By Alli Thresher

When I first came across Joe Peacock’s “Booth Babes Need Not Apply” post on CNN’s Geek Out blog, I was intrigued. Here, I thought, based on the title alone, is a self-professed geeky guy delving into the problematic nature of a culture that promotes and uses models as marketing bait. “Excellent,” I thought to myself, “rad even – it will be cool to hear the perspective of a male consumer on this issue.” Boy was I disappointed. The title of Peacock’s post is horrendously misleading. He notes that he’s bothered by booth babes – but doesn’t really delve deeper than that. Instead, the readers are presented with a long, rambling, screed about “fake geek women” and how they’re ruining geek culture for everyone (everyone being dudes like Joe and his friends).

There are so many things problematic with Peacock’s piece–the fact that he rates women on a 1 to 10 scale, that he conflates professional booth staff with models and promoters and regular old cosplayers. That he talks about his own attraction to “real” geek girls but maligns anyone who might be at conventions doing the same thing:looking for a date. And then there’s the ranting and ranting and ranting against “fake geek girls.”

Let’s just get one thing out of the way here. Fake geek girls? They don’t really exist. Seriously. Leigh Alexander has some amazing things to say here. But I searched far and wide, but could not find anyone who’d ever met one of these supposedly toxic, nasty, creatures.

There are some decent points buried in Peacock’s post, but they’re barely touched on and mostly obscured by his complaints about all the nefarious fake women who are apparently ruining conventions for him. For example, he’s right that booth babes are a problem– but, counter to his complaints, they’re not a problem because they’re “fakes” or teases or whatever. Their use is problematic because it lends rise to attitudes like Peacock’s. When the most visible women in a male dominated space are, largely, promotional staff and models, it becomes really easy to write off most other women on the floor–as Peacock and his supporters, do.

As I wrote in another piece, when I’ve spoken to fellow gamers about their issues with booth babes, I’ve found, surprisingly, that male-identified gamers, their ostensible targets, are the ones most vocally opposed to the use of booth babes as an advertising gambit. I hear over and over “they don’t belong here, they don’t play games, I can’t talk to them.” When the women working the floor are written off, immediately, as not worth talking to, it lends to an attitude of models, promoters, and other female staff, developers included, being treated not as people but as, well, something less. It’s telling that Peacock called out both the Frag Dolls, a group of professional gamers, and Olivia Munn, former co-host of Attack of the Show, as “fakes” – I’d warrant that most geeks and gamers count all of these ladies as having more “cred” than the average geek dude, Joe Peacock included. And if Peacock hates the use of booth babes so much, he shouldn’t go after the models, go after the companies that hire them, or the content creators who build a market for hypersexualised, unreal, versions of women.
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ABC News President Ben Sherwood said, in the wake of errors in and disputes over his network’s coverage of the shootings at The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado, his network had no immediate plans to change standards and practices, but would look at how to make sure staff followed them in tense breaking news situations.

Sherwood faced sharp questioning from the Television Critics Association at a presentation in California on Thursday about Brian Ross’s initial report that a man who shared the name of the accused shooter was a member of a Tea Party group, and about reports that ABC News had mischaracterized the reaction of the suspect’s mother when she was called for comment about his involvement. In the former case, the James Holmes Ross identified as a Tea Party member was not the same James Holmes who will be tried for the murders of twelve people at an Aurora theater. And Holmes’ mother has suggested that her remarks to ABC News that “Yes, you’ve got the right person,” were meant to confirm that she was, in fact, his mother, not to indicate that she believed it likely that her son would have committed the crimes of which he is accused.

“What happened was we put something on the air that we did not know to be true, and the part of it we knew to be true was not germane to the story we were doing and the story we were covering,” Sherwood said of Ross’s initial report on Holmes’ political affiliations. “That was a violation of our standards.” But he declined to provide a narrative of how ABC came by the information and made the decision to air it, saying only that the report was Ross’s error rather than an indication of a systemic failure. That lack of a narrative made it difficult to determine which ABC standards or practices were violated, and which procedures Sherwood and his team would seek to improve.

In a press scrum after the main conference, Sherwood suggested that one change might be to give on-air reporters more information about the quality of data and reports.

“I’ve asked our team to look at ways in future breaking news situations that there’s even more clarity, as things are going around, as we’re pulling things off the web, as we’re pulling things down from social media,” he said. “Let’s make sure we’re even more clear with everybody who’s about to go on the air and involved in reporting, what is reportable, what is confirmed, what is only for background…It’s a blizzard of information, there’s all this stuff going around. We can be more clear in our internal communications so that we put only on the air what is confirmed.”

Sherwood said that Ross has personally apologized to the man he misidentified on-air, but said that he would not be suspended, sanctioned or formally reprimanded, though Sherwood said “I had a very serious and stern conversation with him, and I can assure you that Brian feels sick about this.”
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There’s a lazy, irritating strain running through the critical reaction to The Dark Knight Rises. It assumes that because the protagonist is a rich philanthropist and the villain an Occupy-soundalike terrorist, the film is taking a hard-right stand on today’s political issues. You see this move from some on the left, who go as far as calling the film fascist. Others on the right are eager to deny the supposedly legitimizing Bat-mantle to liberals or to tie the Occupy movement to Bane’s unremitting violence.

It’s true that Christopher Nolan’s films blanch at armed revolution, but it’s also true that his films have nothing specific to say about the main debates that define popular American politics. Rather, the real message of the trilogy is philosophical in character: Nolan is mounting a layered defense of liberal democracy against its authoritarian opponents. The Dark Knight trilogy is saying something that most Americans assume implicitly – that best government is one that respects the rights of its citizens.

To start with The Dark Knight Rises, if the is film a dig at advocates for economic justice, it’s an extraordinarily anemic one. Virtually no screen-time is dedicated to Gotham’s social dynamics or violence by the people against elites. It’s not clear if regular Gotham citizens, or just Bane’s mercenaries and hangers-on, are participating in mass looting depicted on screen. There’s no evidence of downtrodden masses cheering Bane’s arrival. By contrast, the film is peppered with little asides about the consequences of inequality: the traders at Gotham’s stock exchange are arrogant and self-absorbed, Selina Kyle’s jabs at Bruce Wayne’s wealth have bite, and Bane’s bankrollers are vulture capitalists. Viewed in this light, what’s wrong with Bane isn’t his left-wing “motivation:” indeed, that’s almost immediately shown to be an insincere fig leaf for public consumption. Rather, Bane is a villain because he uses the slaughter of innocent people as a means to attain his ends.

Giving Bane some slightly sympathetic lines is par for the course in this morally complex trilogy. Indeed, one clear continuity between the three films is that Nolan consistently puts legitimate critiques of Gotham in the mouths of the trilogy’s villains. No one, not even Batman, would argue with Ra’s Al Ghul’s claim that Gotham was a thoroughly corrupt city. Rather, Al Ghul’s mistake is concluding this entitles him to serve as Gotham’s executioner. In Batman Begins’ first act — in a scene suffused with class tension — Wayne refuses an order to behead a working class farmer as punishment for a crime. In The Dark Knight Rises, Batman’s first rule for Catwoman is “no killing.” Neither as Batman nor himself does Bruce Wayne argue that Gotham’s social structure as it stands is morally defensible. Rather, he suggests that the city is worth reforming rather than destroying.
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Over the past several days, I’ve been reading my colleagues reactions to NBC’s executive session at the Television Critics Association press tour, particularly to president Bob Greenblatt’s remarks that, while he loved comedies like Community and Parks and Recreation (a claim that in Community‘s case, I doubt the veracity of), he doesn’t plan to make more of them. “What Greenblatt seems to mean in his formulation is that ‘broadening’ is actually a process of programming shows that are less personal visions of the world by their creators, and more big, easily grasped concepts packaged as big-laff heart-warmers,” wrote Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker. Time’s James Poniewozik wrote “NBC is under no obligation to make challenging, narrow sitcoms that only critics like me love. TV is a business, and that, as history proves, frequently means being a monkey business. Also: you can make big, broad, even dumb comedies that are great!” And Tim Goodman at the Hollywood Reporter weighed in with a close read of Greenblatt’s carefully couched remarks to suggest that “the words used definitely implied what people seemed to fear – that NBC was going to dumb things down in a real hurry. But the unsexy qualifiers that were left out also suggested that Greenblatt was thinking of something more complex – and that is a middle ground where comedy can be broadly appealing while also smart as opposed to a sophisticated lock-box of cleverness that appeals to a niche audience and thus keeps NBC in the basement.”

I agree with all of those assessments, to a certain extent. But I think that the challenges NBC has faced with finding audiences for its current crop of comedies is fairly easy to diagnose, and with an answer that doesn’t come down to merely that they were too smart for a dumb audience. And that diagnosis suggests the beginnings of a formula that NBC can use to fix itself.

NBC’s critically acclaimed comedies are complex both in their concept and in their human details. 30 Rock is not just about the backstage antics at a television show, it’s about the backstage antics of a sketch comedy show, and how those antics are influenced by corporate pressure. Its characters are engaging precisely because they’re not archetypes: instead, the show stars a neurotic, middle-aged single woman, an insecure black star who intellectualizes his stardom, and a depressive corporate executive. Parks and Recreation is about a small town, but a high-concept one with apocalypse cults and Indian massacre sites and wacky Peruvian sister city delegations. Again, the characters themselves are wonderful and rich, whether it’s libertarian Ron Swanson or apathetic April, and they’re highly unusual tropes in an already wacky town. Community, when you think about it, started off as the lowest-concept of these shows, about students at a community college, and initially, only two of its main characters, movie-obsessed Abed and millionaire Pierce were major deviations from existing tropes. And as much as Community‘s been praised for its experimental episodes, which are genius, it’s also been exceptionally good at its entirely conventional storylines, like Troy’s first legal drink.

I think some of NBC’s response to its current woes, and the response that’s been getting much of the attention, has been to think that both its concepts and its specific storylines and haracter need to be as generic as possible. It’s why they’re producing a show like Guys With Kids, which has an increasingly familiar premise—men staying home to raise children—and relies for humor on the exceedingly low-level, generic idea that males of the species caring for their young is inherently hilarious. To its credit, I don’t think NBC’s reaching all the way for the lowest common denominator. Nothing on its schedule has jokes as racist and pandering as 2 Broke Girls, for example, and the network’s new shows are actually strikingly diverse.

But it’s also instructive to watch 1600 Penn, which the network will begin airing in the midseason, and like Guys With Kids, is one of the worst shows of a new pilot crop. That show, like 30 Rock and Community, has a very specific premise: it’s a look inside the dynamics of the first family, something only a handful of living people can actually relate to without reaching for metaphor. The characters within that family are also specific, some in a way that are relatable and universal—a perfectionist daughter, a hypercompetitive dad—and some of whom are less so—a trophy wife second First Lady, a heavy, fratty First Son who is both cause and solution of international crises. The father and daughter work, but the wife and son are weighed down in nasty cliches and implausibility that isn’t actually funny or insightful. Specificity can be as lowest-common denominator as broadness, and NBC has examples of both ways to fail on its fall schedule.
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When word came down that Daniel Tosh, not precisely known for his cutting-edge or sexually sophisticated humor, had used the specter of gang rape to mock an audience member at one of his shows, it kicked off a perpetually-simmering debate about whether jokes about sexual assault can ever be funny. I think that they can be, if they target attackers rather than victims, and if they expose the absurdities behind the idea that anyone is entitled to sex, or that anyone is asking to be assaulted. And that’s why I love this video from Sasheer Zamata, where she goes inside the mind of a guy who flashed her, breaking down the ridiculousness of the impulse that leads anyone to expose themselves to a stranger—and ending with an uncomfortable but sharp insight on how that ugly incident compares to the rest of her dating life:

It’s worth comparing that video to the promotion for Tosh’s new show Brickleberry, an animated show about a state park. To his credit, Tosh scrapped what were apparently numerous and not very thoughtful rape jokes from the pilot after the controversy. That, however, appears to have left him with animals having sex like humans. It’s not entirely bankrupt—I find the idea of moose in reverse cowgirl kind of amusing—but it’s not even a joke that’s funny over a full minute of content:

If Tosh wants to retool his schtick, something that would be both legitimately difficult—excellent material is hard to come by—and kind of seismic, I’m all for supporting him in that effort. Artistic growth, especially when it means leaving behind something that’s made you very successful, is an easy imperative to ignore, but it’s a compelling one, particularly if that growth means setting aside your power to suggest that damaging, aberrant behavior is normal or funny. Hopefully some of the comedians who defended Tosh’s right to say whatever he wants will help him figure out what he wants to say next.

One of the pieces of conventional wisdom about Netflix and its competitors in pay cable is that cracking the international markets would let them keep costs lower in the United States by monetizing individual pieces of content on a much broader scale. But The Hollywood Reporter’s wrapup of the financial reaction to Netflix’s quarterly earnings report has this interesting and important observation from “SIG Susquehanna Financial Group: “Internationally, challenges appear to persist in Latin America. Management highlighted low device penetration, insufficient Internet infrastructure, and consumer payment challenges as the main obstacles. We think these are necessary but insufficient conditions. Netflix may be too early and the consumer isn’t ready: pay TV penetration in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina is currently around the levels the US reached in 1980 (one year after ESPN was launched and one year before MTV started), 1990, and 1994, respectively.”

I think I’d expected the broadband and device issues, but the low pay cable penetration rates came as something of a surprise to me. The Emmys this year, and the critical consensus of a decade, cement the idea in the United States that cable is where momentum in television lies. And I think our sense of the landscape and what audiences crave and can afford is somewhat distorted by the excellence of British programming, particularly that which plays in syndication overseas. That’s not to say that international audiences are less sophisticated, or producing content of lower quality, or that shows like Game of Thrones don’t do well when they’re syndicated to audiences that are prepared to embrace them. But it’s a reminder that while there might be gold in them thar hills, it may be some time before it’s actually possible for companies to excavate it, and for them to reap the rewards we expect will keep our prices low and make it possible for companies to experiment with new business models.