George Clooney was the actor who irritated me most in 2011: I thought The Descendants was a less-revealing-than-it-thought-it-was celebration of rich people, and the Ides of March fundamentally misunderstood the dynamics of politics, and was weirdly smug about that ignorance. But I think he gets something important right about celebrities who want to speak out about politics in this week’s issue of The Hollywood Reporter:

Through the years, he says he has learned to think carefully before he speaks out on issues, but that makes his commitment to some causes all the more courageous. His criticism of the war in Iraq made him a highly controversial figure in the early 2000s. “They did a half-hour show on Fox saying my career was over, and there was a cover of one of those magazines with the word ‘traitor’ written on it, and the White House was passing out a deck of weasels and I was on one of the cards,” he recalls. After initial anger, there was a brief moment when he felt afraid. “I called my dad and said, ‘Am I in trouble?’ And he said, ‘Grow up. You’ve got money. You’ve got a job. You can’t demand freedom of speech and then say, “But don’t say bad things about me.” ‘ And he was right.”

Even more precisely, I think it’s that you can’t expect both that your endorsement of a cause or position will mean something and then also expect that people will not react to that endorsement as if it carries weight. I don’t think that the only way for artists to be of service to their politics is for them to validate politicians and policies with their constituencies—they have independent ideas to offer about framing and policy. But recognizing, when you have a lot of power, that you speak from a privileged position, is always smart and classy.

Sports fans, the national media, and even National Basketball Association insiders are wondering how everyone missed out on Jeremy Lin, the where-did-he-come-from point guard for the New York Knicks who has set the sports world on fire over the last two weeks. Lin, after all, was barely recruited out of high school, undrafted out of Harvard, cut twice by NBA teams, sent to the NBA Development League, and nearly cut again, all before emerging to score more points in his first five starts than any player in NBA history.

The New York Times found what seems like at least part of the answer this week: Lin is of Taiwanese descent, and according to some coaches the Times talked to, “recruiters, in the age of who-does-he-remind-you-of evaluations, simply lacked a frame of reference for such an Asian-American talent.”

Racial stereotypes, taboo in virtually every other aspect of American society, still play a huge role in sports, particularly in how the media, analysts, and scouts evaluate talent and make comparisons. Analysts use adjectives like “crafty” and “intelligent” to describe how white athletes overcome their general lack of athleticism, while marveling at the sheer athletic ability of black players who supposedly lack the intangibles of their white peers. Whites are often touted as the tough-nosed, blue collar players; blacks, the ones who make it look easy.

The stereotypes then carry over to the comparisons we make between athletes. Analysts spent years looking for the “next Larry Bird,” putting the label on virtually every talented white player to reach the NBA. On a statistical level, though, the “next Larry Bird” was actually Kevin Garnett, a 6-foot-11 black forward who has been in the NBA since 1995, just three years after Bird retired. We ignore that black quarterback Donovan McNabb had a lot in common with white quarterback Mark Brunell, and that neither played much like white quarterback Dan Marino or black quarterback Warren Moon.

The same stereotypes are in play with Lin. Few other Asians have ever played in the NBA, and the majority have been tall centers like Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi (Lin is 6-foot-3). The stereotype for Asian NBA players was easy, then: they’re tall, or they don’t exist. Now that Lin has proven that wrong, others persist. With no Asian to compare him to, analysts are matching Lin to the next closest thing — white point guards like Steve Nash who came out of nowhere to star in the NBA. That may be a compliment to Lin — Nash is a two-time MVP — but other than blossoming in similar systems and having lighter skin than most of the other players, Lin and Nash’s games bear little resemblance.

The stereotypes, many of which exist subconsciously, likely aren’t going anywhere. Which means whenever the next Jeremy Lin comes along, fans, the media, and even the biggest experts won’t see him coming.

I often get sort of schadenfreude-y over Fox’s musical dramedy Glee, and I think for good reasons: Ryan Murphy and his coworkers have no commitment to treating characters with any sort of consistency, following up on plot twists from one episode to the next, or having a sense of what makes someone likable or actions despicable. But the Valentine’s Day episode highlights something I think the show does very well when it bothers to do it: capturing the way teenagers, especially young evangelicals, talk about religion.

The scene that initially convinced me that Glee could be a compelling show all the way back in the pilot was when main character Rachel Berry, then a boyfriendless misfit, tried to make connections by going to a meeting of McKinley High’s abstinence club. But she couldn’t keep up the charade, and busted out with a protest that there are girls who do want to have sex, that abstinence doesn’t make sense for everyone. It as a perfect meeting of teenage intention and teenage desire. And the show worked similarly well in grappling with Quinn’s pregnancy that first season: she was so wrapped up in her identity as a good Christian, that she concocted and held onto an elaborate lie about how she got pregnant to hang on to that identity.

Now, the show hasn’t exactly been a model of consistency about incorporating its characters’ faith in their decision-making processes ever since. But in this week’s episode, Glee returned to the fact that a bunch of its characters are religious, having Quinn, Mercedes, Sam, and Joe, who transfered to McKinley after being home-schooled get together to raise money for their club by doing singing Valentines. It’s a project that poses a dilemma for them when Santana asks if she can hire them to serenade Brittany. Their resulting discussion was both perfectly teenaged, but it had a real respect for the fact that the characters have ideas and things they have to figure out:

And the end result—an embrace of love, no matter who it’s between—also seems to me to be the rare case where the show’s plot needs and reality intersected. Young evangelicals are much more likely to support equal marriage rights than their older coreligionists. These conversations will happen, and they won’t always be easy. But I think with time, they’ll tend to come to the right conclusions. For once, Glee actually captured a whiff of the zeitgeist. It’s no accident that it achieved that nice little moment by taking its characters, and their ideas, seriously.

The latest Women’s Media Center report on the representation of women in media occupations is out. The results suggest that television is doing somewhat better than film in getting women involved in the production process and in representing them on-screen—but in neither case are the numbers anything to write home about.

When it comes to when we see on-screen, women are definitely doing better on television than they are in the movies. In the 2010-2011 television season, 41 percent of fictional characters on television were women (down slightly from the all-time high of 43 percent in 2007-2008). The report notes of women in television that “Female characters were typically younger than male counterparts, white, and more likely to have an undefined employment status,” which I thought was interesting to pick up on: it’s not just that female characters are less defined by their jobs than men, but that it might not be clear what, if anything, they do. In 2008 and 2009, by contrast, just 32.8 percent of speaking characters in movies were women. In both media, the number of female characters in a product goes up if there are women creating or on the writing staff of a show or writing or directing the movie.

When it comes to overall employment, women are also better off than television than in movies. The number of women in what the report defines as “key behind-the-scenes roles” in movies has stayed relatively flat, from 17 percent in 1998, to 17 percent in 2005, 16 percent in 2009, 16 percent in 2010, and 18 percent in 2011. And of the 250 top-grossing movies of 2011, 5 percent of directors, 14 percent of writers, 18 percent of EPs, 25 percent of producers, 20 percent of editors, 4 percent of cinematographers were women. By contrast women seem to be doing somewhat better in television. In the 2010 to 2011 season, women made up 18 percent of creators, 22 percent of executive producers, 37 percent of producers, 15 percent of writers, 11 percent of directors, 20 percent of editors, and 4 percent of directors of photography.

That’s not to say that women are making durable gains in any of these fields. The number of women directing the 250 top-grossing movies has fallen from 9 percent in 1998 to 5 percent in 2011. Between the 2009-2010 season of television and the 2010-2011 season of the television, the number of women writers fell from 29 percent to 15 percent—and that’s down from 35 percent in the 2006-2007 season. And women aren’t necessarily helping other women out. The number of female producers was higher than the percentage of directors, writers, editors, and cinematographers in every year the study examined. And the same was true for television, where the rates of women creating, writing, directing, and editing shows never matches or exceeds the rates at which women produce them.

I sometimes feel like I’m banging my head against the wall reporting these kinds of numbers. But until it’s clear to Hollywood both that it’s persistently underrepresenting women and that said underrepresentation means a lot of us aren’t getting content we’d like to pay for, we have to keep saying it. These are not problems that are going away on their own. We’re stuck with them unless people do something very intentional and serious to try to fix them. Fox’s new Diverse Writers Program is a step in the right direction, but helping mentor 10 writers a year is just a start.

I’m sorry to hear that production on The Colbert Report is suspended for two days. As some other folks have pointed out, an unexpected hiatus generally means that something bad has happened in a show’s family, so the Colbert team is in my thoughts. And given our continuing conversation about the Obama administration’s contraception rules, I’m particularly sorry to have Colbert out of action right now. Having someone who is seriously, thoughtfully Catholic—Colbert’s taught Sunday school, if you need proof—break down the issue with humor doesn’t just mean Colbert has credibility on the church’s issues and dogmas. It means he can find jokes in the weeds that other people wouldn’t even know are there for the taking:

I’d have loved to see him take on House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa’s decision this morning to exclude women from testifying at a hearing on contraception coverage.

The bridge is yours.

-Apple suppliers may be better than other Chinese employers, but relativism is not exactly a victory.

-Checking in with James Murphy.

-I’m sort of sad we won’t get to see Michele Bachmann on Dancing With the Stars.

-Sometimes, American audiences do the right thing: Glee‘s ratings are dropping.

-The path from Canadian TV to American premium cable.

When the Grammys invited Chris Brown to perform not once but twice during Sunday’s awards show, three years after he plead guilty to assaulting his then-girlfriend Rihanna, the decision sparked outrage—and some good questions. At Ebony, Zerlina Maxwell wants to know if the Grammys think they’re sending a message other than that domestic abuse is no big deal. And the New Yorker’s rock critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, asked “Why forgive Chris Brown so quickly and hang Ike Turner out to dry for so long?” The answer isn’t that the Grammys, or any other institution in Hollywood, have arcane or difficult-to-discern rules about when domestic abusers should be welcomed back and given the platforms they need to make enormous amounts of money. It’s that they don’t have established standards at all, leaving them to handle things on a case-by-case basis that often seems incoherent.

In January, I asked FX President John Landgraf, who is working with Charlie Sheen on a new show called Anger Management, if he thought there was a clear standard for something an actor could do that would make them, in Landgraf’s eyes, unemployable. He told me:

I can’t tell you what that is. But the answer’s clearly yes. You can certainly imagine a performer doing something that renders them unemployable. Again, what is that? I don’t know. And do I hope that won’t take place and believe that probably won’t take place? Yeah. But anybody could do something that would be grounds for termination of a show. How could I define that line? I’m not a lawyer. How could I have a precise list of things and here’s the line and if you’re on this side of the line you’re fine and you’re on that side of the line, you’re not fine? I don’t think that’s theoretically possible.

When it comes to why Landgraf trusts Sheen in particular to star in Anger Management, in which Sheen plays a former baseball player with anger issues whose best friend is a woman, who has a female therapist, and who is raising a daughter as a single father, he said:

Part of what the show is about, frankly, is a kind of comeuppance. For example, he has a teenaged daughter, he has an ex-wife, his ex-wife has questionable tastes in men, and he was the first of her questionable tastes in men. But now, as a co-parent, he has to deal with a series of men in his 13-year-old daughter’s life, and that’s a kind of comeuppance for him. I can’t know what’s in Charlie Sheen’s heart. I can only tell you that as an artist and as a performer, he made a choice in terms of what he chose to do next that to me is indicative of somebody who wants to grow, and he wants to play a more self-aware, more dimensional character, and he wants to make a more complicated, more nuanced show.

I think you and Mo [Ryan, the television critic at Huffington Post] imagine that some of the same things that happened in the past will probably happen in the future, and therefore in your estimation, I’ve stepped into the role of an enabler that was exited by others like Warner Brothers and CBS. And in my estimation, we make a really good show and Charlie grows as a human being, and we don’t know.

I’d argue that the evidence is fairly clear that Charlie Sheen has a pattern of repeated violence against women who are his intimate partners, and of relapses in his program of recovery, and that perhaps my and Mo’s bet is better than Landgraf’s. But making bets about the future isn’t really the point here. It’s how Hollywood treats past behavior and sends messages about which sins matter, and how much, and which don’t.
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It is a perpetual complaint that cable television is expensive out of proportion to its value, and that it’s expensive because cable bundling means customers are subsidizing channels that they don’t actually want to watch. That structure’s justified by the idea that it provides consumers with choices, even if they’re choices that customers are unlikely to ever make use of. The case against bundling is that even if it would kill some channels and make the remaining ones somewhat more expensive, is that it would let consumers exercise choice up front, paying for what they want in the combinations that they choose—to get BBC America, for example, without buying it with a tranche of other programs, or to get HBO without buying a bunch of other channels first.

And so I’m somewhat less optimistic about a new product called Aereo that’s being heralded as a cable-killer. The idea is that the service, which is premiering in New York in March, would let people rent a tiny antenna that would allow them to stream locally available television channels to any device they want. It’s not entirely clear whether Aereo is legal, something that one would imagine will have to be cleared up before the March 14 launch date. But even if it is legal, I wonder if it’ll actually be in a position to kill cable entirely.

The reason? Aereo’s only got the ability to get people access to the broadcast networks and local channels. It can’t unscramble cable networks. Hulu already gives folks access to the core programming on the broadcast nets, admittedly, with a day delay, and has become vastly more accessible on devices like iPads and streaming on set-top devices, so there’s already a service that’s similar, if not identical, on the market. But their lack of access to programming from some cable channels and all premium cable channels means that Hulu can’t be a complete substitute for a cable subscription. And even for folks who are willing to wait longer, Netflix isn’t either. People like their Bravo, and their ESPN, and their HBO, and their Showtime. As long as they can’t get them in a timely fashion any other way, I think people will continue to pay for cable to get access to those networks, and those shows that have a patina of high value.

Friend of the Blog Gabriel Rossman has a post on the enormous challenges of estimating the cost of piracy that I think has an essential formulation for moving the debate forward:

In the arguments over SOPA, I’ve seen a few arguments from people I respect that piracy basically doesn’t matter. These arguments strike me as somewhat plausible but probably wrong and grounded in wishful thinking that a solution being unpleasant means that the problem it addresses is nonexistent. This is not to say that I support SOPA, for I do not. My main intuition on this is that an industry that sponsored the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act has forfeited its claim to our sympathies. Thus even when it has a legitimate grievance, I am inclined to give it only mild weight. Thus I tentatively favor the Megaupload suit but I’m gonna say “sucks to be you” when the industry demands escalating the fight against piracy into the top priority of US trade diplomacy and a total war waged on the terrain of the internet’s low-level infrastructure. Nonetheless I think it’s important to clarify just how complicated estimating the effects of piracy are…I think we need to be skeptical of free lunch thinking that if a policy has undesirable consequences this doesn’t mean we have to pretend there is no real problem it is addressing. It’s a common position to say “I don’t like bullying tactics, bad faith arguments, and rent-seeking of the IP industry, therefore piracy is not a problem.” I sympathize with this frustration but it’s more intellectually honest to take seriously that there might be a problem that we decide it is better to leave unsolved.

Really, read the whole thing. But I think that moving the debate back to a more realistic look at the costs of piracy, and a serious conversation about the costs and benefits of a range of interventions to get people to buy more content through licit means, is the most productive way forward.