highly informed—or at least highly opinionated—viewers. They’re the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.

Franklin’s pieces are very good, but they’re infrequent, and sometimes oddly timed given that larger shift in how television criticism is consumed. She wrote for the magazine roughly every four weeks. The September 12 column on The Hour came out almost a month after the show started airing in America, and is behind a paywall, so non-subscribers can’t read it, and even if they could, there’s no comments section. This is a larger philosophical issue for the New Yorker, of course. Comments sections take a long time to moderate, and while I find it a joy, it is not everyone’s cup of tea. Similarly, her column on Terriers came out a month after the show premiered last fall—it’s too bad Franklin didn’t get to write a preview piece that could have championed the show and tried to build an early audience for it. If you’re going to be in the business of using criticism to get people to watch something, those pieces probably need to be published in time for the sink-or-swim early weeks of new programs. And the magazine has blogs for books, film, and photography, but not for television (though Amy Davidson sometimes takes on the subject), which really seems like it might be the most natural fit for blogging.

So as the New Yorker thinks about who it’s going to hire to replace Franklin, I hope they pick someone who can help the magazine move into the new age of television criticism. Whether it’s Todd VanDerWerff at the AV Club, who’s proved you can build a community and set a tremendously high standard for the discussions it has; Heather Havrilesky, whose big, synthesizing pieces have been one of the best things about the revamped New York Times Magazine; Jace Lacob from NewsBeast, who brings a fierce reporter’s sensibility to bear, figuring out how what we watch comes together; Vulture’s wickedly funny Willa Paskin; and I’m sure you can all think of terrific alternatives. But in any case, I’ll hope for the New Yorker think not just about the person but about the job description.

Will Leitch has a great piece on the sudden sea change in professional sports towards treating anti-gay sentiment as unprofessional and unacceptable. And he points to Charles Barkley as the man helping knock down the closet door in preparation for the first professional athlete to come out into the light:

As usual, at the center of the story was TNT analyst Charles Barkley, the iconoclast chatterbox. When asked about the fines, Barkley went off. “I’d rather have a gay guy who can play than a straight guy who can’t play,” he told the Washington Post. “Any professional athlete who gets on TV or radio and says he never played with a gay guy is a stone-freakin’ idiot. I would even say the same thing in college. Every college player, every pro player in any sport has probably played with a gay person … I’ve been a big proponent of gay marriage for a long time, because as a black person, I can’t be in for any form of discrimination at all.” It was a cannon shot: It was one thing for Vogue intern Sean Avery to come out in favor of gay marriage. It was quite another for Charles Barkley, an NBA icon, to do so.

Barkley’s comments seemed to open a door. “You sensed a change in the atmosphere, and that often sort of presages something greater happening in the culture,” Buzinski says. “That is the kind of stuff we have not heard voiced before that publicly.” Next thing you knew, former Cowboys receiver Michael Irvin was on the cover of Out magazine, declaring his love for his gay older brother and saying, “If anyone comes out in those top four major sports … I guarantee you I’ll give him 100 percent support.” It became fashionable for sports franchises to do public-service announcements, like support for marriage equality (the Phoenix Suns, whose team president, Rick Welts, is gay) and “It Gets Better” (seven Major League Baseball franchises, most recently the Tampa Bay Rays). In a video released by the Baltimore Orioles, players declare, “You should never feel like you have to hide who you truly are.” The PSAs were greeted by the sports world with a surprising yawn.

Obviously it would be wonderful if pro sports had started fining and suspending people for using terms like “faggot” during play and employing homophobic slurs as motivational speech a long time ago. But I do wonder if the various leagues’ arrival at enlightenment at the same moment that homophobia’s becoming increasingly radioactive in all parts of the public sphere is the only way such fines ever would have worked with fans and with players. There don’t seem to have been players who have become martyrs after being fined for using anti-gay slurs during games — instead, Joakim Noah and Kobe Bryant were immediately and publicly contrite. Tim Hardaway’s repented of his anti-gay remarks and is now fighting religious conservatives who are trying to recall El Paso officials who have supported extending health care benefits to the partners of gay city employees. It would have been wonderful for sports to lead the fight for gay rights, but there’s no reason to expect they would have, not their history, not their conservative fan bases. Instead, I’ll take the leagues using their economic power to enforce societal standards. Athletes were never going to start this fight, but it would be great if they and sports executives could help end it.

The bridge is yours.

-The world probably does not, in fact, need a Hannibal Lecter TV show, but I guess horror is in these days.

-The story behind Contagion‘s amazing, eerie posters.

-Information about celebrities can be remarkably difficult to find.

-Apparently, the apocalypse will cure homosexuality.

-New Ladytron!

Ladytron – Gravity The Seducer by nettwerkmusicgroup

Charmed, the WB’s attempt to bottle the lightning that was Buffy and sell it to grown-ups by dressing Alyssa Milano in outfits that were wildly inappropriate for work at a newspaper, has long been one of my guilty pleasures. In recent months, I’ve joked that it’s one of the few pieces of pop culture that I can watch at home and for pleasure because it’s so feather-light that there’s no risk that I’ll accidentally slip into analyzing it. No more. After Sunday’s True Blood finale, I realized something: we’ve reached a point where Charmed is actually a better show than True Blood. Here’s why:

Gaining power changes people’s lives.

One of the things that bothered me most about this season of True Blood was what happened to Lafayette and Tara when we and they learned they had magical abilities: pretty much nothing. Okay, sure, Lafayette got himself possessed multiple times and killed his boyfriend, and Tara was slightly less passive than usual and was rewarded for it with a shotgun to the head. But what did it mean for their, and our, understanding of themselves? Not a damn thing. There’s an interesting story to be told about the gay black man in a rural community who tells himself his whole life that he’s special and then finds out he actually *is*. There’s another story to be told about a woman who has been routinely disempowered and finds the strength to build a different life. Hell, there’s even a story to be told about someone like Marnie, who found safety from a world that judged her in a quirky magical enclave and decided she wanted to make everyone who ever mocked her burn. But True Blood didn’t tell any of those stories, throwing out Marnie’s motivations in single lines, condemning Tara and Lafayette to the usual messed-up relationships black people are doomed to on this show. Magic can serve plot by serving characterization. I’d rather see Lafayette grow as a character than some silly special effects that bring Gran and Rene back from the dead. And not only did Sookie’s shiny new powers appear out of nowhere, they appeared to have precisely no effect on her whatsoever.

Charmed always got this. When Piper got the power to blow things up, it unnerved her, and she had to learn to embrace it. Cole and Richard both struggled against their powers — and then reclaimed them to ill effects — to keep their relationships going. Paige struggled against her whitelighter abilities before accepting them, and the responsibilities that came with them. Having power changes your self-image, the way you interact with other people, your sense of obligation and where you fit in the universe. Charmed has always understood that, even if its three sisters were never as isolated as Buffy — the show wasn’t afraid to sit with the Charmed Ones as they figured things out.
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As someone who already thinks $79 is a relatively low price to pay for unlimited two-day shipping from Amazon, where I buy an obscene number of products, much less for that shipping plus streaming from a decent-sized video library. So the news that Amazon is exploring doing some sort of “Netflix for books” option seems like a suspiciously good value for the money. Tim Carmody, in a typically thoughtful post, explains why the pricing part of it is in fact the biggest challenge both Amazon and book publishers, and why it probably means that the plan will work more like Netflix’s discs-per-month program than its unlimited streaming program. The program will need to be profitable enough for publishers to digitize their back catalogues, and Amazon will probably want to calculate the point at which high-volume users will keep pulling the trigger and still buying additional books but below which new users won’t buy e-readers and pay their $79 annual entry fee. Seems pretty reasonable to me. I’ve already punched my ticket to Prime and am buying books like a maniac. And they’d really clean up if they found a way to translate comic books and magazines for e-readers, maybe by making the Kindle app full-color even if the device itself isn’t.

As an aside in a Deadline piece about the deals coming out of the Toronto Film Festival, Pete Hammond notes something interesting about the difference between how studios planned to get Colin Firth and Michael Fassbender Academy Awards:

Most buyers I talk to are irritated by some sellers’ insistence that their film be released this year in time for Oscar consideration. That’s a tall order and leaves little time for creating a marketing campaign, much less an awards strategy. Nevertheless, that was one of the demands made by the sellers of the controversial Shame during negotiations. Fox Searchlight agreed, others didn’t. In fact I was told that Sony Pictures Classics, which wanted the picture, came up with a smart strategy they compared to The Weinstein Company’s for Colin Firth. That consisted of Firth doing a lot of campaigning and earning a nomination for A Single Man in 2010, thus laying the groundwork for his The King’s Speech win the next year. SPC was going to put Fassbender out there and get him recognition for their November release of David Cronenberg’s Dangerous Method and then release Shame later in 2012 for a one-two punch that the Academy would notice. No go. The sales people behind Shame insisted it be released this year, thereby throwing the Venice Film Festival’s Best Actor winner into an already overcrowded awards race that among others includes Clooney, Pitt, Oldman, and DiCaprio who are better known – at least at this point.

The approach to Firth was clearly conservative: he established credibility for playing gay, but the role everyone knew he was going to win for was much more conventional, a heterosexual monarch gearing up to fight Hitler with words. I would have liked to see a campaign for Fassbender go in the opposite direction, from a great man who crosses the line in service of what he sees as a higher good to what sounds like a lacerating deconstruction of what society sells as a heterosexual male fantasy, as much sex as you want and more.