GLAAD does an incredible job of combing through new and returning every fall to figure out who—and not only on the basis of sexual orientation—the networks want to tell stories about. The numbers on series regulars are important because they represent a more significant commitment: it’s not particularly hard for a show to slot in a supporting characters whose main characteristic is his or her gayness, or to cast an actor of color to play a wholly generic supporting character whose role is so slight doesn’t require anyone to think about any potential racial inflection of the part. So as the season gets off to a start this year, here’s what television looks like:

-4.4 percent of series regular characters are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender

-61 percent of gay characters on broadcast television are men

-20 percent of gay characters on broadcast television are lesbians

-78 percent of series regulars are white

-12 percent of series regulars are African-American

-4 percent of series regulars are Latino

-5 percent of series regulars are Asian-Pacific Islanders

-1 percent of series regulars are multi-racial

-45 percent of series regulars are women

-0.6 percent of series regulars on the broadcast networks are people with disabilities

On race, the really egregious representation is for are Latino series regulars—16 percent of the American population is Latino, and this number of series regulars is actually down 2 percent from the previous television seasons. I’m not entirely sure why writing Latino characters appears to be such a challenge for television networks. Maybe it’s that archetypes of Latino characters aren’t as well-established as those for African-American characters, though I think the works of folks like Michael Peña is starting to establish roles like Latino cops that will prove as durable and as easily slotted into shows as African-American police officers and detectives. It may also be that some of the archetypes that do exist, like the volatile bombshell, only work and aren’t awful, stereotypical throwbacks under certain narrow circumstances, and when executed by certain performer like Sofia Vergara, and then not with consistent success. But either way, it’s an embarrassing statistic.

People with disabilities are also dramatically underrepresented on television: the reality’s around 12 percent, and representation’s clocking in at 0.6 percent. Some of this may be a settings issue: 21.1 of people with disabilities were employed in September 2012 as compared to 69.3 percent of people without disabilities, which means that a lot of American television is set in environment where people with disabilities are underrepresented compared to their actual presence in the population. But it’s also a matter of reminding network suits that, in fact, people with disabilities live and laugh and love and have adventures and solve crimes and practice medicine and run parts of government and try cases in court, and that audiences at home can see something other than their disabilities.

The National Hockey League, eight years removed from a lockout that devastated its revenues, was finally healthy again. But after another dispute over how to split revenues and the owners’ lockout of players ensued, the league has canceled the first two weeks of its season, including all four of Tuesday’s opening night games and 78 others.

More cancellations could be ahead, as both players and owners indicated in statements that a deal over how to split the league’s $3 billion in revenues probably isn’t close. According to Players Association head Donald Fehr’s statement, the players were willing to take the ice while a new collective bargaining agreement was being negotiated, but ownership decided to lock them out anyway:

“The decision to cancel the first two weeks of the NHL season is the unilateral choice of the NHL owners. If the owners truly cared about the game and the fans, they would lift the lockout and allow the season to begin on time while negotiations continue. A lockout should be the last resort in bargaining, not the strategy of first resort.

For nearly 20 years, the owners have elected to lock-out the players in an effort to secure massive concessions. Nevertheless, the players remain committed to playing hockey while the parties work to reach a deal that is fair for both sides. We hope we will soon have a willing negotiating partner.”

The primary issue in the lockout is almost identical to the one in last year’s NBA lockout. Under the last collective bargaining agreement, NHL players received 57 percent of the league’s $3 billion in revenue; NHL owners want to lower that to less than 50 percent (their preferred number is 47 percent). Under their previous CBA, NBA players also received 57 percent of their league’s $3 billion in revenues. NBA owners wanted to lower that share to 47 percent before the two sides settled on a 50-50 split.

The NHL’s owners don’t need this lockout. The league is as healthy as it has been since the 1990s, its championship series back on national television, its revenues are rising, and its big markets are competitive, strong, and making money. Another labor dispute only risks putting the league back to where it was in 2004, and for little reason.

But here’s the thing: successful lockouts breed more lockouts. NBA owners were in a similar situation (just 12 years removed from a devastating lockout), and they won. The league suffered little backlash from the media or fans for the second lockout go-round. NFL owners locked out their players last year and won. By the time the season started, fans were just happy to have the games back. The NFL tried again this year with its officials, and again they won. Now, it’s the NHL’s turn. And when corporations lock out workers and win, other corporations use the same tactics to make their own situations better. It’s why the number of lockouts is rising so quickly.

These are not isolated incidents, and that’s what makes the disputes so important not just for the players involved, but for all workers who could one day be subject to a corporation or business that has a lockout in its arsenal.

One of the best documentaries I saw at the Sundance Film Festival in January was Escape Fire, a look at doctors, patients, and hospital administrators who are trying to bend the curve on health care, both by looking at costs and insurance, but even more importantly, at what we get for our money and our insurance. From Sgt. Robert Yates, who makes the decision to kick his addiction to pain medication after suffering serious combat injuries in Afghanistan and recovers with the help of alternative therapies as part of the military’s grappling with overprescription, to Dr. Erin Martin, who moves from clinic to clinic looking for a way to practice patient-centric medicine and to focus on outcomes rather than services, the movie raises questions far beyond the problems addressed by the Affordable Care Act. I spoke with the movie’s co-director Matthew Heineman about how to tackle some of the biggest, hardest changes in health care. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

There are a lot of different stories in this movie—in a way, it reminded me of reading through Atul Gwande’s archives at The New Yorker. How did you find your subjects for the movie? And here there any who didn’t make the cut?

I think from day one, Susan [Frömke, Heinman's co-director] and I started making the film about three years ago as the health care debate was heating up. Like so many Americans, we were so confused about all the rhetoric, all the hyperbole. Health care was dividing our country. We wanted to cut through that and find out why our system was so broken, and who was out there trying to change it? We ddn’t want to make a film that was just about the problem, we wanted to be about solutions. We found characters and storylines who looked at the story through different angles…Like many films that we’ve done, we spent six to eight months doing research before we even turned on the camera…It was a pretty organic process. We met a few of our experts early on in that process, Dr. Andy Weil and Dr. Dean Ornish, and through them met some of our subjects…It’s a really complicated, wonky subject. So we know we also had to make it interesting, make it entertaining. We didn’t just want to make a film with a bunch of talking heads. We knew we wanted powerful, human stories that would carry the narrative, so at all times, that was in the back of our heads, how can we find characters that tell larger truths about our health care system, but that also have some sort of narrative arc. We found that in Dr. Martin, the primary care physician that’s struggling in a system that’s preventing her from practicing the way she wants to practice, and to find a place where she can practice the kind of medicine she wants to, [in] Sgt. Yates.

So much of the focus of our debate over health care reform is about getting people the insurance that will let them pay for care. But Escape Fire seems to be oriented towards the next debate: what it is that we’re paying for in the first place. I loved Sgt. Yates story because it got at the heart of what our expectations are for our care, and what we’re open to.

Completely. I think health care is incredibly, incredibly important. But i think the key question that our film presents is access to what? Access to a disease care or a health care system? Access to expensive care, to high-tech care, or oriented towards health care and patient-centered care? So many of these films are preach to the choir and are so partisan. We really didn’t want to make a partisan film. We wanted to make a film that would bring all stake-holders to the table…We screened the film at 62 medical schools. Last week we screened it at the Pentagon. And I think what we’ve found is that change doesn’t really have to come from Washington, change can really come at the local level, community by community, and hospital by hospital.
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The bridge is yours.

-LeVar Burton makes the equity of access case for PBS funding.

-Jamie Weinman on Netflix’s plans to drop 13 episodes of its TV seasons all at once.

-10 women who should show up as recurring characters on Joss Whedon’s S.H.I.E.L.D.’s show.

-I am pretty sure I would die of terror if I had to go through this haunted house.

-If you want some Curt Schilling memorabilia, you might get a chance to get your hands on it.

-Adele has this Bond theme locked down:

From Deadline, this will be either amazing or terrible:

Sacha Baron Cohen and his Four By Two Films will develop a feature for Paramount Pictures inspired by Cecil Chao, the Hong Kong billionaire who offered $65 million to any man who succeeded in marrying his lesbian daughter. Chao’s offer made international headlines last week following reports that his daughter had a French church bless her relationship with her longtime girlfriend. The film’s tentatively titled The Lesbian, and is a potential starring vehicle for Baron Cohen, who presumably would play the billionaire. He’ll produce through his Four By Two Films banner. A writer has not been attached.

The key to a project like this will be to satire the homophobia, megalomania, and alienation from family Cecil Chao represents. The problem with Baron Cohen’s work is that, for every singalong to “Throw The Jew Down The Well,” he tends to elicit total decency from people: his sense of what constitutes exposing someone is not as well-calibrated as he thinks it is. In Hugo, he gave one of the better performances of his career as a rigid, wounded veteran of the Great War who inflicted his pain on other people and cut himself off from kindness, but that was when he was being directed by Martin Scorsese from a script by John Logan. Hopefully Baron Cohen has the good sense to get home help on this one. It’s a story that could cut deeply if done correctly. And it would be nice to have it land.

I know this is a long shot. But a dear friend of mine was supposed to take his son to New York Comic Con next weekend, and the person who was supposed to get tickets let them down. If there’s anyone out there who might be willing to sell them a one-day pass for Saturday or Sunday at face value, I would be in your debt. If you’ve got leads or tickets, please email me at arosenberg [at] americanprogress [dot] org.

As Fifty Shades of Grey mania’s swept the country, film and television production companies have fallen all over themselves, first to snap up the rights to E.L. James’ erotic trilogy, and then to find the next Fifty Shades, whether it’s YA riff Beautiful Disaster (bought by Warner Brothers) or ABC’s efforts to develop Dress To Kill, an erotic mystery set in the fashion world, as a series. There’s just one problem: movies and television in particular are often terrible at depicting sex compellingly, even without the addition of floggers and sub-dom power dynamics to navigate and ratings systems to accommodate. But if television’s determined to get serious about sex, and networks want to compete with cable, which has far fewer restrictions on what it can show but still often demonstrates a basic cluelessness about what makes a scene genuinely erotically charged, here are five tips for how to shoot sex scenes that can pass Standards and Practices and still get viewers hot and bothered.

1. Leadup Matters: Short scenes in television often mean we see couples on a straight route from the front door to the bedroom. Hot and heavy’s fine, but it cuts out one of the most fun things about watching characters prepare to get it on, whether this is the first time they’re sleeping together, or whether they’re an established couple going to bed prepared to surprise each other all over again. Two instructive examples come from The Hour and Parenthood. The former spent its third hour on a number of plots, but the through line was rising sexual tension between Bel Rowley, the producer on the news magazine program The Hour, and Hector Madden, her married anchor. As they flirted on the drive up to London and wandered the halls of Madden’s wife’s palatial country home during a game of Sardines, watching Hector catch Bel’s hand or move in for an early kiss was as tense and thrilling as a full-on sex scene, and we didn’t even have to see them take off their clothes. In the second season of Parenthood, in the episode “Amazing Andy And His Wonderful World Of Bugs” Julia and Joel Graham end up delaying having sex until Julia is ovulating because they’re trying to get pregnant. Watching Joel lust after Julia is half the fun, in part because Sam Jaeger conveys longing so well. You don’t have to worry about what acts you can and can’t broadcast if you have actors who can plausibly sell desire even when they aren’t touching each other.

2. People Should Have Fun: Pop culture sex often looks so deadly serious, choreographed rather than spontaneous, attentive to the audience’s expectations rather than conveying the impression the people involved are actually enjoying themselves. The reason that the first sex scene in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair is so effective (once you get beyond the stair-sex, which no one will ever convince me could possibly less than extremely uncomfortable) is that the characters get to be silly, and enthusiastic, and awkward. They laugh, fall off things, vamp a little. It’s actually plausible that they’re all wrapped up in each other, rather than thinking ahead to what they’ll look like when the editing bay gets done with them.
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This post discusses plot points from the October 4 episode of Parks and Recreation.

One of the things I’d looked forward to about this season was getting to know the other members of City Council, now that they’re Leslie’s colleagues, rather than mysterious higher beings she runs into in the halls. This episode did some work in that direction, introducing us to Councilman Jam, a crude dentist, and Councilman Milton, who’s a refugee from Pawnee’s past. Jam is a small-town, excrement-obsessed tyrant who belongs to a cigar bar Tom would like to be a member of, while Milton felt more located in the exceedingly screwed up Pawnee we’ve come to know and love. “Councilman Milton was first elected in 1948 as a member of the Dixiecrat party. Their platform? Deintegrate baseball,” Leslie tells us, a poster with an African-American ballplayer and “You’re Out!” emblazoned on it hanging on the wall behind her. “I can taste the ignorance,” Tom says, choking down a bite of the man’s dressing-saturated salad. “It’s pronounced anchovies!” Milton corrects him brightly. The two men weren’t bad for the set of jokes Parks and Recreation was exploring, but they also didn’t seem like the kind of people the show is going to want to have Leslie, or us, spend a lot of time with in the future.

The larger issue I had with the A story, though, was that it didn’t read quite right to me that Leslie would get so frustrated with politics so quickly. This is a woman who’s cheerfully inserted her way into Ron Swanson’s boys weekend, who figured out how to get Ken Hotate to lift the curse on the Pawnee Harvest Festival, who Kaboomed her way to fill the hole by Ann Perkins house. And she beat Bobby Newport. I can see Leslie needing to learn how City Council works, but it’s a bit odd to see her telling the Porpoises “Our positive attitude is our greatest asset,” then immediately pivoting to tell Tom, “The bill is dead, the Porpoises are doomed, and democracy is over.” She recovers quickly, with an assist from Tom, who pushes Jam in the pool to keep him from spoiling democracy for the kids who sought her out down by the river to ask for her help in keeping their pool open. But it was a bit of a throwback to the first season of the show to see her so rattled, and not in a way that suggests growth.

It was the B story, rather, where someone was moving forward both personally and professionally. Ron, at the behest of Chris, inspired in turn by his therapist, set up a 311 line*. And after the repeated failures of the public works department to provide assistance to, or in any way respond to, a woman with a pothole in front of her house, declares “Andrew, get your lunch, some water, and a 40 pound bag of asphalt,” and sets off to solve the problem himself. The caller turns out to be a rather attractive single mother, a middle school vice principal who turns out to be just Ron’s type of woman, even if he did have to subject himself to a princess makeover by her children, at the behest of an exceedingly enthusiastic Andy. Over the years, we’ve seen Ron be won over repeatedly by Leslie’s enthusiasm for government on a one-on-one basis, but this is one of the first times we’ve seen him take the initiative on his own and enjoy it. “I begrudingly admit the 311 program is a moderate success,” Ron acknowledged, savoring both the mild personal and professional success of his day.

It’s true, sometimes, as Leslie puts it, that “This is why people hate the government. Just when we’re about to do something really good, it all falls apart due to some stupid, selfish jerkbutt.” But Leslie, more than anyone else on the show, knows how often government comes through. I’m surprised she forgot that over something so small.

*The 311 line inspired the evening’s best joke, with Donna, who’s been reading Fifty Shades of Grey telling a caller Then Anna asks Grey to punish her,” only to have Jerry, who’s been getting all the calls that are supposed to be going to 911 tell her “Donna, please! Can you please keep it down! Or at least research how to deliver a baby that’s coming out face up!” and to have the shot in turn toss to Ron, who explained “Lie the mother on her side and try to move the baby in a corkscrew fashion.”