Once upon a time, rumor had it we were going to get a show called Ripper that spun off Anthony Stewart Head’s character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer that would follow the former Watcher back home to England where he’d get up to a variety of supernatural skulduggery. The Buffy Season Eight and Nine comic books have seemed to have foreclosed that possibility—Angel, Buffy’s vampire-with-a-soul sometime lover did kill Giles by snapping his neck. But the Mary Sue makes it sound like a Ripper show, or even just a show with Anthony Stewart Head and magic, from Whedon might be a possibility again, this time on the BBC. The project, if it ever were to happen, actually sounds like the kind of thing that Netflix ought to be all over.

Currently, Netflix has been all over continuation of cancelled series like Arrested Development, remakes of well-regarded programs with high-priced talent attached like House of Lies, and deeply random original series like Lillyhammer, which just got renewed for a second season. It’s a combination of daring shots in the dark and utterly conservative programming. Something like a Whedon-Head reteam would let Netflix walk a middle path. The show would attract a dedicated fan base, but it would also be an original project, one that wouldn’t absolutely require hardcore membership in the Buffy or Angel fandom. It’s the kind of project that might work well with a shorter order than a network season, something that Netflix seems to be focusing on. And unlike Netflix’s other original projects, this would be one that critics actually created a buzz around. The whole project may be a pipe dream. But it would be less silly than Netflix spending even 30 seconds considering keeping Terra Nova alive.

This post contains spoilers through the April 19 episode of Parks and Recreation.

I thought this was not the strongest episode of Parks and Recreation, which laid out good themes this season but has been somewhat stagnant about pursuing them. But it is does feature perhaps the single best instance of synchronicity between television programming and the political process in the animal shelter A story, while also advancing an important issue Leslie will have to deal with if she is elected to City Council.

Leslie, forgetting that she’s running to represent all of Pawnee, goes into the budgeting process determined to fight for her department. She wins, bullying a tired Bradley Whitford into saving her from an 8 percent cut. The problem is, the money comes out of the animal shelter where Champion lived before Andy and April adopted him. And that subsequent cut gives Jennifer a chance to beat both the charges that Mitt Romney abused his dog by crating it for a long drive, and that Barack Obama committed the sin of eating dog in Indonesia as a six-year-old, by going on local television and declaring that “I’m not saying that Leslie Knope is a dog-murderer, per se. But it does raise some questions. Like is she a dog-murderer?”

When she tries to solve that problem, Leslie ends up getting Ann’s job cut (though since she’s still dating Tom Haverford, that is the least of her problems). And the shelter gives April, last seen cutting off attendees at a meeting Leslie was supposed to be running with a sour “All respect, Mr. Hamster Penis,” a chance to pursue something she turns out to care a lot about: finding homes for abandoned animals. She enlists Donna to write up resumes for them—”A lot of these dogs have rescued people from burning buildings,” Donna explains. “This one helped Ray Charles around.” It doesn’t entirely work, but watching April chase down a woman who tries to abandon her cats with the adoption drive is worth it.

The C plot, in which Chris insists that Ron spend a day with him doing yoga and meditating to make sure they’d be compatible if Ron is promoted to deputy city manager, is totally slight—”There’s a hot, spinning cone of meat in the Greek restaurant next door. I don’t know what it is, but I’d like to eat the whole thing,” is wonderful, but old territory. But it illustrates something important. It would be good for this show if Leslie won the race in part to shake everyone out of their own roles. Ann’s new job in City Hall has mostly served to bring her into closer proximity to the rest of the cast, not give her new things to do. Tom’s move away from the Parks Department was a failure both for him personally and creatively for the show. Donna and Jerry could use more to do other than be joke-generators. And April and Andy are clearly growing up and should be given roles to grow into. Parks and Recreation doesn’t need a reboot, but it could use new material for basic plots. And I want to finally get to know Councilman Hauser.

I’ve been enjoying Scandal, ABC’s Washington drama from Shonda Rhimes about a crisis manager named Olivia Pope (a nicely steely Kerry Washington) modeled on Judy Smith, who worked with figures like Monica Lewinsky and Gary Condit. Scandal is a deeply silly show without much to say about the way that Washington actually works, though its politics are in the right place. In its second episode, Olivia protected DC’s finest madam, a nice bit of pop culture rehabilitation for Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the actual DC madam who committed suicide before she could begin serving a prison sentence. And last night, Olivia convinced a powerful woman to turn in her son on a rape charge rather than continuing to protect him. But the most Washington thing about the show—though not in a contemporary sense—might actually be Olivia Pope’s romantic relationship with the President of the United States himself.

Willa Paskin’s written about how that relationship fits into Rhimes’ larger pattern of telling stories from the perspective of mistresses. And while Scandal may fit Rhimes’ ouvre, it’s also haunted by a pair of historical ghosts: President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a slave who came into Jefferson’s possession through his wife. Now, I’m not saying they’re the same thing. Olivia is obviously a free woman. She didn’t start her relationship with the president as a young teenager. And she isn’t continuing her relationship with him in part as a way to guarantee that her children will be freed later.

But there is still a power imbalance between them: Olivia seems unable to resist him or break away from him entirely, he views his relationship with her as kind of a reward for his goodness in other areas (an awfully Clintonian justification for sexual misconduct), and as it turns out, his wife condones the relationship at least to a limited extent. When the president gets insomnia, she makes sure Olivia will show up at a state dinner so he can get his fix, and go back to the work of running the country. I tend to appreciate Shonda Rhimes’ race-neutral casting and mixed-race relationships, but there’s something weird about not acknowledging that this is a case where a white president in love with a black woman would have particular repercussions. The country’s behaved insanely enough in response to the election of a black president. Something like this—or, god forbid, the revelation that Obama had an affair with a white woman—would expose a whole other level of ugly, and I think that’s worth acknowledging in some way. It’s one thing to have race-neutral writing in situations that aren’t inflected by race. It’s another to have race-neutral casting in situations that would necessarily be racially inflected.

One of the reasons the Obamas are so compelling to the country, I think, is that they’re a tonic to the sexual anxiety and humiliation of the Clinton years, a good-looking couple who to all outward appearances are just nuts about each other. It’s a situation that lets us acknowledge the sexual appeal of the presidency without attaching a whiff of scandal or disgust to that acknowledge. With Scandal, Rhimes brought us back to a moment of national confusion and embarrassment, and injected an interracial relationship into the mix. What she intends to do with that brew seems considerably up in the air. But in the interim, the results are enjoyably trashy.

This week, spurred on by the debut of HBO’s Girls and the subsequent discussion of the show’s whiteness, has seen a significant discussion about the erasure of women of color on television, and the fact that the depictions of women of color, when they do happen, are frequently created and mediated by white writers. However we feel about Girls, and opinions vary, I think we can agree that the larger situation is untenable, and that our popular culture would be a richer, more interesting place if women of color had more opportunities to create, run production on, star in, and direct more television shows. I also think it’s critical to emphasize that just because women of color aren’t always visible as characters on television doesn’t mean they’re not already writing episodes of television and acting as showrunners. So in this post and another that run on Monday, I want to do two things: first, lay out the actual facts on the employment of women of color in television, which is an important starting point for a conversation about structural reform, and second, call attention to the great work of some of the women of color who are creating television already, but who don’t get the same kind of attention as Shonda Rhimes.

So let’s talk some numbers. First, the state of women’s employment in television overall is an embarrassment. According to the Women’s Media Center, during the 2010-2011 television 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

-4 percent of directors of photography.

Those numbers have not appreciably improved since 1997, and in fact, the years in which women make some gains in one of those professions frequently seem to be followed by declines in substantive seasons.

Moving in from those general numbers on women’s employment, the numbers are substantially worse when you look at women of color. A Directors Guild of America analysis of the 2010-2011 television season found that women of color directed just 1 percent of 2,600 television episodes that aired during that period (men of color directed 11 percent of those episodes, numbers comparable to those helmed by white women).

It should be noted that in television, unlike in film, writers have substantially more impact on the final product of a given episode than directors do. The Writers Guild of America, West puts out its Hollywood Writers Report less frequently than some of the other reports I’ve cited here or drawn other figures form, but the 2011 edition of the report, which looks at employment data from 2009 is revealing. It doesn’t break out data on minority women, but the numbers are still worth a look.

Between 2005 and 2009, the number of minority writers in television has fluctuated between nine and ten percent—as the report puts it, “it appears that minority writers are at best treading water when it comes to their share of television employment.” The median salary for white male television writers in 2009 was $108,000. For all minority writers, the median salary was $84,675. The pay gap between white male television writers and minority writers of both genders was $8,007 in 1999, $10,688 in 2007, and in 2009, rose to $23,325.

The report also notes an important factor that may interact with these other statistics: in 2005, 2007, and 2009, the number of writers younger than 31 stayed constant at 6 percent. And the number of writers aged 31 to 40 went from 37 percent to 36 percent during those years, so it’s not as if the number of younger writers stayed constant because they’re all aging into the next cohort and being replaced on a one to one basis. In other words, there isn’t yet an influx of a younger generation of writers that might bring more diversity than the current crop of established writers. Changing these numbers doesn’t appear to be something that’s going to change naturally. In fact, in some categories like compensation, the industry is losing ground.

These numbers are pathetic. This situation is pathetic. And if you’d like to let executives at the networks know that, here are the people at the major networks you should call out about it:

-NBC
-ABC
-CBS
-Fox
-FX
-HBO
-AMC
-Showtime

The bridge is yours.

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Last week’s episode of Game of Thrones, “What Is Dead May Never Die,” was my favorite of the show’s run so far, full of marvelous character development and deep attention to questions of fealty, faith, sexual identity, and courage. Bryan Cogman, who wrote the episode, and serves as story editor and keeper of the Game of Thrones mythology, was kind enough to take the time to answer some questions about “What Is Dead May Never Die,” and about sexposition, his relationship to the Game of Thrones fan community, the awesomeness of getting to introduce Brienne of Tarth, and the crazy suggestions that women don’t like fantasy.

I’d be curious to know how much the decisions to diverge from characterization—or to bring a character who doesn’t have a point of view perspective to the fore as is the case with Margaery—are driven by the simple demands of narrative economy, and how much they’re driven by the capacities of the actors involved?

In a few cases, there’s a kind of energy a certain actor possesses that inevitably informs how we write the character. For example, John Bradley’s Samwell Tarly is arguably funnier and maybe a bit more self-assured (at least amongst Jon and his friends) than his book counterpart. Or there’s Theon Greyjoy—his storyline has remained more or less the same but the characterization is quite different as a result of us de-aging the character when Alfie Allen was cast. This immediately changed the dynamic between him and Robb—they became contemporaries—and a more brotherly relationship developed between them over the course of Season One. This makes his decision to betray the Starks in Season Two markedly different than it was in the books.

In the case of Margaery Tyrell, this is an example of us taking advantage of the fact that we don’t have to adhere to the book’s strict POV structure. Margaery is pivotal to the plot of the novels, but she doesn’t really come front and center until the fourth book and, even then, you don’t know a whole lot about her. That’s fun in its own way but we decided when plotting out the current season that it would serve the show better to give the character a stronger presence earlier on. It gave us the opportunity to examine a key part of the game (the arranged marriage) up close. And once Natalie Dormer was cast, her persona certainly influenced the writing of the character.

Those are just a few examples… but there are plenty of characters on the show that seem like they leaped from the pages of the books onto the screen, unchanged — Gwendoline Christie’s Brienne and Conleth Hill’s Varys are examples of this, I think. So I think we have a healthy mix.

I’m sure you’ve heard the suggestion that Game of Thrones relies on sexposition, scenes where someone lays out an idea while unrelated sex is taking place somewhere in the frame. This week’s scenes between Loras and Renly and Renly and Margaery were the exact opposite of sexposition—the nudity and sexual contact between the characters were absolutely critical to our growing understanding of the characters—but I’m curious how you approached writing that scene given the larger conversation about sex and the series.

I appreciate that you don’t consider the scenes in my episode to be “sexpository”. Frankly, I think the term has been overused when talking about the current season and, in most cases, used incorrectly. From my point of view, there has been exactly one Season Two “sexposition” scene so far, between Theon and the Captain’s Daughter, and that was taken directly from George’s book, thank you very much! Sure, there’s still plenty of sex on the show — but far less “sexposition” than last year.

And I guess I take exception to the idea that we “relied” on sexposition last year. There were several scenes in Season One where backstory and mythology were peppered into dialogue that didn’t involve a sexual act. Robert’s “war story” scene with Ser Barristan and Jaime is one example, Theon’s encounter with Tyrion in my own Season One episode is another. Of course, there were plenty of exposition scenes that did feature sex (hence the term) but I also take exception with the idea that the sex is unrelated to what’s being discussed… but that’s a whole other conversation.

Anyway, back to Season Two. It was an exciting challenge to get to tackle the sexual gamesmanship of the Renly/Loras/Margaery triangle, which doesn’t really exist in the books. And I particularly enjoyed pulling the curtain back on Renly. The strength and swagger on display at the beginning of the episode is nowhere to be found at the end, after he’s gone a couple of rounds with brother and sister Tyrell. But I don’t think I approached the writing of these scenes any differently than I would the others. I’m certainly not thinking about the larger discussion of sex on the show — we can’t let those kind of discussions influence how we tell our story. And, make no mistake, sex is a big part of this world, as it is in George’s books, as it has been throughout history, and as it is in the lives of every human being, whether they admit it to themselves or not. [Note: Bryan emailed me to say he should add that he loved Saturday Night Live's Game of Thrones and sex skit, in which Andy Samberg plays a horny 13-year-old who consults on the episodes]

One thing we see in this episode—and that gives the episode its title—is a baptism, and Jon Snow also gets something of a theology lesson. Given your role as keeper of Game of Thrones mythology, what role do you think religion plays in the franchise? And do you think there are particular challenges in bringing religions where gods are active in the world, and fealty, which is a similar emotion to worship, to a modern audience?

George’s exploration of religion is, without question, one of my favorite aspects of his story. It plays an increasingly significant role as the series goes on, not only in the lives of the various characters but in the “game” itself. Last season, faith was largely depicted in a personal way — Ned’s quiet vigil under the weirwood tree, Cat’s homemade shrine to the Seven, etc. This season, we begin to see how religious faith is used in the pursuit of power, specifically with Stannis and Melisandre. And while the various religions in our story (the Seven, the Lord of Light, the Drowned God) were born out of George’s imagination and are somewhat fantastical, I think modern audiences can definitely relate while watching. I would say that “gods” are very “active” in our own world, especially when it comes to those in the pursuit of power — you need only examine some of the rhetoric from the candidates in the current presidential race to find examples of that.
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It was never going to take very much to convince me to see Magic Mike, Steven Soderbergh’s movie loosely based on Channing Tatum’s early stripping days:

But what’s interesting to me about this trailer other than the obvious enjoyment of a movie that offers up beautiful men’s bodies for consumption in the same way women are so often presented for male pleasure is the other ways in which gender stereotypes are swapped here. It’s almost unprecedented to have a story about a man who trades on his looks in precisely the same women do, from a position of supplication and as a consumption object rather than as a tool to be deployed. It’s also somewhat rare to have a male character with a career dream that a female character encourages him to pursue rather than the other way around—it’s women who are supposed to discount their own abilities. And while seducers snared in the parson’s mousetrap are an ancient story subject, the narrative normally has the rake change because he realizes he wants something else, not because he realizes his life has been bad for him, or that he’s deluding himself about the joys of libidinousness. Soderbergh hinted at some interesting themes of male bodily anxiety in The Girlfriend Experience, and I can’t wait to see what he does with the male body as consumer product here. And to do some consuming of my own.

This post contains spoilers through the April 19 episode of Community.

Over the years I’ve been watching Community, I’ve written a great deal on and off about Dean Pelton. Often, it’s been about the way the show’s handled his sexual orientation in the absence of another gay character. But there’s an extent to which I think, if Abed Nadir is Dan Harmon’s stand-in on the show, Dean Pelton represents Community itself with the study group as audience proxy. Pelton is the clearest articulation of the show’s desire to be weird, and to be happy in that weirdness, whether it’s embracing a Dalmation fetish or splitting the show into six different timelines. But Pelton isn’t a happy, untroubled freak—he’s a freak who both wants to let his flag fly and is in a constant state of anxiety about how it will go over with the people he wants to impress. And when he tells the study group “Can I be perfectly honest with you guys? I think I went too far with this one. I have to go to the bank today. What am I supposed to tell people in line?” and then tells himself “Come on, Craig. Get your life together,” it’s the perfect prelude to Community’s most conceptually and emotionally ambitious episode in quite some time.

I like Community’s high-concept stuff, but ultimately, the show’s emotional capacity is more important to me than its experimental riffing. It’s why “Mixology Certification” remains my favorite episode of the show: it took a deeply normal concept, let all the characters bring their own type of weird to the proceedings, and reaped enormous emotional rewards, from Pierce’s self-destructive cussed independence, to Shirley’s past as a drunk, to Abed’s confrontation with a social world that’s less forgiving of his foibles. Tonight’s episode was much more narrowly focused than “Mixology Certification” was. But putting together Community‘s most-empathetic character and its least-empathetic ended up reaping considerable payoff for the most serial storyline the show’s done, Abed’s ongoing confrontation with the fact that his way of seeing the world may make it special, but it also doesn’t make him a very nice person.

The episode really kicked into gear when Abed tries to explain how the Dreamatorium works, and ends up insulting Annie. You see it that way because it’s calibrated to a specific level of brain function,” he tells the girl who’s volunteered to play with him so Troy and Britta can go on a date. “Not stupid, just less able to see what I see.” In response, Annie jams the works, spitting out “We lower-functioning brains call this empathy.” What follows doesn’t resolve anything—it’s not clear if Britta and Troy did or are going to get together, Annie may not know what’s going to happen between her and Jeff next, and who knows if Troy’s going to air conditioning repair school—but we do know more about how Abed sees the group he’s terrified of losing.

He assumes that Annie wants to be overwhelmed by Jeff, imagining that she’ll like it if he, as Jeff, tells her: “Make love to me, Annie. I know I’m just a surgeon, and you’re a hotshot upstart administrator. But damn the rules. Damn the system. Damn our two-foot height disparity. I want you.” And Abed sees Britta and Troy as a joyless couple, who tell him things like “We just saved an uninsured homeless man’s life,” “Using an unapproved procedure. Now we’re going to kiss.” (Troy’s confession that “I’m more turned on by women in pajamas and lingere. I just want to know they feel comfortable,” is, however, unintentionally the best ever.) Leonard is a cable-less peeper. Abed’s terrified that Annie truly does see him as a “Control freak with no empathy. People bend over backward to help him.” And he’s terrified to admit to anyone how he really sees himself. It’s deeply poignant when he tells Annie “I don’t get married. I don’t invent a billion-dollar website that helps people have sex. I don’t make it into Sundance, SlamDance, or DancePants. Troy invents DancePants in 2019, but don’t tell him. He has to stumble onto it.”

If Abed’s stuck categorizing the world, Annie, at least, is able to confess that she has the opposite problem: trying to bend the world to meet her needs. “We’re just in love with the idea of being loved. And if we can teach a guy like Jeff to do it, we’ll never be unloved,” Annie tells Abed. “We both need to get more comfortable wining it.” And after several episodes of Abed asking for clarification on what to feel, or whether something is a social cue, he finally gets it right. “I’m hungry,” he says, asking Annie “Are you hungry? I’ll make us buttered noodles.” It’s a small foundation for redemption. But sometimes, you wear your Duala-Dean outfit to the bank and end up out to lunch. For Community‘s often-stunted characters, life’s all about taking enormous risks for potentially small emotional payoffs. The show takes huge creative risks for small ratings payoffs, but the emotional gifts, when it gets things right, are enormous.