Maureen Ryan pointed out this Q&A with Michelle Lovretta, the creator of Canadian fantasy show Lost Girl (currently airing on SyFy) about a succubus trying to make her way among warring faerie communities. I was particularly struck by her explanation of the efforts she’s made to keep the show sex-positive, and to avoid falling into stereotype and error:

So, I came up with a few internal rules and I moved to Canada that first year to co-showrun the show (with the fab Mr. Peter Mohan) partly just to help institute them:

1. sexual orientation is not discussed, and never an issue;

2. no slut shaming – Bo is allowed to have sex outside of relationships

3. Bo’s male and female partners are equally viable;

4. Bo is capable of monogamy, when desired;

5. both genders are to be (adoringly!) objectified — equal opportunity eye candy FTW…

Bo has lots of sex, with men, women, humans, Fae, threesomes… and she’s still our hero, still a good person worthy (and capable) of love, and that’s a rare portrayal of female sexuality. Also, a show built around a bisexual lead doesn’t have to BE about her bisexuality — orientation can just be an interesting element of a story, and not the story itself, and that’s the central spirit of our show. I consider that “I’m here, I’m queer, and it’s no big deal” approach to a main character still fairly rare and wonderful, at least in North America. It’s also rare to have a female lead who is so honestly sexual, without judgment…I think the single element I will remain proudest of is just that we’ve been able to create and put out into the world a sex positive universe where a person’s sexual orientation is unapologetically present and yet neither defines them as a character, nor the show as a whole.

I would really like to see this sort of thing tacked up in a lot of writers’ rooms. And the fact that a show that starts with the intention of doing something better needs these as reminders is an illustration of how pervasive our default assumptions about women and non-straight people and sexuality are. Getting your head right is a constant struggle.

I’ve longed to see the actual statistics on viewership for Hulu and Netflix’s original content efforts, so I was exceedingly interested to see Deadline’s first roundup of how many people are watching the YouTube channels the company stood up with programming seed money. The numbers are revealing.

Geek and Sundry, the Felicia Day-branded channel meant to build off the success of her web show The Guild, has attracted a proportionally huge amount of media coverage and buzz. But it was only the 16th-most watched channel on the site last week, netting 728,453 views (it was 13th previously). The most-watched channel, Sourcefed, which quickly wraps up viral news stories, was number one for the second week running with 5,607,921 views, a number that would have any actual network other than NBC feeling chest pains. The numbers drop off quickly after that: the channel with the number two slot has 3.8 million views, and only the top 11 channels netted over a million clicks on the play button. These are sobering numbers for folks who’d like to see network and cable television get outcompeted by the web. And they’re a cautionary tale for those who’d like to see their favorite shows, like Community, slip the yoke of a conventional production company and be supported by viewers: it’s a reminder that the core audience for any given show who would follow it off their televisions, much less support it with their dollars is not actually equivalent to its Nielsen rating.

Perhaps these numbers will improve. I continue to think that bundling web series together makes a lot of sense so people can find a number of things they might like at once, and so shows like The Guild, Husbands, or The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl with comparatively large followings can be used to launch new efforts. This is a medium is barely in its infancy, it’s really still in gestation, and the vast majority of consumers haven’t even thought about seeking out new original programming online much less figured out where to find what they like.

But I still think this illustrates a point I made in On The Media this weekend. I really think the networks would be smart to start using web television as a farm system. A season of web television usually adds up to about the length of a pilot. If a motivated web audience finds a show and proves willing to keep coming back for the bits and the pieces of a pilot over a period of time, that might be a good indicator that a core audience exists for a show that a network can build on, rewarding legacy viewers with higher production values, and putting a promising concept in front of an audience that didn’t even know it was out there to hunt for. If the networks were smart, they’d be excited about the idea of all these people shooting test pilots for them for free and developing audiences for them before they have to spend a penny of their advertising budgets, even if they don’t care about good ideas. And as much as I like the idea of the networks having more competition, it’s not time to give up on conquering from within either.

“Tears aren’t a woman’s only weapon. The best one’s between your legs. Learn how to use it.” – Cersei Lannister

“There is no number.” – Peggy Olson

“What do we say to the god of death?” – Syrio Forel
“Not today.” – Arya Stark

I’ve been saying for some time that once the books are finished and the television series has caught up, there’s an essay I can’t wait to write about the male mentors of Arya Stark. But watching this Sunday’s episodes of both Game of Thrones and Mad Men, I was struck by the parallels between those series’ traditional women, Sansa and Joan, and their trailblazers, Peggy and Arya, and the advice they receive from others about how to make their lives better.

One of the ways we understand that Don Draper is a fundamentally selfish person is his failings as a mentor, one of the major threads of this season. On a fairly fundamental level, he’s incapable of seeing Peggy’s — or anyone else’s — success as a contributor to his success rather than detracting from it. He’s not going to advocate with her with Heinz. He hangs up on her when she tries to apologize. Instead of seeing Ginsberg’s rise as another opportunity for Don to get credit for spotting and developing a talent that other people might have passed over, he undermines the younger man by leaving his design for a Sno-Cone ad in a cab so he has an excuse not to pitch it. Alan Sepinwall remarked on how “Peggy tries to resume her role as Don’s work wife — literally in the Cool Whip pitch — but the chemistry’s not the same” in “Lady Lazarus,” but in a way, that’s an illustration of the fundamental awkwardness of their relationship. Don’s lack of confidence means that he’s keeping a ledger of what Peggy owes him, rather than secure and able to spend his influence and knowledge without expecting a return with interest in a series of scheduled payments. Everything he does when Peggy gives her notice is wrong. He’s asked too much of her over the years to understand she sees their account as basically even. Even if Peggy wants the role of Don’s work wife, his ardent, courtly kiss on her hand is an attempt to seduce her rather than respect her, a fundamental reminder of her gender. The emotion is powerful, but what she wants is a kind of relationship that Don is unable to engage in.

Joan, who gets and takes the best advice (which is not saying much) offered to her all episode by Lane, who advises her to get a fair price for what she’s selling, was never really considered a potential subject for mentorship and professional growth. She buys her way to a more stable, secure, second-class existence. It’s a place she can have not just because, as Don tells Peggy, she’s been there for thirteen years, but because giving your office manager five percent of the firm is fundamentally different from admitting a woman as an equal partner. Joan, as Emily Nussbaum argues at the New Yorker, has won her right to be in the room, to hear what the men think of her. Peggy wants to change the terms of the conversation rather than simply hearing it, or participating in it. Her deep drink, her conviction to leave, is less about the firm choosing Joan over her, and more about the affirmation that Don Draper has trained her for something he doesn’t actually know how to give her: leadership.
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The bridge is yours.

-Jaguar gets that product placement doesn’t always have to be sycophantically positive.

-SEK has a typically brilliant analysis of the camera work in “Blackwater.”

-Watching Curt Schilling blame the state of Rhode Island for the failure of his video game company is a study in conservative hilarity.

-I actually think this trolling of Community fans, myself included, is pretty funny.

-Of course Danny Boyle is basing the London Olympics Opening Ceremony on The Tempest and Frankenstein.

-Jay-Z and Kanye West take to the barricades:

When the first teaser for The Host, the adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s science fiction novel starring Saorsie Ronan as an alien lifeform implanted in the body of a young human woman, came out, I decided to give Meyer the benefit of the doubt and give the book a shot. I was pleasantly surprised, and it made me wonder how Meyer’s career might have gone if The Host had been published before Twilight and Meyer had been embraced as a science fiction novelist, rather than primarily as a romantic one. But we live in the world that Twilight built, and so The Host looks like it’s going to be marketed as an intense young adult love story:

This is too bad, because to my mind, the most interesting thing about The Host as its status as a kind of peaceful Old Man’s War from the aliens’ perspective. Ronan’s character is an extremely fragile alien who goes by Wanderer. Her species is a colonizing—and as they see it—civilizing one that travels to new planets, removes the consciousness from the sentient species who live there, and insert themselves. The worlds they run are free of conflict, poverty, disease, and ecological devastation. In Wanderer’s opinion, this is a significant improvement, and lets her species, known as Souls, gather the stories, traditions, and wisdom of the species whose bodies they occupy. Where in Old Man’s War, John Scalzi’s characters drop in on species and civilizations as they fight their way through the galaxy, Wanderer gives us fleeting but powerful glimpses of life in all its possibilities.

That’s not to say there isn’t a YA-level love triangle in the novel, but rather than being defined by Who Loves Bella Swan more, the people who end up competing both for Wanderer’s love and the affection of the body she inhabits offer differing models of human independence in the face of alien invasion. The man who loved the body Wanderer occupies before it was hijacked stands for resistance to the invasion, to an inflexible vision of humanity as pure and independent, while the man who comes to love Wanderer for herself is one of the first humans she meets who is intrigued by the possibility of expanding his knowledge of the universe and his understanding of the kind of people who are worthy of sympathy and empathy. It’s a triangle with intellectual purpose beyond emotional frisson.

The book isn’t perfect, far from it. But it’s going to make me sad if The Host gets sold as another romance in the vein of Twilight and not as anything more. I’d like to think that a sense of wonder is still something that can get pricked by exposure to the potential size of the universe, not just by the sensation of being desperately wanted. Maybe The Hunger Games will convince folks that if you heighten romance with a postapocalypse, girls won’t be deterred, and boys will feel there’s something there for them, too, and we’ll all get a better movie as a result.

I think James Poniewozik is largely correct that while the networks may be upset about new technologies that let viewers skip ads, they might be better off trying to find fee structures that are responsive to new technologies:

But they want—and a good business would provide—many more ways of paying, if not with their eyeball attention to ads, then with money. (There’s the possibility, for instance, that networks could raise fees to networks like Dish that offer ad-zappers, which fees could be passed along to those who ad-zap, to replace lost ad revenue.) People want to be able to buy episodes, subscribe to shows, watch on their own schedule, and bypass ads they don’t want. In the process, the relationship of people to TV networks will change: right now, networks’ true “customers” are the advertisers, because they’re the ones who pay money.

The TV business is changing from one with a single main revenue source to one with a lot of them; the transition is bound to be painful for the networks. But quashing an option your consumers want is the wrong way to forestall that pain. You can’t pull the plug on technology forever, and if that’s your best response to change, it’s your own fault when consumers start tuning you out.

I also think this is easier in theory than in practice, and is going to take years to sort out. One important experiment will be to see how consumers respond to a Netflix or Hulu Plus pricing scheme that’s more reflective of the actual cost of supporting that content and the production of higher-quality original content. A second step will be to see how consumers behave if they’re faced with regular but reasonable hikes in the prices of those services, which are responsive to both renegotiated content contracts and rising wages and costs. I would like for it to be true that people are willing to pay for content at a cost that will support a fairly diverse array of high-quality programming, but as I’ve written before, we don’t actually have proof of a viable financial model yet, and it’s not wrong for the networks to be cautious about blowing up an existing business model in favor of optimistic projections.

We have a sense of what we’ll pay for three distinct products in this market. First, there’s what people will pay for bundled cable, both in terms of what prices will get them in the door and what prices won’t lead them to quit at the end of a first-year contract. We also have a sense of what we’ll pay for a single episode of television, because iTunes and Amazon have established that price for consumers much in the way cable companies did. And we know we’ll pay $8-$30 a month for streaming video and DVD exchange services. As consumers, I think we have little sense of the ad revenue we’d have to make up if we were to replace advertisers as networks’ customers. I’d be excited to see a good experiment in how to price out new models, but it would take serious negotiation between distributors and the networks to set one up, and it would need to include both coastal and rural consumers to account for differences in broadband penetration and avoid preference bias. If folks have ideas on how to make such an experiment work, leave them in comments. It’s time to start thinking beyond the simple idea that evolution is good and important, and start talking in greater detail about how we get there.

In response to yesterday’s post, in which I suggested it was time for journalists to start asking white actors, directors, and writers rather than people of color about how their careers have been influenced by race and why Hollywood is so overwhelmingly white, a reader directed me to this fantastic clip of Shame and Hunger director Steve McQueen making precisely that point, laying out exactly the questions that should be asked, and watching as his white male counterparts at the roundable get very, very nervous:

One of the things I think has been interesting about watching folks talk about Lena Dunham, Girls, and race is that it’s one of the only times I can think of where a white creator was asked (quite fairly, I think, though Terry Gross could have been more probing) about race and the role it played in her creation. Like her answers or not, at least Dunham seemed prepared to have a conversation about the assumptions and decisions that made her show what it was. That’s a lot more than any of these older, Oscar-nominated dudes were ready to do. Maybe next time, they’ll be prepared. And hopefully one of the lessons of Girls will be that many more of these conversations should be happening in interviews. As commenter Jenni put it on Twitter, “White people have race, and men have gender. We should always be talking about these things.” Or at least more often.