The television season gets an early start this summer, thanks to the Olympics, which NBC is using to launch the two most promising new comedies it developed this year, Go On late tonight after Olympics coverage ends, and Animal Practice, which it will air at the same time on Sunday (both will be available online the next day).

Go On which features Matthew Perry as Ryan King, a sports radio host whose wife recently died, and who is required by his boss Steven, played by John Cho, to attend a support group before he can return to work, reminds me a bit of the early days of Community before the show became a wildly creative exploration of pop culture tropes with dismal ratings. Ryan is snarky and resistant about the gongs and self-affirmation exercises employed by Lauren (Laura Benanti, freed from servitude in The Playboy Club), the group leader. But as in Community, he can’t help but be drawn to the other members of the group including Owen (Tyler James Williams of Everybody Hates Chris), a withdrawn young man whose brother is in a coma after an accident, George (Bill Cobbs), an older man who has gone blind, and Anne (a wonderful Julie White), a widowed lesbian whose partner died after being cavalier about taking her heart medication.

The show’s goofy, at least through the pilot, operates on a less intense level than Community‘s did, where exploring the trope was the way you accessed emotion (in a sense, the show was an enormous, continuously operating video game). Ryan sets up a March Sadness competition to get the members of his group talking about the tragedies that have befallen them, and there’s a weirdly joyful bit involving equipment stolen from a LARPing group, but the characters don’t need them to express what they’re feeling, just as aides to start accessing joy and humor again. And while Jeff’s former lawyer colleagues have played a decidedly minor role in Community, the biggest problem with the Go On pilot is the time it spends on Ryan’s job, which is introduced as a relatively generic radio station with no character beats as good as those in the support group, unless Steven’s tendency to pat people on the ass counts as a personality trait.

But the characters in-group are very strong, and hopefully Go On will have the sense to devote the bulk of the show’s time to them. Anne, in particular, who Ryan describes as “a cool, very angry lady,” is one of the most quietly original characters of the new season. Unlike Ryan Murphy’s The New Normal about a gay couple seeking to have a baby via surrogate, which will debut in September, Anne conforms to no particular trope of gayness, and the death of her partner, mercifully, has nothing to do with their sexual orientation. Instead, it’s the mundanity of heart disease that felled her and has flattened Anne, who is furious at telemarketers who keep calling for her dead wife, and at Patricia, for leaving their children without one of their mothers. When I asked Julie White about Anne at the Television Critics Association, she surprised me by explaining that the character was initially written as straight, but that creators Scott Silveri and Todd Holland changed the role after White was cast.
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I know that a lot of you think I’ve been too easy on Skyler White, the deeply morally compromised wife of violent meth kingpin Walter White on Breaking Bad. But her transformation from naive wife to a woman who’s grieving her own sins and confronting her husband even though she’s terrified of him has sparked some fantastic considerations of the character. And I wanted to grapple a bit with this one from Kelli Marshall, which I disagree with, but want to address because I think it raises some problematic ideas about women and violence and abuse in popular culture:

But it’s this second-to-last occurrence that, I think, brings my aversion to Skyler White full circle. Last week’s episode (“Madrigal”) features one of the most disconcerting shots in the entire series (also in the Top Ten Most Disconcerting, the above-mentioned avocado/chicken scene as well as that turtle and poor Victor’s demise-by-box-cutter). In a nightgown, Skyler is in bed. Walt approaches her and begins to derobe, all clothes. He slides in bed, adjusts his penis, closely spoons his wife, and kisses her on the arms. Although she’s clearly uninterested, Skyler does not recoil. WTF? This seeming act of “pseudo-rape” is indeed, as one blogger puts it, “one of the most uncomfortable moments of the entire series.” A TV Line writer remarks similarly: “Aaaand thank you, Breaking Bad, for the fade to black that spares us a full-on, against-Skyler’s-will sex scene [...] though I’m not sure what’s worse — seeing it or imagining it.”

At this point, it should be clear that I’ve a very low tolerance for representations of rape and/or forced sex (the same goes for portrayals of animal abuse). But what’s more, I’ve little patience for female characters who choose to remain in said abusive relationships without exacting some sort of revenge or authority over their male oppressors (maybe this is coming to a head in Breaking Bad?). Finally, as mentioned above, I take issue with female characters who function as victims — or prey, as Anna Gunn puts it when describing the set-up for the “I’m a coward” scene depicted in the animated gif below: “It ended up as a dance, with Bryan [Cranston] pursuing me all around the room. It was really like I was trapped animal that was Bryan’s prey.” Yeah, I don’t dig this situation.

It’s one thing to not want to consume fiction that involves images of women being the targets of physical and emotional violence, which I completely understand. Everyone has their own limitations—it’s one of the reasons I rarely go to or write about horror movies—and those personal boundaries are worthy of respect. It’s another to say that a female character is not written credibly, that her failure to resist to violence against her, or her resistance to violence visited upon her don’t resonate given what we know of the characters, their material and emotional resources and support systems, and the worlds in which they live. A third to examine the work of creators who appear to enjoy visiting harm, degradation, or embarrassment on their female characters. But I have a hard time disliking Skyler White on the grounds that she should have found a way to leave Walt or stop him from potentially assaulting her already.

Women who are battered, and I’m not even talking about women who are emotionally abused, the most common form of abuse Walt subjects Skyler to, take an average of five to seven attempts to leave the partner who is abusing them. There are all sorts of reasons a woman might not leave, or return, many of which affect Skyler: the safety and continued care of her children, her knowledge that her husband is willing and capable of murdering people who he believe threaten him, even ones who are protected, Walt’s ability to implicate her criminal activity. Skyler’s been in this situation for almost precisely a year, which is not a tremendously long time. Given that timeframe, and the timing of Skyler’s confrontation of Walt, it makes sense to me that she’s potentially working up to a first attempt to leave Walt, not counting his moving out before she was aware of his criminal activity, a hugely exciting, but also hugely frightening prospect.

And beyond that, there’s something disturbing about the idea that Skyler, who certainly deserves blame for her involvement in Walt’s drug-laundering, should be considered at all complicit in her marital rape and abuse. This sort of judgement is unnerving for the same reason the prospect of Lara Croft facing sexual assault was unnerving: it placed responsibility for avoiding rape in a female character’s power, and made that process into a game that didn’t take into account the prospect real sexual assault victims sometimes face of being murdered or further brutalized if they fight back. In a sense, I find the fantasy that it’s easy and realistic to fight back against rapist or domestic or emotional abusers even more damaging than illustrations of what it’s like to be trapped in an abusive relationship. What’s horrifying about Breaking Bad isn’t that Skyler is taking it from Walt, that she’s forming a human barrier between him and her children, but its depictions of how Walt has set up a situation where his wife has to forfeit the credibility that she might have been able to leverage against him in order to protect the most vulnerable members of his family, that he believes his intimidation of her is a sign of his moral superiority.

I’d really like to live in a world where it was easy for women to leave their abusers and to see their rapists convicted. It’s a beautiful, powerful fantasy, one that I definitely enjoy see reflected in utopian and science fiction and fantasy. But it’s not the world we live in. And what I’m hungry for is not fiction and heroines that erase the difficulties of reaching that world, but that illustrate how high those hurdles are, and spur the people who consume that fiction to action and awareness anyway.

When Husbands, the online sitcom about a professional baseball player and a TV star who get married in a drunken weekend in Vegas and decide to stay together in support of marriage equality and because they think they might actually be in love, premiered last year, I wrote that “setting yourself up as a model minority may be an important way to argue for legal rights, real equality means the right to make mistakes and bad decisions—and to work your way out of them.” While that’s true of the show’s main characters Brady (Sean Hemeon) and Cheeks (Brad Bell, also the Husbands co-creator, writer, and executive producer with TV veteran Jane Espenson), when it comes to experimenting to discover the future, it’s also true of Husbands itself, one of the pioneering high-quality ongoing shows to live online rather than on a broadcast network.

What’s exciting about about Husbands, though, is how quickly the show has grown in scope and emotional ambition from its first season to its second, which premieres on August 15. A year’s acquaintance has richened the on-screen chemistry and affection between Hemeon and Bell, and Husbands has grown in confidence both in terms of the ideas it’s exploring and the team behind the show’s sense of the skills they’re developing by working on it. And the show is becoming an important example of how television distributed online fits into a larger pop-culture ecosystem, not simply as an alternative means of distribution for content networks are too timid to make, but as a rich idea lab that could breed a new generation of pop culture tropes and show-runners.

For a sense of that, I have an exclusive first look at the behind-the-scenes material the Husbands crew shot to accompany the second season, which goes inside the table reads and Bell and Espenson’s writing sessions, and also provides some perspective on how large the team involved in the show is:

And it is large: the $60,001 the Husbands team raised through their Kickstarter campaign helped pay the more than 40 people who worked on the second season of the show, let the production move from its cramped initial setting to a rented house that gives the scenes and actors room to breathe, and helped upgrade the cameras from commercial hand-held DSLRs to Steadicam rigs with Scarlet cameras that improved the quality of the images. “It looks like big TV,” Espenson joked when I visited the set in May. “It’s the new big TV,” Bell said, and it’s true. Husbands is an illustration of the narrowing gap between online sitcoms and their broadcast siblings.

The set and the crew aren’t the only way Husbands is bigger in its second season. The show has a large roster of major guest stars, most notably Joss Whedon as Brady’s clueless agent Wes. He’s the kind of man who declares “You know I’d gay-march on hepatatis-infected glass to change things,” even as he tries to get Brady to tone down Cheeks, explaining that “acceptable gays are overweight, over forty, overly professional with their lovers in public,” the show’s painfully accurate swipe at chemistry-free couples like Cam and Mitch on Modern Family. And in a sequence that will make fanboy hearts everywhere go pitter-patter even as it makes a point, Dichen Lachman and Tricia Helfer appear in a brutal parody of straight-guy fantasy about pillow-fighting college girls experimenting with lesbianism.
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The bridge is yours.

-NPR’s list of listeners favorite teen novels is out and it’s pretty great. I’m particularly thrilled to see the Song of Lioness series and Ring of Endless Light on there.

-This project about the first black principal of Beverly Hills High sounds like it could be interesting.

-Of COURSE Ryan Lochte is doing reality television.

-Jonathan Rhys Meyers to continue to be extremely attractive in The Mortal Instruments.

-New Studio Gibli! And about teenagers in sixties Japan!

In a long analysis of the cable television business yesterday over at Huffington Post, Tom Silva argued “Movies fared quite poorly during the economically shaky year of 2011. Last year was the weakest year in terms of movie tickets since 1995, with overall revenues dropping by 4.5% compared to 2010–despite the fact that prices were at their highest ever. So, what happened? It could be that, just as Hollywood had to fend off television in the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood is facing a new assault — but this time from Pay-TV. There is a serious case to be made that the center of the media constellation has shifted to Cable TV.” I think there’s definitely truth to the idea that richer storytelling is taking place in serialized form on television than it is in many two-hour chunks of the movies. But the relationship between television and movies is even more complex than that. Cable television is starting to make truly excellent movies that movie studios probably wouldn’t produce. And while they have very different core business models, FX, Netflix, and HBO are suddenly in collective competition for at-home viewers rental dollars, whether they come in the form of a cable package or a Netflix subscription.

In an interview with Deadline, Tony Gilroy, of Bourne and Michael Clayton fame, astutely noted that mid-budget action movies are essentially non-existent these days. “It doesn’t seem that long ago that I finished Michael Clayton and in my fantasy, my life would be, I’ll write for dough and I’ll try to make Crimes And Misdemeanors every year-and-a-half or two years. Well, that model just doesn’t work. That disappeared by the time I woke up, you know, from Duplicity. It’s over,” he said. “There will be exceptions. I don’t want to be Chicken Little or anything, I think stuff like that will exist and I don’t think that’s any big secret to anyone that it’s all gone and it’s gone to some place really great – it’s gone to cable television. As upsetting as it is to watch the movie part of it disappear, it’s pretty exciting you realize that television is better than anything’s ever been in the history of entertainment probably.”

He may have been referring to the tone and grown-up (as opposed to adult) orientation of content. But it’s also true that TV is making a lot of terrific and ambitious movies right now. HBO’s adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s financial market meltdown Too Big to Fail boasted a fantastic cast and snappy writing. It easily could have gotten the theatrical release and video on demand deal that Margin Call received, and HBO could have just as easily bought Margin Call for a premiere airing and on-demand screenings. Even if I thought it was laughably bad, Hemingway & Gellhorn was visually experimental, the kind of television movie that only works because relatively inexpensive large flat-screens have become so ubiquitous (the same reason, I think, Breaking Bad has been able to be so visually ambitious).

And even when cable channels aren’t making their own movies, they’re aggressively acquiring them for secondary distribution. HBO’s been able to resist putting its contents streaming on Netflix not only because the value of its original scripted series is so high that people will buy them stand-alone, but because it has a considerable movie library to both stream and air. FX has also been aggressively acquiring top-grossing movies—network president John Landgraf said at the Television Critics Association press tour that FX had purchased rights to 20 of the 30 movies that made more than $100 million in 2011—in part as a way to push back at Netflix, which has previously suggested that FX doesn’t have the capacity to build its own streaming site like HBO GO or Netflix. If FX can put the squeeze on Netflix by snapping up desirable movies, it can negotiate more favorable deals for content like Sons of Anarchy.

And Landgraf is pushing critics to demand specific numbers that would place a value on Netflix’s content, particularly as that company starts production on new episodes of Arrested Development and continues work on its House of Cards remake.

“Netflix could tell you how many people watched Lilyhammer — each episode of Lilyhammer if they wanted to,” he pointed out at TCA. “And what I’m saying to you is, look, to say that 20 million unique users sampled something tells me nothing. They might have watched 30 seconds of it. You understand? That’s 30 20 million people spent, an undefined amount of time interacting with a piece of programming, whereas, if I tell you that 3 million people a week or 8 million people a week in a certain demo or total viewers watched a show, that means that’s the average viewership for every minute of that show.” If Netflix’s prices are to rise, and they may have to in order to let the company keep up in the content and development arms race, cable companies are going to want to make the case that consumers get a better value for their money from the cable bundle and premium channels than from Netflix or Hulu Plus.

In other words, the idea that the future of cable and the future of the movies trade off with each other isn’t quite right: instead, they, and the future of streaming video services, are merging into a continuous ecosystem. The movies will still be able to make huge up-front investments that a network like HBO is spreading over seasons and years with something like Game of Thrones, and roll the dice on tiny movies that could be hits or busts, but that won’t garner the basic audience cable needs to sell subscriptions and advertising. Television will still dominate truly long-term storytelling, no matter how many movies Peter Jackson turns The Hobbit into. And as television you watch on a television set becomes only one element of the cable business model, the long-term monetization of movies will be a place where cable networks and movie studios interests—and ours—intersect.

When the United States Women’s National Team kicks off its gold medal match against Japan tomorrow in London, it will mark the culmination of a year-long journey toward avenging its loss to Japan in last year’s World Cup final. The women’s team captured America’s heart last year before losing in heartbreaking fashion in Germany, and the run to the Olympics has been similarly dramatic — the U.S. defeat of Canada in the semifinal was hailed as one of the premier international matches in the sport’s history, and its systematic dismantling of the rest of its competition has been beautiful to watch.

Whether the U.S. avenges its World Cup defeat or falls short again, though, an uncertain and unfortunate future awaits the top American players. They will return next week to a United States that has no major professional soccer league after Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) folded earlier this year, meaning the game’s biggest stars — Abby Wambach, Hope Solo, Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, and others — will have no top-level soccer to play.

That’s a major problem, not just for the continuance of the American women’s dominance of soccer, but for the health of women’s soccer around the world. There are more than 337,000 American girls playing soccer on 10,500 high school teams alone; there are another 700 women’s college-level teams and hundreds of thousands more playing at levels below high school. The growth of women’s soccer around the world has followed the United States, where the USWNT remains one of the few fully-funded national teams. Brazilian star Marta played her professional games in the WPS, and even in soccer-mad countries across Europe, women have struggled until late to gain the same access to the game that they enjoy in the United States.

An America without women’s professional soccer, however, puts all of that in jeopardy. And there are plenty of reasons to worry about the future of women’s soccer: excitement about previous World Cup wins and mega-stars wasn’t sustained, and as popular as this rendition of the USWNT has been, there’s little evidence that American sports fans are ready to support a major women’s league. WPS drew just more than 3,500 fans per game in 2011, and its model — which included teams in six cities — proved unsustainable.

But there is good news, too: U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati is committed to growing and sustaining a major women’s league in the U.S., as he told Sports Illustrated columnist Grant Wahl this week. “We’ve talked with club owners and teams that are in the USL and teams in the WPSL,” Gulati told Wahl, referring to two American semiprofessional leagues that still exist. “And we’ll see what we can figure out, not on how we get the right set-up started, but on how we get the right set-up sustainable. That’s more important. Whether that’s an existing set-up or some other set-up or a combination, I don’t know yet.”

There is also precedent for reviving a failed soccer league in America. Major League Soccer got off to a bumbling start in the 1990s, drawing small crowds and expanding to new cities far too fast. After downsizing and reorganizing, the league is now thriving in 19 cities and drawing bigger crowds than ever. And unlike a women’s league, MLS can’t boast that it features the world’s best players.

As Gulati told Wahl, growing a domestic women’s professional league is going to take time and patience. Like MLS, it will have to start small, placing teams in strategic cities where soccer is already popular and facilities already exist, and partnering with well-established MLS teams in Los Angeles, D.C., Seattle, and New York (as some semiprofessional women’s teams already do) could help the league off the ground. MLS was once left for dead, too, and it is now thriving. And regardless of the constraints, starting, sustaining, and growing a major women’s professional league is imperative. The world’s biggest stars need a place to play, and the millions of soccer-playing girls around the world who dream of repeating the heroics of women like Wambach, Morgan, and Rapinoe need proof that their sport doesn’t lead them to a dead end.

The good folks at Eater have chronicled all of the different ways in which the stock photo of a woman either eating or being fed asparagus (the hands could be her own) that Newsweek put on its cover to illustrate its 101 Best Places to Eat in the World has been used by other publications, and handily illustrates the latest one:

The cover’s been called food porn, which is absolutely true. But more to the point, it’s not actually much of an illustration of the story itself. The asparagus look just fine, but they also don’t appear to be cooked, which is a little odd since the story is about restaurants. And orgasm is one of the most-used and least creative metaphors for the experience of eating really fabulous food.

It might have been hard to choose between restaurants, chefs, and dishes, and it would have been more expensive to do a shoot at one of the restaurants in the piece than to use a stock photograph. Given Newsweek’s financial woes—Barry Diller’s IAC took sole control of the company, and he has said he plans to invest less in the magazine, cost considerations might have been reasonable. But even under those circumstances, there are a lot of photos in the Getty library and others, probably even of some of the people, places and things mentioned in the cover story. Newsweek could have gone less sexy and more specific, but that might mean trying to sell a cover package on its actual merits.