When the Hollywood Reporter noted yesterday that My Damn Channel, an online television network, had unveiled a slate full of original content, it clarified a major problem with web television for me. While YouTube’s channels, like Felicia Day’s Geek & Sundry, will aggregate some similar tranches of web programming, so many of the best shows live off in their own isolated spaces, word of them traveling by word of mouth. I’d watch vastly more web television shows if there was a single place I could find a lot of them, sorted by topic, or theme, or programmed into something approaching harmony. And I wonder why, in their pushes into original programming, Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon haven’t focused more on true web television and less on an arms race with networks that have an enormous advantage over them in production and advertising budgets (Google is, to be fair, spending $200 million advertising its YouTube channels) and savvy.

Much of what these online content providers seem to be doing so far is feeding off scraps or trying to capture old magic. When Terra Nova was cancelled, there were rumors Netflix might pick it up even though it was immediately and obviously a terrible proposition. Its remake of House of Cards, helmed by David Fincher, lacks a creative rationale and is a hugely expensive attempt to purchase the kind of credibility that so many British shows arrive in the states armored in. The Arrested Development reboot is about satisfying an old core audience rather than building a new one. This is a defensive strategy rather than an offensive one. Hulu’s been trying to play offense, but its new shows have no built-in audience unless you count Morgan Spurlock diehards.

Acquiring or distributing existing web TV franchises would be a more modest first step, but it makes sense for a lot of reasons. First, it would be a lower-cost way to bring existing fans of a program to Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon’s streaming site, and in a way that has the potential to be sticky if people jump from a show they already like to one they aren’t familiar with. Second, and this is important, web series offer the potential to catch audience growth on the upswing, rather than the downswing. While this isn’t true for all web series, shows like Jane Espenson’s Husbands can work as individual episodes or, watched all together, as a test pilot. Web shows could be a way for Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon to grow an initial audience and figure out which shows are their best investment bets to level up to full series, and then allocate their production and advertising budgets to shows and showrunners with proven track records in this format.

This is a more modest, less fast way to compete with the networks. But ultimately, it’s hard to believe that the streaming services will truly be able to match network content. They’re viable precisely because people want to pay less for content, and so the streaming services’ best bet is not to try to stretch those dollars threadbare, but to use them to build something entirely different. Google seems to get this. Everyone else? Not so much yet.

In recent months, BuzzFeed’s garnered a lot of traffic from, and done a public service by, publishing lists of hugely racist things that people are willing to say in public, whether it’s spotlighting the bizarre and horrifying comments on a newspaper article, the racist and homophobic reactions to the Capitals’ Joel Ward’s overtime goal against the Boston Bruins, Twitter reactions to the Tim Tebow trade, or the ugly things commenters said about black characters in The Hunger Games. But somewhere along the way, wires appear to have gotten crossed, resulting in the publication of this immensely bizarre list of reasons “why Asians are the superior race.”

Now, I get that the list is supposed to be funny. The article has a subhead that signals that intent loud and clear: “By use of deductive reasoning, I have concluded that Asians are the superior race. This is scientific proof.” But as with the awful Ashton Kutcher PopChips ad we discussed earlier today, in which the actor appears in brownface to play a stereotypical Indian single man, this is an attempt at humor that has nothing to say about race, or about racists, and elicits nary a chuckle.

It might be one thing if the list was full of stereotypes or things that were so blatantly untrue that the article was an attempt to parody ridiculous things racist people believe about Asians. Instead, it’s a recitation of common-to-the-point of boring statements: everything is cuter! they’re weird in ways that white folks find laughable but not contemptible! they’re a source of memes for Western audiences! This isn’t a parody of a mindset: it’s an investment in it. (Also, the piece seems to believe that, a single banh mi reference aside, “Asian” mostly means Chinese and Japanese.) This isn’t actually a list about the superiority of any given Asian country or any given Asian culture. It’s not a Tiger Mother argument. It’s about the fact that white people find some cultural practices that originate in Asian countries more entertaining to consume than, say, the sight of middle-aged dudes in Lederhosen. It’s a joke about superiority that ends up reinforcing a sense that people from Asian countries are inferior, that these cultural practices are worthy objects only of amusement rather than actual interaction.

What worked about BuzzFeed’s lists of Tweets and comments is that they were intended to spotlight the ridiculousness of racist and homphobic statements. Somewhere along BuzzFeed’s edit chain, that purpose seems to have gotten lost, while the form and subject matter stayed on. Style and subject tend to drive traffic. But purpose ought to determine what’s worth publishing, and which pitches are worth rejecting as fast as possible. Especially when the evidence is clear that you can garner as many clicks and as much attention for doing something worthwhile as for ginning up controversy.

It’s going to be an excellent summer for movies. As I’ll lay out tomorrow, The Avengers levels up the superhero movie. The fact that there’s already talk of a Snow White and the Huntsman sequel means we could be headed into a world with two big action franchises anchored by women. Prometheus looks visually and conceptually astounding. The Dark Knight promises to be a visually and intellectually rich conclusion to a powerful, darkly moral trilogy. Brave will finally put a girl at the center of a Pixar frame. But in the midst of this embarrassment of riches, I wanted to call your attention to a movie that won’t get a third of the promotional heft of any of these movies but that is audacious and wonderful, intimately engaged with questions of poverty and global warming, and that features a little girl as a superhero. I refer, of course, to Beasts of the Southern Wild, which was my favorite movie at Sundance, and finally has a trailer out:

In addition to being just hugely fresh in perspective and subject matter, Beasts is interesting to me because some of the special effects were crowdsourced. I’m curious to see how audiences react to them—and to what y’all think of this trailer amidst a blockbuster glut.

The bridge is yours.

-Some lessons in how to draw wheelchairs and wheelchair users accurately.

-Women from the 30 Rock writers room, moving on up.

-Grimm‘s monster-maker.

-The only circumstances in which a Dukes of Hazzard reboot could possibly make any sense at all.

-All the superheroes in five minutes:

I’ve never been exceptionally compelled by the provocateurism of hip-hop group Odd Future, particularly given the collective’s penchant for disturbingly unempathetic talk about rape. But the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica has a profile of Earl Sweatshirt, a member of Odd Future whose mother sent him to school in Samoa just as the collective was taking off, and who has now returned to the United States. And there’s an interesting anecdote about both that rape talk, and Earl’s time away:

As part of the Coral Reef curriculum he also performed community service, spending time working at Samoa Victim Support Group, a center for survivors of sexual abuse, including children.

“That was a pivotal moment,” he said one afternoon at Bristol Farms, a supermarket near his manager’s office. One of the things Earl Sweatshirt had been prized for as a rapper was his extreme imagery, bordering on vile. “You can detach imagery from words,” he said, adding that he “never actually pictured” the things he rapped about. (“Lyrics About Rape, Coke, And Couches Will Be Blaring In Your Ears,” was how “Earl,” the album, was advertised on Odd Future’s Tumblr when it was released in March 2010.)

By the time he began working at the center, “I had already come to the conclusion that I was done talking about” that sort of subject matter, he said, but coming face to face with young people who had suffered in that way was overwhelming. “There’s nothing that you can — there’s no — you can’t evade the — there’s no defense for like — if you have any ounce of humanity,” he said, the feeling swallowing the words.

Sensitivity and sympathy aren’t just things we inherently have. We learn them, often most effectively by directly facing other people’s pain. And I’d be really interested not just in hearing what Earl talks about when he’s set that old attitude and subject material aside, but to see him make music about that process of growing into sympathy, and into greater experience of the world.

Ashton Kutcher has a new (and almost immediately pulled) video series up for PopChips that’s supposed to be a comedic riff on dating services. It’s a weird little project in which he riffs on profoundly obvious targets—hippies, rednecks, size queens, Karl Lagerfeld—without having much new to say. But it tips over into a decidedly bizarre place with Kutcher’s impersonation of a Bollywood film producer:

It’s not a funny impersonation, and it doesn’t have anything to say about globalized Indians the way Bride & Prejudice’s riff on Jane Austen’s Mr. Collins did, in a role written, directed and played by Kenyan-born artists of Indian origin:

We’re at a really interesting inflection point where characters with South Asian heritage have made their way into tons of television shows, whether Kalinda on The Good Wife, Abed on Community, or Dev on Smash, and have done so in a way that hasn’t all cast them as representatives of the same trope. It’s a pretty remarkable example of pop culture getting to second-level diversity with a minority group quickly and all at once, without first giving us a huge wave of say, South Asian grade-grubbers or convenience store managers that would have been the equivalent of sassy gay friends.

At the same time, not going through a period where stereotypes about any minority groups are specifically debunked does leave room for folks like Kutcher who are new to those unfortunate tropes to think they’re hilarious and to trot them out. Unless people are pushed to try harder and instructed to be funnier, it’s depressing how quickly folks will default back to the laziest—and comedically broadest—possible option. Give me the jewler’s-fine tools any day. The specific made universal is always a more impressive feat than the resort to the common assumption.

As I noted in my post about this on Tuesday, CBS has been the most reluctant of the four major networks to put episodes of its shows online. Unlike ABC, NBC, and Fox, neither CBS nor any of its corporate affiliates owns a stake in Hulu. The network puts relatively few of its shows on the streaming service, and when it does, the video quality is significantly lower than that of their competitors. In some cases, it doesn’t put certain hits online at all: 2 Broke Girls started out with full episodes available on Hulu, then full episodes were available only on CBS’s website, and now the network only makes clip shows available. The episodes aren’t even available on iTunes (though you can pick up a game based on the main characters). If you’re not watching the show on your television screen, you’re not watching it.

But could that change if Hulu, as has been discussed, moves towards a system that would require users to authenticate that they subscribe to a cable service in order to stream shows (whether it would preserve a pay alternative like Hulu Plus is an open question). Les Moonves told the Hollywood Reporter that he’d reassess doing business with Hulu if the company moved to an authentication system.

It makes sense that CBS would be the network most reluctant to experiment with online content. Like all networks, CBS has had some dips in ratings this spring, but unlike NBC, which is almost being forced into niche programming against its will, CBS still has huge mass-market hits like NCIS, Two and a Half Men, 2 Broke Girls, and The Big Bang Theory. CBS isn’t scrambling to meet the needs of a fanatical audience with very precise tastes both in content and how they consume it. That doesn’t mean that the network isn’t thinking about digital—Moonves says they’re working on web-only content to be prepared for the day when that business model is financially viable. But they’re not approaching streaming episodes with a sense that they need to do so to preserve the audience they’re in danger of losing. From their perspective, authentication would give CBS the means to provide a new and improved convenience to the customers they’ve already got locked down. The question is whether they’re acting from a position of strength or poised for a crash if they’re suddenly confronted with a generation of users that wants much more flexibility in their viewing experiences.