One function of not watching much television as a kid, or perhaps just my general weirdness, is that I’ve never particularly liked watching comedies that are taped before a live studio audience. For me, trying to figure out if what I think is funny is the same as what that audience thinks is funny (or what the laugh track is telling me I should think is funny) has always made me feel more alienated than at home. But Todd VanDerWerff, who I would like to be when I grow up, has an interesting defense of the form centered around a taping of 2 Broke Girls (about which more to come):

But in comedy especially, the need to suggest that a community is watching the show has become less and less important. In some respects, this is an outgrowth of our growing sophistication as an audience. My generation is only the second to grow up with television always present in the home; we’ve been raised on setup-punchline humor, so it’s essentially impossible for us to be surprised by it anymore…It might also have something to do with the fact that the Internet provides an instant community for viewers. A relatively small audience may watch Community every week, but the Internet makes it easy for fans to find each other. We don’t need ghost voices to laugh with us when we have our friends online spitting out LOLs…

I couldn’t honestly tell you if the episode I saw being filmed was funnier than the pilot, simply because the atmosphere of the event had me primed to laugh at every little thing that happened. The comedian was an expert at getting the audience just revved up enough to be ready to laugh uproariously without exhausting us. The DJ was great at picking just the right song (or sound clip) for just the right moment. And down on the floor, the people making the show worked diligently to pull the whole thing together, tweaking lines we weren’t laughing at quite as hard as other lines, and figuring out ways to zip the performances along even better.

I think the bit about the Internet is exactly it; instead of checking to see if I’m in synch with an anonymous community, I can find out for sure with a clearly defined community that I’m invested in. Watching True Blood this season, checking in with my Twitter pal BabylonSista helped me confirm that I wasn’t losing my mind with rage. I check in with folks about quotations and nuances as I watch Thursday night’s NBC comedy block. In an age of niche television, the whole point is that you aren’t part of an ephemeral, but low-engagement community; it’s that you can find a concrete, high-engagement one who loves the things you love.

One of the things about living on a frontier is that everyone’s hustling to survive and there isn’t an enormous amount of time for everyone to sit around the Gem and talk about their feelings, even if the Gem was the kind of establishment where you felt inclined to be vulnerable in more than the conventional ways. But it’s extremely satisfying in this pair of episodes to watch three characters snap themselves out of bad circumstances.

First is A.W. Merrick, who has had his presses wrecked and his hopes for a romance with the new schoolmarm dashed after running afoul of Commissioner Jarry and the Hearst interests. Al comes to pay a visit through a connecting door he was previously unaware of, though as A.W. explains “Several of your patrons in different stages of undress have illuminated me” of its existence. “I’m in despair,” A.W. explains to his neighbor. “The physical damage may be repairable, but the psychic wound may be permanent.” But Al gives him a smack and some good advice: “The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you’ve got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man and give some back.” A show like The Wire might have deepened the despair, but Deadwood believes that there’s still goodness in the world. When A.W. exerts himself, befriending his new office-mate, the Russian telegraph operator, they’re rewarded with one of the most joyful scenes of the recent golden age of television, Tom Nuttall’s bicycle ride:

Then there’s Jane, who is in a dangerously bad way, telling Charlie, who finds her with bloodied lips, that “I woke up on the dirt in the fucking graveyard, questioning dusk or dawn.” Charlie tries to bring her back to herself by finding a way for her to do for others since she won’t do for herself, suggesting she visit the bereaved Joanie Stubbs because “Seeing as you know about losing friends, you might be a good person to go on and talk to her,” but he tells Bill’s grave that he doesn’t have much confidence in her recovery. Still, when Jane bestirs herself to visit Joanie’s mausoleum of a whorehouse, there does seem to be a spark. When Joanie offers Jane a drink, Jane initially explains that “Yes, but my opening position is no,” before explaining that her preference in booze is “That it ain’t been previously swallowed. Bourbon, if you got it.” And if Joanie gets Jane wanting to drink in a moderate way, Jane gets Joanie talking about the terrible fate that’s befallen her.

Joanie’s been the most beaten-down character in the show practically since its beginning. So there’s something particularly powerful about seeing her bestir herself for the first time since the murders. Cy can’t figure out that Joanie is looking for new patterns, asking her, “What the fuck did you come here for if not to be protected?” And when Joanie smashes her bourbon bottle against Wolcott’s head and tells him to get out of establishment or she’ll kill him, I actually cheered. Maybe Joanie wouldn’t have been able to ward off Wolcott if Charlie Utter hadn’t softened him up for her, but I’m so glad that she saves herself. I understand why Alma’s dithering about Ellsworth’s (totally adorable, btw) proposal; I understand why Martha speaks to Seth in code. But in the case of these terrible murders, backed by powerful institutions, it’s wonderful to see Joanie get her own justice when the law can’t, or won’t, protect her.

Cable providers lost 268,000 subscribers in the second quarter of this year, by far the biggest loss in a quarter ever. Netflix subscriptions came in well below the company’s targeted numbers for subscriptions after splitting streaming and discs into two separate fees. And Hulu is apparently failing to lock up the content deals it had hoped for in Europe.

None of this is really surprising. We’re still negotiating our way towards a new equilibrium, and we’re going to see a lot of bumps, like Starz not renewing their contract with Netflix, along the way. Cable subscriptions will probably have to fall a lot further before the cable companies and the networks feel pressure to more aggressively seek out alternatives. And at the end of the day, I think prices will settle somewhere in between what cable companies charge now, and what Netflix and Amazon charge. There’s no way $79 per year makes sense as an all-inclusive fee for delivery of physical objects, streaming licenses, and now, a couple of books a month. And $29.98 for unlimited streaming and a lot of disks seems pretty fair, though still not enough to cover current shows that you can watch on multiple devices. This system’s going to get more complicated before it gets clearer.

In the comments on my Salon piece about The League, one commenter raised an objection I hear from time to time, often, to their credit, from men, that there’s no way to make a really funny rape joke. I should note first that everyone has different trigger levels, and I understand that some people will never be comfortable hearing jokes about sexual assault, and that position should be treated with the utmost respect. No one has the right to try to force anyone else to enjoy something. But I do think it’s possible that very carefully constructed and tightly targeted jokes can effectively reinforce the idea that rape is a horrible thing to do.

Take this bit, from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia:

Charlie is obviously not actually a professional “full-on rapist,” nor is their any suggestion that such a thing would be a good or admirable thing to be. The joke is about his own patheticness: he’s so afraid to admit what he actually does for a living that he lies, trying to say he’s a philanthropist, and then when he pronounces it wrong, he rolls with it even though saying he’s a rapist is vastly worse on every level than just telling his date that he works as a janitor. The routine doesn’t shame victims, it doesn’t mitigate the gravity of sexual assault, it just serves to dig Charlie, sweating and hornet-stung as he is, into an even deeper hole.
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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the pop culture insistence that while women may get badly messed up before a divorce, men get wrecked in the aftermath. Free Agents fits squarely in that model, though it’s a bit more balanced, about a man, Alex (Hank Azaria), and woman, Helen (a wonderful Kathryn Hahn), who find precisely what they need from each other in the aftermath of staggering emotional blows: in his case, the divorce, in hers, the death of her fiance.

The show works almost entirely on the strength of Alex and Helen’s characters as they both struggle to maintain their equilibrium in a semi-brutal office culture. Alex’s coworkers haze him to get back on his game after the divorce that’s flattened him; an obnoxious coworker pressures Alex to act as his wingman; his boss, an unfortunately grating Anthony Head tells him to focus less on his life and more on his work before showing him sex acts on his iPad. Helen gets anxious after a younger coworker warns her that she’s facing vaginal death. The supporting characters are, one episode in, dangerously grating, and the show risks souring easily if it doesn’t elevate them beyond stock tropes.

But Azaria and Hahn make me willing to forgive a lot. “You’re, like, making a statement there,” Alex remarks on the number of condoms in Helen’s bedside drawer the first time they sleep together. “I can buy bulk on the Internet?” she asks. “No, more like it’s 2011 and I’m an independent woman and I can buy hundreds of condoms,” Alex says thinking he’s come up with a compliment. “Doesn’t make me a slut.” Helen is taken aback. “Is that what I’m saying? Or am I saying it’s 2010 and I’m going to buy condoms to have sex with my fiance,” who is, of course, now dead. When a date tells Alex his new, Helen-approved shirt is nice, Azaria sells his anxiety beautifully when Alex asks “Really?” And I liked the specificity of Helen’s shopping list when she freaks out at a supermarket clerk she thinks is judging her. “I am buying wine, and frozen pork medallions, and sherbet, and wine. I’m not having a party,” she tells him in a huff. “I’m going to eat my pork medallions, and my sherbet, and drink my wine alone. And I’m fine with that.”

There are good things here, and I’m interested in how the show’s going to explore Alex and Helen’s grief and loss. I appreciate that Alex isn’t totally emasculated by the agony he’s clearly in — he’s funny and functional, even if he can’t keep it up all the time. And Helen’s self-aware about the ways she’s holding on to her fiance, even if she starts taking pictures of him off the wall to, for whatever reason, “Fernando.” (“I’m not sure what you think ‘Fernando’ is about,” Alex tells her. “It’s about two old Mexican men who are reminiscing about the Mexican American war.”) These are real people. Everyone else around them should be, too.

The bridge is yours.

-A New Hope is totally awesome at world-building, but it’s not better than Empire Strikes Back.

-Make your own pop-up music videos.

-I always like it when the entertainment industry does what I tell them to.

-I think the thing that bothers me most about Twilight is the fact that Bella doesn’t tell her parents she’s going to get vamped.

-Amy, Amy, Amy:

The Directors Guild of America has some new numbers out about the percentage of episodes of each major show that are directed by men. And they’re impressively terrible: white women directed 11 percent of the 2,600 episodes the guild analyzed, while women of color directed just 1 percent of episodes.

Of the shows that had no episodes directed by women, Fringe, iCarly, Victorious, and Weeds all have a female lead, and Burn Notice, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Justified, and Leverage, all have significant female characters. Bored to Death had no female directors, but it’s a comedy about three white dudes. Of the shows where fewer than 15 percent of the episodes were directed by women, Army Wives had 8 percent of its episodes directed by women, Cougar Town had 9, and True Blood had 10 percent. Again, all shows with ostensible female leads, where networks seem relatively confident that the stories involved can be brought to life by men. The pattern doesn’t really go in the opposite direction, though: there are just a handful of shows that have a significant number of episodes directed by women, like Hung with 60 percent, and Mad Men with 31 percent.

We talked about this a bit in comments last week in the context of Maureen Ryan’s piece on women writers, but if we’re going to assume that there’s some essential insight about their own gender that men and women bring to writers’ rooms and directors’ chairs, then we should see a lot more parity in writing and directing: there are a lot of female characters on television. And if some men and women are uniquely good at writing and directing stories about people of the opposite gender, there’s no reason men would have an exclusive lock on that ability to see beyond themselves. I agree that we shouldn’t be looking for strict parity here, but there is no way that there are 82 men who want to direct television episodes for every 12 women who do.

And while it’s great that the DGA put out these numbers, I am vastly curious how the membership plans to address them. Television directing jobs are a finite resource. Unless men are willing to give up some work they have now, the numbers aren’t going to get better in the immediate future. And if the networks aren’t very aggressively hiring and mentoring women to prepare them to replace men as they get out of the game, things are going to get better for a very long time.

I have to admit, I want to like Up All Night more than I actually love the show yet, in part because I love both Will Arnett (Chris) and Christina Applegate (Reagan), and in part because I want there to be an actual comedy about a working mother instead of jokes about Liz Lemon’s perpetually forestalled adoption. But it’s fixed to find a way to make the universal experiences of parenthood feel fresh. I’m not even a parent and I know that raising an infant makes you sleep-deprived. The show’s going to need to find a way to communicate that these experiences are new to the characters without expecting that they’ll be new to us, to have us laugh in recognition rather than tune out because yes, babies can be hard to corral.

The best way Up All Night‘s found so far to do that is to do gender reversals, to put words that might be dismissed if they were coming out of Reagan’s mouth in Chris’s. There’s one very funny scene of Christina Applegate wrestling herself into a skirt, but otherwise, the show doesn’t harp on her baby weight. Instead, Chris promises that in his new role as stay-at-home Dad, “Maybe I’ll get the old Nordic track about, get my body back to where it needs to be,” only to have Reagan sigh: “The much talked-about, little seen body renaissance.” The first time Chris ventures out grocery shopping, he’s confronted by an ominous older woman who fawns a little too aggressively over baby Amy and comes home with a giant wheel of cheese because he can’t navigate the aisles. And he freaks out about leaving his law firm to take care of Amy, explaining that he’s angry, but he doesn’t know who at.

And when, in the morning when they get out of bed after their anniversary party, he voices a universal truth after Reagan complains about having to go into the office. “Yeah, ’cause raising a human’s no work at all,” he snapped. It shouldn’t feel this good to hear a man admit that raising children is labor. But it really does.

I’d had the vague sense that Brooke Shields’ career wasn’t in the best place (as Entourage tells me, if she’s involved in a project with Johnny Drama, that’s not a good sign), but I’m sort of depressed, both because of what it means for her talent and what it means for her politics, that she’s starring in an anti-eminent domain movie on Lifetime about the Kelo case. Speaking out about postpartum depression and the idea that seeking treatment for it isn’t shameful is really useful and important. Sparking fears that the government’s going to take your property is a lot less useful.