Maureen Ryan on how irritating it is when television shows like, apparently, USA’s Common Law, feel the need to constantly reiterate that two men who happen to be close aren’t gay:

It’s past time to stop treating gay, lesbian and trans characters as The Other. When “Seinfeld” introduced the phrase “not that there’s anything wrong with that” in connection to the possibility of a character being gay, GLBTQ characters were a rarity on TV and thus that joke may have served as a sort of crude but useful enlightening tool.

Now that kind of joke — “We’re close friends, but we’re not gay!” — feels like a distancing technique, something that draws attention to gays and lesbians as something out of the norm. That feels wrong for a lot of reasons.

And honestly, who cares? In this day and age, are you telling me that two men who are best friends would constantly have to deal with the assumption that they’re gay? I just find the whole idea fairly preposterous. Who doesn’t know straight men who hang out all the time without anyone thinking about or guessing about their sexuality? How is drawing attention to not-gayness, at this point, anything but a representation of lingering shreds of mild but unmistakable gay panic

This seems like a relic of a transitional moment when lots of folks were starting to come out and straight people who previously had been unaware of the potential existence gay people started to get worried that they didn’t have valuable information they could use to keep from embarrassing themselves. Now, it’s true that said information remains relevant—no one wants to hit on someone who’s unavailable, be it because they’re gay or because they’re married. But we’re really at a point where even straight folks should have learned what makes for reliable gaydar and what doesn’t. Sharing a friendship or a roof with someone of your same gender doesn’t make you a homosexual: it makes you a person who craves connection with other people or who doesn’t have enough money to live alone. And the best way to find out someone’s sexual orientation is to get to know them.

I admit I’m totally shocked by this statistic. But it turns out that 60 percent of the audience for Girls, Lena Dunham’s post-Sex and the City take on the lives of sheltered young post-graduate women in New York City, is male. MediaPost, the source of that statistic, suggests that some of it might be men sticking around after Game of Thrones, though if those men were uninterested, you’d think they’d burn off during the half hour airing of Veep that happens in between the end of Game of Thrones and the start of Girls.

I’d be curious to know why those dudes are watching—and Slate’s deconstruction of the show every Monday by a slate of male viewers has become one of my must-reads to start the week. Is it to get insight into the lives of young women? Is it to laugh at Hannah and her friends because their lives are such a horror show? I’m glad for the evidence that men are more than capable of turning out for a show about a female protagonist, an anti-heroine, even. I just hope they’re not turning in because they hate Hanna Hovarth more than they’re actually interested in her.

There’s something deeply craven about the energy politics of at least the ads for Revolution, the splashy J.J. Abrams apocalypse show that NBC is adding to its schedule this fall. I’ve always been skeptical of the idea of a world where “all forms of energy mysteriously cease to exist,” even as I tend to think hitting the reset button on civilization is interesting. But there’s something particularly cowardly about the approach the show appears to be taking to that amorphous premise: this is a show about energy politics that doesn’t seem to have the courage to even mention that electricity is generated by other things, among them coal, natural gas, and oil.

Seriously, this is a show that says things like “We used electricity for everything. Even to grown food and pump water. But after the blackout, nothing worked. Not even car engines or jet turbines. Hell, even batteries. All of it. Gone forever.” Except that absent some mysterious magical thing or scientific nonsense Abrams and Eric Kripke, his co-creator dream up for introduction at some point, electricity doesn’t have an on-off switch: it’s generated by many different methods. Messing with the grid that distributes electricity is not the same thing as removing our capacity to ever generate and distribute more of is. We don’t use electricity to make airplanes stay up, we use jet fuel—20.2 billion gallons of it annually as of 2009. And while hybrid electric cars are on the market, those too rely on internal combustion engines, which in turn are powered by fossil fuels.

I’m fully aware, of course, that most television is based on junk science. But the reason this is particularly disappointing is that Kripke and Abrams are setting up a scenario here that undermines precisely what science fiction has the potential to do: reckon with what we’ve done to ourselves and posit solutions, be they scientific or societal. A magic shutdown scenario, rather than a situation where we’ve run out of fossil fuels, doesn’t require us to grapple with what we’ve done to ourselves—there are no contractions of services, no resource hoarding, no slow adaptation and competition between classes or nations. The blame can and probably will be placed on some sort of mysterious cabal rather than our collective inability to radically change our energy use. And the solution will be in the form of hidden knowledge possessed by an equally small and brilliant cabal, rather than major, painful, realignments in the way we live our lives and innovation that changes it. Setting up its central conceit this way, Revolution is a fantasy of an energy crisis where no one is to blame, in the same way that Tony Stark’s building-powering arc reactor (a great discussion of the relevant zoning issues is available here) is a fantasy that an alternative to fossil fuels is just around the corner.

But at least The Avengers argues that green energy innovation is sexy (as will, apparently, Marion Cotillard in The Dark Knight). That’s much more attractive than a fantasy in which an energy crisis happens to us as innocent victims, rather than an acknowledgement that we happened to the world’s energy reserves.

The bridge is yours.

-Here are Fox and NBC‘s schedules for the fall.

-Some real talk on the reality of friendship segregation and Girls.

-An interview with the creator of The Avengers‘ secret big bad—and a reminder that Marvel could be doing better by the creators of its characters.

-Glad to hear Greg Garcia has a new overall deal.

-This makes me very, very happy:

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past couple of days about why HBO hasn’t made its content more widely available to non-cable subscribers. While I understand individual consumers are frustrated, I think we need to reckon with the fact that this is not a problem of a single premium network. It’s a limitation of an ecosystem that also happens to have produced the kind of environment where HBO can make the content that makes it so desirable.

Erik Kain started the current wave of this, first blaming HBO for piracy, then, arguing that HBO should offer HBO GO as a standalone service and that the company would make more from those subscriptions than from its current arrangement from cable companies, and eventually backing off for some of the reasons I’ll articulate. But it’s important to reiterate that a stand-alone service is not a minor change . There are major forces at work here, and both HBO and we would do well to be attentive to them.

First, I agree with Yglesias that commentators, particularly those of us who cover entertainment technology, tend to dramatically overrate the extent to which cord-cutting is actually happening and to which consumers want to and are dropping their cable in favor of streaming services. Even if broadband gets cheaper and broadband adoption gets more serious, that doesn’t mean that people are going to prefer streaming services to cable. As I wrote earlier this week, people are dropping cable subscriptions, but not yet in a way that indicates a cultural shift rather than a tough economy. The cable companies aren’t wilfully ignoring overwhelmingly compelling evidence. They’re waiting out a trend to see if it’s real. And until sports in particular, a much bigger driver of cable subscriptions than the premium networks, get unbundled from cable, I’m just not sure we’re going to see huge, permanent accelerations in this trend, particularly if use of streaming services like Hulu gets tied to authentication of a cable subscription or a tacked-on fee.

Second, waiting that out isn’t evidence of idiocy or a desire to do harm to consumers (though it’s a mystery to me why folks who consume content assume entertainment companies’ main purpose is to be nice to them rather than to make money). HBO and other premium cable channels have a very solid and established business model here. Cable subscriptions overall may be dropping, but HBO added 190,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter of last year, the biggest growth the network’s experienced since 2006. Folks may not like paying for bundled cable, but there isn’t actually compelling evidence that HBO in particular rather than cable companies in general should be worried about cord cutting.

And though Erik suggested that it would be easy for HBO to make up lost revenue by charging more for HBO subscriptions, I think he dramatically understated the difficulty and unpredictability of that move. It’s not just that “HBO has deals with cable companies that may make this move difficult, and quite possibly very expensive.” It’s that there is no way the cable companies would let this go quietly. At all. As Todd VanDerWerff put it:
Read more

The great genius of Will Ferrell is his capacity for embodying pompous, privileged blowhards in movies that critique them and gives them opportunities to grow—his actorly portfolio is one in which almost no one is irredeemable. In the past, he’s done this with sexist news anchors in the 1970s and NASCAR drivers in our own day. And now he’s taking on some of the most cosseted, self-important people in America: our politicians. What looks great about The Campaign is how squarely it’s aimed at the practices of the modern election, rather than at voters or democracy itself:

It’s all there: the John Edwards-like obsession with looks, the conviction that the candidate must be at the center of attention even in the aftermath of his own gaffe (or, okay, baby-punching), the pablum of pander. To my knowledge, no existing American politician has declared that “Filipino Tilt-a-Whirl Operators are this nation’s backbone,” but I eagerly await the day when one does. The Campaign looks to be the inverse of Parks and Recreation—hopefully it’ll help us bide time until that noble pean to the best in American politics returns to the air.

This post contains spoilers through the May 13 episode of Game of Thrones.

I enjoy watching Game of Thrones so much, and identify so deeply with some of the characters, that occasionally—horrific violence and lack of proper sanitation aside—I forget that they exist in a profoundly different era. Last night’s episode explored one of the psychological ways in which that’s true: what happens when people who have lived their lives governed by others’ wills find themselves confronted with the prospect of choice.

First, there’s Dany, who in recent weeks has become a less admirable character as she’s refused to assert her will or even attempted to discern it. It’s one thing to insist that her claim to the throne of Westeros is good in foot-stamping terms, another to actually devise a strategy of her own beyond the offers the members of the Thirteen are willing to make her. Her vacillation, and her rebuffs to the people who attempt to help her through a deliberative process, leave her vulnerable. Last week, she found her dragons stole and her khalasar slaughtered. This week, she finds that the deed’s been done by men of greater vision and will than she currently possesses, who saw in her a way to claim Qarth for their own. Will can’t merely be affirmed in this conflict, it must be asserted.

But is it possible for it to be complete? Tywin Lannister’s conduct this week suggests that he knows Arya to be false, but wants to keep her with him anyway. “If you’re going to pose as a commoner, you should do it properly,” he warns her, letting her know both that he sees through her facade and that there are limits to his tolerance, to this whim in the midst of his exercise of his will. “Have you met many stonemasons?” Arya asks, testing Tywin as he tests her facade. “Careful, girl,” he warns her. “I enjoy you, but careful.” Even a man of iron will has some remaining softness for a girl who reminds him of his daughter, but it remains an open question whether this whim will fortify Tywin’s will or be his doom. She still has one death left to dispense, after all.
Read more