The New York Times has a decent-sized story about the impact of Keith Olbermann’s departure on MSNBC and another one today on the larger challenges the channel faces. The piece describes two core problems for the network: the fact that it’s getting beat by competitors between 8 and 11, and the fact that it’s getting beat on news. But is Keith Olbermann the real problem for MSNBC?

Even before his defenestration from MSNBC and his move to Current, Olbermann’s ratings were falling. In 2010, Olbermann drew an average of 1 million adults and 268,000 adults aged 25-45 during the 8PM hour (that first number was down 11 percent from 2009, the second, down 25 percent in the same time period).

Olbermann wasn’t alone in his woes at MSNBC, though his numbers were slightly worse than some of his colleagues. Rachel Maddow’s numbers fell between 2009 and 2010, too, down 6 percent overall and 14 percent in that coveted demographic of younger viewers. And MSNBC saw its viewers between 8 and 11PM go down 9 percent overall and 18 percent in the demographic. In the same time period, for the same viewing hours, Fox News saw a slight but slower decline, falling 5 percent overall and 6 percent in the demographic. And CNN, which is now challenging MSNBC for that third-place, looked like it was in free-fall. Its number of overall viewers in the 8-11 hour was down 36 percent, and its number of young viewers was down 37 percent, to 184,000.

But this September, MSNBC pulled in 269,000 viewers ages 25-45 in the prime-time block, up modestly from an average of 249,000 in 2010. But CNN’s made a dramatic improvement, lifting its young viewers from an average of 184,000 for the primetime block in 2010 to an average of 257,000 in September 2011. The Times piece from which I’m drawing those numbers doesn’t break out Fox’s numbers for the full month of September, but looking at day-by-day data on TV By the Numbers, they appear relatively consistent with the figures the network pulled in 2010, when it averaged 2.4 million people total and 612,000 younger viewers in primetime.

So Olbermann’s numbers and MSNBC’s were declining at the time he left. And even in the context of Current’s smaller viewership, he’s continued his downward slide. MSNBC is available in 78 million households in the U.S., while Current is available in 60 million. But absent the network profile of MSNBC, Olbermann’s ratings initially fell more than the 23 percent that might have been the difference between the two networks and have continued downward. The week of Olbermann’s launch on Current, an average of 354,000 people total and 131,000 in the demo tuned in. The next week, after the novelty wore off, it was down to an average of 253,000 total and 93,000 in the demo. By August 1-5, those numbers had fallen to an average of 208,000 and 85,000 in the demo.

With all this context, it’s not totally clear to me that Olbermann, even if he’d stayed, would have reversed his ratings trend—and the network’s. Olbermann’s departure was messy and public. But while the resulting vacancy may have prompted CNN to shake up its lineup, it wasn’t the only thing affecting MSNBC’s viewership. How to get the network growing significantly in prime time is a question that’s much more complicated than one hour, and one anchor.

A good post from Nikki, in response to some of my writing, saying that it’s not enough to want more women writing and directing television episodes. She writes:

If we suggest that increasing the number of women ON television might increase the number of women BEHIND television, thereby effecting a change in how sexist or feminist television shows might be, we excuse men from the process entirely, except as Upholders of the Status Quo. Set aside the question about women behind the scenes and focus on the men behind the scenes, who are definitely still in power in the media and it’s that power structure that should be held accountable for the current portrayal of women on TV.

Amen. I’m a pretty firm believer in the carrot-and-stick thing, though, because it’s relatively easy for male creators to clap their hands over their ears when they’re being criticized for not giving us wonderful, developed female characters and just not listen. And it’s much easier to get people to listen when you’re praising, and for other people to see that praise and think “I want that!” So without further ado and in no particular order, 10 fantastic female characters on television who were created by men.

1. Trixie, Deadwood, David Milch: I know this list isn’t in order, but if it was, I’d still put it at the top. Milch’s prostitute-turned-accountant, pimp’s-trick-turned-Jewish-businessman’s-girlfriend would still be at the top. We meet Trixie at the beginning of the show when she’s been accused of murder, and watch her help another woman beat a drug addiction even when it means defying her employer’s orders; seek out an education no one ever gave her so she can have more options in life; stand up for her friends when they get married and grieve for them when they bury their children; and develop a new relationship. She’s always making choices. And when she takes steps backwards, we understand why, at the gut level. She’s empowered, but the show doesn’t fall prey to the trap that strong female characters created by men often do — that women’s liberation is purely a matter of will, not circumstance.

2. Alice Morgan, Luther, Neil Cross: Alice, who enters the scene when she murders her parents, melts down the gun, and feeds the remaining parts to her dog, is a certified crazy person, but she’s not a victim. Her attraction to John Luther doesn’t make her a nymphomaniac. And her decision to work cases comes out of a clearly defined alternate morality and worldview. Rather than setting her up to be judged by the audience, she’s a compelling — and sometimes very scary — way to see the universe.
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Twenty-eight minutes into Terra Nova‘s two-hour premiere, what had been advertised as an ambitious science fiction epic had neatly reduced itself so the only really epic thing about it was that it manages to be both a cop show and a medical drama at the same time. And that’s before we get to Terra Nova and limitations on how much hot water solar cells can heat reignite Classic Family Drama about who stole all the shower water. This is a show that appears to have spent its budget for actors on Stephen Lang, and its budget for ideas on a dinosaur fight choreographer.

I really wanted to like Terra Nova, but I can’t shake the feeling that the much more interesting parts of this setup are back in the polluted, rotting world that our characters are leaving along. There’s a bit of Ender’s Game-like family planning, a clearly punitive legal system, chokingly unbreathable air that a few elite families escape by living in domed cities, and odd implications for what the plan is for Terra Nova. But it’s pretty hard to have a sinister conspiracy when information only travels in one direction, unless everyone planned it beforehand and people involved in it are coming through in waves. Which given the different rates of travel through the rift and the rates of mortality by dinosaur and random disease seems like a dicey proposition.

From what we’ve seen of Terra Nova, the camp’s leaders aren’t really doing that much to try to change the course of human history by organizing human society differently, unless letting teenagers live in a group house and drink in the woods counts as social engineering. It’s sort of annoying to hear Lang’s character, a military man named Taylor, intone, “The world you left behind fell victim to some of the baser instincts of our species…we blew it. We destroyed our home. But we have been entrusted with a second chance. A chance to start over. A chance to get it right,” when Terra Nova looks almost entirely like the universe of characters we see on your average American drama.

Mira, the doctor, says things like, “I didn’t want that for my children…I think they deserve a chance to be part of something real. Something new. Something that has a future.” But what she really seems to want is a chance to hit the reset button personally so her children will grow up in an unspoiled world where they can grow up in clean air. That’s a nice idea, but not a revolutionary one. Similarly, it would be interesting if, like Ender’s parents, Jim and Mira had decided to have a third child out of some sort of conviction, but Jim just says, “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” which is both a weak line of dialogue and a totally vacant justification for an enormously risky act.

The only interesting people here are the Sixers, who are initially described as sinister because “They had an agenda.” But an agenda seems like a pretty reasonable thing to have if you’re going to travel back 85 MILLION YEARS IN THE PAST TO DINOTOPIA. It’s totally bizarre that the show treats the Sixer leader’s declaration that “Control the past. Control the future. These are the key. To everything,” as if it’s some sort of sinister statement. It makes no sense to go back in time without a plan. I don’t doubt that there are sinister conspiracies afoot, maybe even Taylor’s son off leading a gang of Others in the woods or something. But it would be such a boring dodge to have the portal be magic. We need fiction that will help us figure out a whole new world, but not the Aladdin variety.

I don’t know that I’ve ever sat through an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear from readers that in the second episode of this season of the show, Sandra Oh’s character, Cristina Yang, had an abortion — and not because she got pregnant and it was inconvenient, or because she was raped, or because she’s broke and desperate — but because she doesn’t want to have children. Which is one of those things that people feel, but still gets treated as if it’s a risky thing to say unless you’re Helen Mirren.

So I watched the episode, and I actually thought they did a pretty nice job with it — particularly with this scene, which I thought was a good illustration of how stressful it must be to terminate a pregnancy without the support of your partner:

Grey‘s is a soap opera, but it’s a soap opera that reached an average of 11.41 million people per episode last season. So this is big, even if it’s a one-off.

Then, there’s also the news that Mindy Kaling is developing a show for NBC where she plays an ob/gyn, a character she’s basing on her mother who, as her brother puts it in the profile of Kaling that recently ran in the New York Times, is “a professional gossip who does Pap smears.” I really, really hope that there’s a way for the show to handle abortion at some point. It would get ridiculous fairly quickly for an ob/gyn to only ever has patients who are overjoyed about their pregnancies and to never have a patient who doesn’t want to be pregnant, or can’t — for whatever reason — stay pregnant. At minimum, there have to be conversations about birth control and sexual and reproductive health, and the mere possibility of something like that being on network television every week makes me so joyous my heart runs the risk of exploding.

The fact that we live in a world where women making vagina jokes on networks is enough to send some dude-critics to the fainting couch illustrates how necessary something like Kaling’s show is, how necessary Grey‘s decision was. These shows don’t have to end the conversation, but they’re a vital acknowledgment that lady business isn’t just that.

The bridge is yours.

-Why Superman’s first appearance in the 1978 movie that bears his name is so cool.

-Cultural broadcasting and privacy.

-Competition for Netflix doesn’t really seem like it’s going to benefit consumers that much at home, or abroad, for a while.

-You get a lot more out of being a Hollywood conservative than you do out of being a Hollywood liberal.

-Joan Jett. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s on:

Maybe? Because it sounds like we’re about to get a whole bunch of government-centered shows. It’s not clear whether it’s the run-up to the election, or the entertainment industry’s obsession with Scandanavia, but non-law enforcement government-themed shows suddenly seem to be a thing!

First, there’s CBS’s show about a one-term president who goes home to work at a law firm that will let him take only legal cases that resonate deeply with him. Sounds like some network has an idea for what a certain law-professor-turned-senator-turned-recession-cursed president should do with himself in January 2013! In all seriousness, though, ex-presidents are the one set of public figures that pop culture has never really figured out. There’s My Fellow Americans, which essentially says that it’s probably a good thing more former Commanders in Chief don’t go the George W. Bush brush-clearing-memoir-writing route because otherwise things can only end in wacky road-trip hijinks. Also, tears. Folks like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have given us the sense that presidents who leave office fairly young should do worthy things, but it’s hard to structure a relatable show about peace negotiations or running the Clinton Foundation, and brush-clearing, is, let’s face it, relatively dull to watch on-screen (though accidentally shooting your hunting partner in the face has comedic potential in an era where we like to consume other people’s pain). So apparently, running a law office it is. I really hope said president at some point joins forces with Leslie Knope, decides to put her in the path of his former campaign manager, and the rest is history.

Second, NBC, which really should have pursued the former show so that crossover can actually happen, is adapting Denmark’s Government, the trailer of which sounds exactly like one of the voiceovers in the German television shows Liz Lemon was supposed to watch and summarize for Jack on 30 Rock:

In between this and HBO’s Veep, we’ve got a nice little crop of female-politician shows. My one concern is that rather than serving the valuable purpose of showing us smart, competent women holding extremely important government positions, these shows will have dippy women who in vastly over their well-coiffed little heads and mine a lot of comedy from that proposition. Which I am…not so excited about. In all likelihood, Leslie Knope will just remain the Best At Everything.

It would be so, so fantastic if a woman finally got the chance to direct a superhero movie, particularly a superhero movie where the superhero is a guy, and even more particularly a superhero movie with feminist, if underdeveloped, female characters. I refer, of course, to the rumors that Patty Jenkins might be in the running for the job of directing the sequel to Thor.

I haven’t seen Monster, the Aileen Wuornos biopic for which Jenkins is best known. But it suggests she’s pretty fiercely engaged with female complexity. And whatever you think of how the show went after, she did a fantastic job directing the pilot of The Killing, particularly in capturing the spiky dynamic between Linden and Holder without resorting to cliches that would have portrayed Linden as ball-busting or humorless and Holder as cocky. Can you imagine how much fun it would be to have Thor and Sif rocking a slightly competitive, mutually supportive relationship? Not to mention how great it would be to have more attention paid to a superheroine who is not just clothed, but armored, and super-competent? I’d hope they’d hold off on having Sif and Jane compete for Thor’s attentions because yawn, who needs to see that again, and I’d much rather have some characters just be friends in one of these things. But there are a lot of possibilities.

Even if those don’t choose Jenkins, though I hope they do, I’m glad to see that Marvel’s committed to at least considering unusual directorial choices. Kenneth Branagh was a good experiment even if it didn’t quite take, I appreciate that it didn’t scare them off. Getting a woman’s perspective in the director’s chair on one of these things is probably more important, in any case, than bringing in the Shakespearean grandeur. And hey, if this works, maybe we can get Kathryn Bigelow doing a superhero movie some day.

I really liked Tracie Eagan Morrison’s essay last year on Patti Stanger, the titular Millionaire Matchmaker of Bravo’s dating show. She argues, I think persuasively, that more than simply setting up her wealthy clients with the kind of people that they’d like to date and perhaps settle down with, that Stanger’s real strength is brutally assessing the people who come to her and identifying the flaws that have prevented them from having successful relationships. She can go too far, but the show, rather than a testament to love, is a pretty strong argument that if your only priority is to find a long-term relationship quickly rather than organically, you’re going to have to mold your personality and make big compromises in order for that to happen. It’s an aggressive indictment of romantic comedy.

But this stuff? Not so much:

I feel like Stanger is aiming for Dan Savage territory in talking about gay men and monogamy and overshooting, landing…somewhere else. Bravo walks an incredibly fine line with its branding. It’s supposed to be higher-end than its competitors, but its reality shows are no less invasive, and even rich people can have ugly, bad things happen in their lives. And a self- and network-appointed truth teller like Patti Stanger may tip over into a giant vat of crazy, especially in a setting like Bravo programming head Andy Cohen’s live talk show where the guests and the audience drink and everyone’s supposed to be kind of outrageous.