Maria Cahill, Miss Delaware 2011, has become the latest pageant contestant to make right-wing news hay by suggesting that, during her run as her state’s representative, she was told it would be better for her not to express her pro-life views while she was representing the Miss America organization.

I can see why the Miss America organizers might think that way. The days of the pageant’s cachet as a mass cultural event are long over—the first hour of the pageant’s been playing to about 2.5 million people, numbers so bad that even NBC couldn’t find a way to spin them. The competition’s been slagged for its retrograde gender politics for years, and having outspokenly conservative candidates might confirm the impression that Miss America is an organization that represents a small ideological segment of the population rather than celebrating the broad-based best of American womanhood.

But one of the reasons beauty pageants seem boring, as laid out Miss Congeniality, which both poked fun at and redeemed the whole concept of pageants, is because they’ve been bludgeoned into bland inoffensiveness:

I’d be way more interested in watching the pageant if the contestants had actual opinions and personalities that were expressed by things beyond their swimsuit choices. I think it would be reasonable if pageant organizers wanted to counsel candidates on the reactions that have greeted contestants with outspoken opinions, left or right, in the past, and had a plan to connect candidates who become controversial with PR advisors who can help them decide what to do. But they shouldn’t advise them not to speak at all.

In any case, Cahill appears not to have heeded the warnings she was given. And she seems well on her way to becoming the kind of conservative spokeswoman she entered beauty pageants precisely to become. The charges that she was silenced seem pretty thin—it sounds more like she was given advice by unnamed people rather than officially shut down by pageant organizers. But it doesn’t take much to let someone present herself as a martyr. If Miss America is really about the best in American womanhood, the contestants should be offering clear and competing versions of that ideal.

Kevin Fallon interviewed Warren Littlefield, who ran NBC’s Entertainment division during the fertile years of 1993 to 1998 to talk about his new book, an oral history of Must See TV. He doesn’t have anything illuminating to say about the present, dismal state of NBC—does anybody?—but Littlefield does have some interesting context to offer on the fight to get NBC to go forward with Will & Grace:

Management said, “What the hell are you doing? Why are you developing Will and Grace?” It’s network television, and we have advertisers to answer to. Advertisers are not ready to embrace, at the core of a show, a relationship between a gay man and straight woman. What are you doing?…As I looked at the world, we lived in a world where I saw that relationship all the time. It was this gap. Television had ignored it. I knew that Max and David had a great feel for that world and those characters. They just needed to be convinced that we would actually go forward with it if they wrote it. I said to them, “If you do a great job, we’ll have to.” And that’s what they did. So then in order to kind of hip-check my management, I made sure that I went to Jimmy Burrows. When Jimmy fell in love with the project, I knew that no one could stand in the way…Lo and behold, advertisers said, “Oh, this is a really funny show.” That’s all they saw. So there was no protest. There was no advertiser boycott. It just went on and continued to carry the torch of what Must See TV stood for.

It’s one of the clearest cases I’ve ever seen of executives being afraid to greenlight something they didn’t have personal experience with, and overestimating the negative reaction as a result. I’m sure there are others. It’s rather sad to me that if someone doesn’t see a potential audience or kinds of relationships with their own eyes, they’d be unable to imagine that it exists. I don’t assume that my experience is the sum total of the world, and I do believe it’s incumbent on me to broaden that pool of experiences I have to draw on. Gay men and their straight female friends aren’t unicorns. Neither are middle-class black families. It’s infinitely irksome that gatekeepers wouldn’t have learned this basic lesson, and that it keeps the world of entertainment smaller and more limited by poverty of imagination than it has to be.

The MPAA has pulled together some interesting statistics on race and movie attendance that really ought to be getting more attention, especially in the context of Think Like a Man‘s two-weekend long stretch atop the box office. White moviegoers buy more tickets than people of color simply by virtue of there being more white people than people of color. But people of color turn out to be somewhat more dedicated moviegoers than white folks.

Latinos make up 25 percent of moviegoers even though they’re only 16 percent of the population. The average Latino moviegoer makes it to 5.3 movies a year, compared to 3.7 movies per year for African Americans and 3.5 movies per year for white moviegoers.

I tend to end up pointing to the performance of movies with African American leads or diverse casts to point out that there’s an underserved market there, and I think that point remains true. But maybe an ancillary point is that African American moviegoers are, by a narrow margin, and Latino moviegoers are by a wide margin, more dedicated customers of Hollywood’s existing products than white audiences are, and their numbers are growing. You’d think Hollywood would want to hold on to those customers, and to recognize that the day is coming when those consumers’ preferences will be more important than the white consumers who no longer have either numerical superiority or proof that they’re more loyal customers. Nothing about the state of writers’ rooms and directors chairs suggest that movies are television are actively preparing for that eventuality. And I wonder how ready white entertainment consumers are for a day when pop culture doesn’t automatically reflect their faces because we no longer have the numbers or the proof of market power to expect that we be the default.

The bridge is yours.

-The silliest complaints about movies from British people.

-Where Gawker’s new commenting system comes from.

-Hillary Clinton writes Jason Segel a rejection letter.

-Yo, Deadline? The Obama-is-a-celebrity meme didn’t work last time around.

-Game of Thrones gets the Adam WarRock treatment:

It’s not often that the folks at Big Hollywood and I agree, but we’re in the same place on the casting for a new reality show. The backstory: CBS is putting together a new dating show, apparently based on an Israeli format, called 3. According to the casting call, the show is “about finding love; it’s about meeting amazing people who could be a good fit in real life; it’s about having a good time and making a connection. It’s not about fancy dates and roses. It is not about ‘TV’” — so, standard TV pitch. But apparently, CBS wanted to cast a wider net in order to catch people than the standard famemongers who wash up on The Bachelor and its infinite spinoffs. So the network started reaching out to widows who had lost their husbands in Iraq and Afghanistan, often contacting them through their blogs.

As Jaci Greggs reports, the production company behind the show hit up women who aren’t widows. Or who are widows, but are in new relationships. Or who have absolutely no such interest in putting their personal lives on-screen. And sometimes, even after they asked not to be contacted, the production company kept coming.

I am absolutely on board with the idea that pop culture in general is more interesting when it features different kinds of people and different kinds of stories. But when networks try to go into communities they haven’t traditionally show much interest in—and with the exception of Army Wives and Are You There, Chelsea?, military wives and widows fall into that category—it’s a good idea to be sensitive and on the watch for new dynamics, like, for example, the fact that military widows may feel an obligation to be seen to be true to their late husbands. The best way in might not have been to ask women if they wanted to participate, but to ask them into initial meetings, get a feel for their reaction to the idea of the show and their concerns, and then ask a few women for referrals. Of course, that would take time, energy, and a commitment to listen, none of which are Hollywood’s strong suits. But it also might have an increased possibility of success.

Yesterday came the news that Fox, as part of its negotiations with Comcast, was moving toward a model that would require people who wanted to view its content online to provide proof that they were cable subscribers, likely through the same mechanism that HBO uses to grant access to its HBO GO site: using their cable provider login to sign in rather than a login for a specific service. That would mean that Hulu users who wanted to watch Fox content through Hulu would likely be subject to the same restriction, and Hulu appears to be exploring a cable verification login system more broadly.

There are a couple of things to consider here. It may be easy to forget this, but Hulu isn’t an independent company. It’s owned by Comcast, Disney, and News Corp, all of which are apparently going to take a larger stake in Hulu next week when the fourth company invested in the company sells back its 10 percent stake in Hulu to its partners. Whether that is a tipping point or not, it’s worth remembering that Hulu has never been about providing an alternative to cord-based television watching. It’s a way to keep as much revenue as possible directly in the pockets of content companies without an intermediary eating up the revenue and negotiating long-term content deals that could turn out to be less-than-desirable for the content companies. And in that context, it’s not really surprising that Hulu’s owners would want people to pay for every single bit of content they watch on the site, whether you’re paying a monthly fee for streaming or a cable bill.

That gets at the really interesting question: will Fox’s carriage agreement with Comcast exempt Hulu Plus? That would be a move that would still require people to pay for content promptly, but would acknowledge that some people are gone from cable and will never come back. Will, as TechCrunch suggests, a free, ad-supported option still exist, but with episodes going up 30 days after they air? It would be the kind of thing that would drive users like The Oatmeal insane, but that strikes me as completely reasonable, considering what a bargain Prime is, and the fact that content costs more to produce than many people feel comfortable acknowledging.

Either way, Hulu warned us what it was when it first launched:

Hulu has never been a challenge to the content companies. It’s their rearguard battalion, making sure the content industry gets money out of folks who go AWOL.

We’ve finally got a trailer that gives us a real sense of what ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ will look like, and golly is it gorgeous and melancholy:

More to the point, I’m excited to see an intellectual debate between this movie and The Avengers. Christopher Nolan’s Batman’s movies have always had an element of monkish sacrifice to them: to be an impactful superhero, Bruce Wayne’s had to surrender his true public image (in the first film, he acts the playboy to disguise his intentions), the love of his life and of the populace, and now, it’s implied, either his life or his physical health. Bane’s declaration that “your punishment must be more severe” is a looking-glass version of how Nolan’s understood the only way for superheroes to make a difference, to self-abnegate, to foreswear their own happiness, to separate themselves from the people they are sacrificing themselves for.

The Marvel franchise, and The Avengers in particular (without spoiling anything), take the opposite tack. Its superheroes become better individuals more closely drawn to their communities for their experiences as superheroes. Tony Stark stops cackling over his power to kill and begins craving the approval of those around him, a selfish motivation that ultimately teaches him to engage with their needs. Thor falls in love with Jane Foster, and with Earth, a process of attachment that turns him from self-involved Asgardian prince into an admirable man. Captain America, in life and in death, gives the American people something to rally around, not to unify in their disgust at his perceived actions. The great tragedy of the Hulk has been that he’s cut off from reason and attachment precisely at the moment that he could provide the greatest amount of strength to protect people or causes. These two movies are going to make serious bank for their studios. But taken together, they’re also a vigorous argument about superheroism. That’s an exciting debate to have, and I’m looking forward to it.