I’ve written in the past about the challenges American film and television studios face in attempting to get their products into the Chinese market, and the Los Angeles Times has a blockbuster piece out about the compromises movie studios are making to win Chinese approval:

In “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,”a romantic comedy about building a dam in the Mideast, Chinese hydroelectric engineers showed off their know-how; the original book included no such characters. In Columbia Pictures’ disaster movie”2012,” the White House chief of staff extolled the Chinese as visionaries after an ark built by the country’s scientists saves civilization.

In fact, references to the Middle Kingdom are popping up with remarkable frequency in movies these days. Some are conspicuously flattering or gratuitous additions designed to satisfy Chinese business partners and court audiences in the largest moviegoing market outside the U.S. Others, filmmakers say, are simply organic reflections of the fact that China is a rising political, economic and cultural power.

Meanwhile, Chinese bad guys are vanishing — literally. Western studios are increasingly inclined to excise potentially negative references to China in the hope that the films can pass muster with Chinese censors and land one of several dozen coveted annual revenue-sharing import quota slots in Chinese cinemas.

Now, I have no complaint with certain things that can result from Hollywood being held accountable to non-American markets. If Chinese audiences want to see more Chinese characters—something the Times piece said happened with a college comedy called 21 and Over—and want to see them treated like actual people rather than stand-ins for stereotypes—Men In Black III apparently went through reshoots to avoid portrayals that were considered objectionable—that’s progress. Hollywood economics so rarely end up incentivizing progress.

But as the Times points out, it doesn’t stop there. Characters are supposed to speak Mandarin rather than Cantonese, because the Chinese government is trying to make Mandarin the uniform national tongue. Studios aren’t supposed to shoot in cities and give revenue to areas that have pockets of dissidents. They’re not supposed to promote obscenity, gambling, violence, supernaturalism, horrors, ghosts, demons, general supernaturalism, or disturbances of social order, all of which are pretty fantastic story drivers. That’s a lot of creative integrity to hand over. At some point, big talents are going to get frustrated by these restrictions. Even from a business perspective, there’s got to be a point at which it becomes difficult to satisfy both American audiences and Chinese censors. And while the Chinese government and Hollywood studios may believe that Chinese audiences will pay to see anything as long as it’s on a big screen, that is not necessarily a condition that will last forever.

Today on the Penny Arcade Report, Ben Kuchera explains why the E3 convention’s reliance on booth babes to sell video games is a fundamental misreading of the video game market:

The first thing I saw at E3 this year was a group of scantily clad ladies giving out energy drinks in front of the Los Angeles convention center. There was another group of female models posing for pictures upon entering the building, and to the right was another pod of “booth babes” giving away T-shirts. Going up the escalators I was greeted by yet another leather-clad group of women pitching a war game. The amount of female flesh on display before you even enter the show floor was impressive, and impossible to miss. The message it sends is clear: This is a show for men, with advertising, promotions, and booth design aimed at grabbing male eyes. In a time when console makers and major publishers are struggling to connect products with gamers, this is a dangerously short sighted marketing strategy…

There is very real money to be made marketing technology to women, or at the very least creating an environment where women feel like they can be part of the discussion. Consider that the high level of consumer adoption of technology by women happens despite the fact that trade show are usually designed by men for an aggressively male audience. In fact, E3 isn’t the only show to struggle with the changing reality of the market. CES has long pandered to a male audience, despite the huge female market for emerging technologies. “It’s confusing, because it’s sending this message of what my sex is here to do, and obviously I don’t feel that way, because I’d rather be learning about the products,” Molly McHugh, a technology writer for Digital Trends, stated in a piece about booth babes at the show.

And the New York Times reports that GoDaddy, the domain name company infamous for its boneheaded ads featuring scantily-clothed celebrities and assorted other women, has realized that the campaign may not be in its long-term best interest, because it sends the message that the product is cheap and unserious:

In July, private equity powerhouses that included Kohlberg Kravis Roberts paid about $2.25 billion for a majority stake in GoDaddy and named Warren Adelman the chief executive; Mr. Parsons became executive chairman. In a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, Mr. Adelman signaled that the era of racy GoDaddy marketing would come to an end. “We are synonymous with inexpensive domains and sexy girls,” Mr. Adelman told the magazine. “I think there is a different message we have to expose people to.”

GoDaddy appears to be learning faster than the video game business, but it’s amazing to see how long it’s taking both an industry and this company to absorb a fundamental point: sexism looks increasingly dated. And nothing’s less sexy in advertising than looking square.
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There are a lot of people who want a lot of things about the way we watch television to change: to be able to buy channels on a stand-alone basis rather than in bundles, to be able to buy streaming access to premium networks like HBO without having to purchase a cable subscription first, to be able to stream shows that are available through services like Hulu as quickly and smoothly as if they were airing on a network. As much as I would also like to see some of those things come to pass, and as much as some networks would like to be able to offer some, if not all, of those options it’s been hard to get through to folks that there is a complex system governing cable television and internet that makes those changes difficult to make without current successful business models take a major hit that could disrupt the delivery and quality of the programming we currently find so desirable.

But major changes to that system might be closer than we think.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Justice Department is probing many of the elements of the cable and internet delivery system that throw up barriers to alternate means of distributing content. The story’s pegged as an investigation of whether Comcast, in violation of its anti-trust agreement that let it merge with NBCUniversal, is giving preferential treatment to content that streams through its own outlets so it streams faster and cleaner than content that comes over the internet from companies like Netflix. That’s critically important, as is net neutrality generally, but apparently, that’s not the only thing Justice is looking into:

Another issue that investigators have asked about is whether cable companies are acting anticompetitively by making viewers have a cable subscription before being able to access certain online programming. Comcast and some other companies have verification systems requiring viewers to enter their cable subscription details before being able to watch, say, ESPN’s programming on an iPad tablet…

The Justice Department also is investigating the contracts that programmers sign in order to be distributed on cable systems. Some contracts include so-called most-favored nation clauses, which make programmers give the biggest cable companies the best price they are offering anywhere, among other conditions. The Justice Department is questioning whether there are legitimate business reasons for such terms or whether they are intended to stop programmers from experimenting with other forms of online distribution, a person familiar with the matter said.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the investigation, I’m glad it’s taking place. So much of the conversation around what people find frustrating in the current cable regime is erroneously aimed at networks, rather than the regime they operate within. This investigation should recenter that conversation, and hopefully give us more insight into the fulcrums we need to push on to give us an environment where networks can have more opportunities to monetize their content and to pursue new subscribers without risking the ones they currently have.

The bridge is yours.

-This Was Television is watching their way through Prime Suspect.

-The comprehensive nuking of the new Catwoman cover is awesome.

-Andrew W.K. is a brony.

-Huffington Post is launching a new weekend magazine for iPad.

-I really like this idea for an alternate main character for Prometheus.

-Laura Jane Grace and Joan Jett cover the Replacements:

I tend to be pretty lucky around these parts. Occasionally, someone will show up in comments here and complain about the fact that we’re talking about pop culture rather than politics, and y’all will set that person straight. Once in a very little while, a true creep will show up and comment on my looks based on a cartoon of my face, my sex life based on…I’m not even sure what exactly, or fantasize about seeing violence done to me, in which case the banhammer comes out, sometimes before y’all can even run them off. And as a media critic who does a lot of feminist work, I hate the fact that I’m grateful for the fact that I’m not harassed for doing my job.

Which is why I was so angry to hear about what’s happened to Anita Sarkeesian. For anyone who’s unfamiliar with her plight, Sarkeesian wanted to start a project to cover a subject that’s not exactly radical: the portrayal of women in video games. Her YouTube account, in which she explains the project, was flooded with comments equating her to the KKK, calling her a “fucking hypocrite slut,” comparing the project to an act of war, and flagging the video as promoting hatred or violence. Her Wikipedia page was vandalized, her picture replaced with pornographic images, and people tried to get the Kickstarter proposal Sarkeesian was using to raise money to support the project shut down. Fortunately, in this case, despite past issues with harassment victims, it seems like Kickstarter’s been more helpful to Sarkeesian than not.

But the whole incident is a reminder of how deeply some men are invested not simply in the structures that provide them tangible advantages, but in the conventions that let them wallow in culture that indulges their worst, stupidest impulses. And if folks are willing to fight this hard against someone doing criticism of culture, there are others who will do worse to preserve the laws that give them privilege in the world. Culture in this area, as in so many others, is a canary in a coal mine. And women who complain about online harassment aren’t being oversensitive: they’re trying to stop an ugly cycle before it spirals out of control. Both psychologically and substantively, it’s key to our ability to do our work.

ABC Entertainment President Paul Lee has been saying some variation of this since his upfront presentation, but he reinforced it again last week when he said his division had gone back through entertainment history to figure out what themes American audiences might be drawn to during a severe and prolonged economics downturn:

“We thought this was a joke and something we could sell at the upfront” presentation. The network found that in difficult periods such as the Great Depression audiences responded to tales of anger and revenge, romances, screwball comedies, and fairy tales. “Lo and behold when you look at the big shows that worked for us, they were comedies, stories of revenge and fairy tales, which was fascinating to see.” For this fall he’s optimistic about Nashville, The Neighbors, and 666 Park Avenue, which he describes as “a very ABC show, a deeply soapy show but it has a twist.”

The way the network’s actually gone about incorporating those themes into its programming is fascinating. There’s nary a straightforward class-war narrative among them, but a strong sense that the elites in any given show are self-cannibalizing.

On Revenge, there are minor upstarts, like assistant Ashley and con man Tyler, who hope to make their way into the upper echelons of Hamptons society, but they’re concerned with preserving that millieu so they can enjoy it. The real threats to upper-class solidarity come from within. Amanda Clarke’s family was destroyed by a conspiracy among her father’s friends to frame him for laundering money for a terrorist organization, when it was actually his neighbors who were guilty—their privilege is founded on the kind of transactions they publicly condemn as noxious. As Amanda, in the guise of Emily Thorne, begins exacting revenge on the people who ruined her life, she finds that some of her enemies, despite their past experience, are still eager to get involved in complex financial schemes, and she uses that propensity against them. When the men of the Clarkes’ circle aren’t making money in a way that carries an inherent risk of dreadful downfall, the women are tearing each other apart: Victoria Greyson, the matriarch of Emily’s stretch of beach is a harpy who doesn’t seem happy unless she has her talons buried deep in the flesh of someone else’s happiness. This is a paradise constructed from rusting siding and rotten struts, dresses sewn from moth-eaten silk. Why wage class war when the system will tear itself to pieces?

The story in Once Upon a Time is similarly a clash of elites, rather than a pure struggle between the powerful and the powerless. In this fairy tale universe, the evil queen’s become Regina, the mayor of a small New England town, and while she clashes with the sheriff Emma Swan (who happens to be the biological mother of the Mayor’s adopted child), the real struggle seems to between her and Mr. Gold, the city’s largest industrialist, and in another world, Rumplestiltskin. In this world and the one they left behind, they’ve pitted different kinds of power against each other: whether elected or anointed, Regina wields the power of the state, while Gold’s control of commerce gives him extraordinary power over the life of the town even after he’s stripped of his magical abilities. The fight between Regina and Emma is vicious and personal, given that the stakes are custody of the child the former raised and the latter bore, and it’s fun to see Emma come into herself as a hero. But the real battle seems to be between Regina and Mr. Gold—their preoccupation with each other alternately harms the people around them and creates space for them to live their lives.

From what I’ve seen, fall show 666 Park Avenue appears to be the same way, a show that takes as its premise that a group of hugely rich New Yorkers got that way because they made a deal with the devil. These shows have in common the idea that while elites can have feelings, they bear some sort of blood taint, and that their power is based in inherently unstable forces or structures. It’s the perfect concept for audiences that feels powerless but frustrated by their circumstances, that wants to see a comeuppance for the architects of their misfortunes but would like to see someone execute them.

The new (paywalled) profile of animation king Seth MacFarlane in the New Yorker is refreshingly honest, if not always admirable:

When I asked about ethnic jokes, MacFarlane offered the enlightened-liberal defense—at first. “We are presenting the Archie Bunker point of view and making fun of the stereotypes—not making fun of the groups,” he said. “But if I’m really being honest, then maybe there’s a part of me that’s stuck in high school and we’re laughing because we’re not supposed to. I don’t know the psychology. At the core, I know none of us gives a shit.” He went on, “Some people say that stereotypes exist for a reason. I’m in no way qualified to make that determination. But I’m sitting in a room with a writing staff that is in large part Jewish, and those are the guys pitching the jokes.”

When I made my list of awesome women of color behind the camera in television, I was actually surprised how many of the folks people recommended and spotlighted had come through MacFarlane’s shows. I wonder if one of the things they learned there was how to make content palatable to the kinds of people who so often serve as Hollywood gatekeepers.