When AMC announced earlier this week that Breaking Bad will premiere its fifth season on July 15, it was met with so much rejoicing that many missed the second half of the press release: AMC will also be premiering the first of eight episodes in a new reality series called Small Town Security, about “a family-owned private security company in Georgia.”

Even for AMC, which has made several high-profile missteps over the past few years, this seems like a strange detour. Over the past year, the network has dabbled in both talk shows and reality shows with Talking Dead, Comic Book Men, and The Pitch. But those series were clearly piggybacking on the success of AMC’s two most prominent (and most profitable) successes: The Walking Dead and Mad Men.

It’s admittedly harder to make a reality series about manufacturing meth, though I’d definitely tune in for a Breaking Bad talk show (Talking Bad? Breaking Chat? Just spitballing here). But Small Town Security is AMC’s first step toward standalone reality programming.

The conventional narrative – and in my opinion, the correct one – is that AMC grew too fast, too soon. After quietly rolling along as the premiere channel for commercial-filled American movie “classics” for decades, the network experimented with original content and hit two unprecedented home runs: Mad Men and Breaking Bad. But quality costs money, and each of AMC’s attempts to curb the costs of its original programming resulted in an embarrassing loss of face, from protracted salary and creative arguments with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner to rumblings about Breaking Bad moving to FX, amid rumors that AMC was demanding a shortened (read: cheaper) final season.

I’m a TV critic, not a businessman, and I’m well aware that my priorities are different than the priorities of AMC executives. But I can’t see how it’s a good idea to invest in reality programming that has no ties to AMC’s flagship series. Small Town Security is being developed by producers Ken Druckerman and Banks Tarver, whose biggest success is VH1’s so-bad-it’s-awful Mob Wives. The sky certainly isn’t falling – AMC has already greenlit pilots for two new scripted dramas – but I don’t know any Breaking Bad fans who will stick around to watch a reality show that would seem much more at home on Discovery or A&E.

High-quality television obviously costs money, and if the price of Mad Men and Breaking Bad means filling other time slots with cheap-to-produce supplemental content, I can live with it. But it wasn’t so long ago that the network was investing in genres that no other network would touch, which led to successes like The Walking Dead and failures like the miniseries remake of The Prisoner. I don’t see any of that pilgrim spirit in AMC’s latest moves. That may be good business. But let’s not forget that AMC’s willingness to invest real money in something risky and brave is how we got Mad Men and Breaking Bad in the first place.

Abigail Breslin may have come up as a precocious little girl in Little Miss Sunshine, and have honed that act in movies like No Reservations and Definitely, Maybe where she’s up against more experienced adult stars. But it’s exciting to hear that she’s moving into a new phase of her career by taking an action role, specifically in a movie called Final Girl where, according to Deadline, she gets to fight off a pack of feral teenage boys who want to use her in a weird initiation ritual.

It’s incredible and inspiring to me that there is a generation of teenage female actresses who are making their bones this way, whether it’s Chloe Grace Moretz playing vampire and superhero or Saorsie Ronan playing the result of an experiment in Hanna and a human hijacked by an alien in The Host. Growing up, I loved movies like The Babysitters’ Club, the Winona Ryder-anchored adaptation of Little Women, and Ten Things I Hate About You, but I know how hard I would have been cheering for girls who were allowed to be ferocious and strong instead of simply smart and creative. It’s not enough to have smart movies for and starring teenage girls if they’re all smart in the same way. Not everyone is a bookish budding feminist like Jo or Kat Stratford, and that’s absolutely fine.

And what’s particularly interesting to me about Breslin’s path is that she’s embodied all kinds of alternagirls. In Little Miss Sunshine, she’s defiantly weird, close to her grandfather, totally uninterested in the standards she’s supposed to meet. As Valentine Wiggin in Ender’s Game, she’ll get to be cerebral and loving. And as the Final Girl, further proof that Joss Whedon created our pop culture world and we all just live in it, she’ll get to fight. The idea that someone like Breslin could just keep going and not have to make a teenaged romantic comedy to continue working feels liberating, even though it’s entirely new. I’m all for letting a thousand Jodie Fosters bloom, and with Moretz, Ronan, and Breslin going strong, we might just get them.

I’m still trying to decide how I feel about the announcement that DC Comics will, in a reversal of an existing policy, have an established character from their stable come out of the closet as gay.

In theory, I’m all for this kind of development. If you’re going to have multiple iterations of characters in multiple universes, one of the smartest ways to take advantage of that setup is to change the characters substantially so you see how people with different life experiences react to gaining great power and how they use it. Making Spider-Man a teenager of African-American and Latino origin is an opportunity to show us a different New York, one with public school entrance lotteries rather than gleaming research laboratories, an initial skepticism about his powers rather than a joyful enthusiasm, a set of family issues that make him vulnerable to S.H.I.E.L.D. bureacuracy rather than to his own inner demons. A gay superhero who comes out offers a new spin on covertness, secret identities, a new sense of what kind of people are vulnerable and need protection.

I just worry about how well this reveal will be done. A headline about Superman being gay would result in huge press for DC—Batman, by contrast, would retroactively make anti-comics crusader Frederic Wertham smile smugly in his grave—but that doesn’t guarantee that DC will be able to weave a coherent cloth between that old sense of a character and the new one. J.K. Rowling did a lovely job, I thought, when she revealed that Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was gay: the information made all sorts of disparate elements of Dumbledore’s biography come together in a coherent whole. Comics characters have so much more history and backstory that it might be hard to find a character where a coming out story feels natural and clarifying rather than requiring a hard reset. And natural and clarifying, with a smart plan beyond the big reveal, should be the goal DC should set and the standard we should hold them to.

The move by Electronic Arts to allow non-EA developers to sell games they funded through crowdsourcing and built on their own on the Origin platform for three months without charging them fees to do so strikes me as a really smart, collaborative decision.

One of the things I’ve been doing out in Los Angeles is visiting sets and talking to people about web television. As I think is clear to anyone who’s watched The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl or Husbands, or played an indie game, the challenge isn’t necessarily getting quality products into production—though extra resources and access to equipment never, ever hurt—it’s finding a way for those products to reach the full audience that would enjoy them if only those consumers knew the products existed, and to make those products sustainable. You can develop the best game in the world, but if no one other than the people who crowdfunded it know where to find it, your chances of using that method to leverage yourself into the next level of business so you don’t have to go back to Kickstarter next time are not great.

Legacy media companies, whether it’s video game distributors or the television networks, have an enormous asset in their distribution networks. Even without a big marketing campaign, if your game is populated in a categories list or popping up in a recommendations list based on your other purchases, or if your show automatically starts playing after another program is finished streaming, that’s a huge advantage over simply hosting that game or show on a website and hoping the audience will find its way there. Right now, these games and these shows are small enough that they aren’t necessarily going to compete with big studio productions—either they’re cheaper so it’s not a financial tradeoff, or the games serve different needs—so the studios lose absolutely nothing by opening up their distribution networks to give the indies a boost.

And these early experiments give them a chance to figure out what a business model for collaboration might look like. EA could end up deciding to let indie games stay on for 90 days for free and longer for a fee. They could shorten the free window to a month, and then let games stay for 5 percent of each sale or whatever fee would make this a viable proposition for indie developers who would be getting sales they never would have had access to otherwise, and for the company whose only costs are expanded maintenance of an existing customer service infrastructure. And legacy media companies could track sales and views and advertising revenue to spot new talent. Legacy media and indie media don’t have to be inextricably opposed, and EA’s opening up its sales platform is a perfect illustration of what an experiment in collaboration might look like.

Okay, which one of you jokers decided it would be a good idea to give Ryan Murphy another television series? Haven’t we learned anything about the results of positive reinforcement? Keep doing it, and he’s going to think this kind of behavior is acceptable.

So, okay, I understand intellectually why he’s been given a new series: it’s because Glee is getting strong ratings and a ton of positive attention, and thus any network worth its salt is going to seriously consider project proposals from him. NBC decided to take the bait to spice things up a bit with The New Normal, which appears to be what happens if Ryan Murphy watches Modern Family right before going to bed.

“See, I could totally do that too” is the unofficial tagline of The New Normal.

I love this knob-slobbering description of the upfront presentation:

Even though those are NBC’s cornerstone comedies for the new year, they’re emotional, progressive and heartwarming. Salke and NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt and could’ve harped on the progressiveness and acceptance of their new shows, but they didn’t — they just focused on the fact that they think they’re well-written and funny.

Right, so NBC gets to ride on progressive laurels without actually saying it’s making a progressive show. So when (not if, this is Ryan Murphy, people) people start criticizing the show on the grounds that it has some seriously massive holes when it comes to treatment of the characters and the subject, NBC can go “well, we were just making a comedy.”

They’re clearly learned a lesson from Glee, which has rightly been savagely attacked for claiming to be a progressive and “inspirational” show, yet having a boggling number of incredibly offensive storylines. This time, Ryan Murphy can say he’s just focusing on the funny. You know, in a show that happens to be positioning itself as progressive and, uh, heartwarming.
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