All, I’ll be traveling and ensconced in Sundance screenings from tomorrow through the 22nd. But never fear! I’m honored to have a terrific crew of guest bloggers filling in while I’m away. I hope you’ll enjoy talking to them about popular culture as much as I do.

Sharmin Kent is a search media editor for Slingshot SEO. When she’s at home she enjoys experimenting in her kitchen, reading science fiction, and bitching about how much better music was in the 90s. Sharmin blogs at Confessions of a Cybernegress.

Betsy Phillips writes for The Nashville Scene‘s political blog, “Pith in the Wind,” and works at Vanderbilt University Press. Her fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine and Qarrtsiluni.

Alan Pyke is a writer and commentator on film, television, fiction, music, and politics, with a particular fascination for hiphop. He reviews movies and concerts for BrightestYoungThings, and occasionally posts at his own site.

In addition to their fine work, Travis Waldron will be writing about sports and Zack Beauchamp will be overseeing the blog. I’ll see you back on the 23rd.

Last spring, Gov. Mark Dayton (D-MN) and the Minnesota state legislature exploited a legal loophole to approve $348 million in public financing to help build a new stadium for the state’s National Football League franchise, the Minnesota Vikings. The majority of the state’s financing of the stadium would come from revenues gained from new electronic gambling machines placed in bars and restaurants — an idea that seemed fool-proof to Dayton and legislators since Minnesota ranks among the biggest states in charitable gaming.

Less than a year later, revenues from the electronic pull-tab machines are falling far short of projections, and even before ground has been broken on the new stadium, it already looks like a bad deal for Minnesota taxpayers. New financial projections say the revenue from gambling has come in below both monthly and daily targets, and the amount of cash on hand has been cut in half, Minnesota Public Radio reports:

Revenues since pull-tabs started on Sept. 18 have fallen far short of the $100 million monthly target experts initially set for the games. Last month, disappointing revenues prompted state finance officials to cut the expected stadium cash they’d have on hand by half.

The most current data from the Minnesota Gambling Control Board show Minnesotans only played a total of $4.1 million worth of the games through the end of 2012. [...]

The existing machines each are grossing $180 a day — again short of the projected $225 daily take — grossing less per day than the experts’ projection made when the stadium financing plan was being worked on last spring.

State officials now project the pull tabs will generate just $47 million in revenue, barely more than half original estimates. Pull tab revenues for 2012 were down 51 percent compared to projections. Minnesota officials and stadium advocates argue that the shortfall is a result of too-slow approval for the new machines. As of December, 75 bars and restaurants had been approved to host the machines, short of the 300 that would have been idea by that time, advocates told the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. The more likely explanation, though, is that the plan was a bad one.

Across the country, taxpayers are footing the bills for stadiums to the tune of $4 billion a year. Cities and states have used a host of public financing tactics, but the result is near-universal: revenue from such schemes falls short of projections, the city and state that financed the stadium are left with a shortfall and without the promised economic boom, and taxpayers eventually pick up the tab, whether through higher taxes or cuts to government services.

Usually, hard evidence that stadiums and arenas are boondoggles doesn’t emerge for at least a few years. In Minneapolis, it became obvious before construction crews even broke ground.

Central Park Five, the latest documentary directed by Ken Burns with his long-term collaborator David McMahon and Burns’ daughter Sarah, is a searing portrait of how detectives and prosecutors coerced confessions out of Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Kharey Wise, which also implicated Yusef Salaam, in the 1989 rape and assault of Trisha Meili. McCray, Richardson, Wise, Salaam, and Santana, who I had the privilege to meet and speak with yesterday, had their convictions vacated in 2002. Matias Reyes, whose DNA has been matched to that found on Meili’s body (there were no DNA matches between Meili and the Five), has confessed to the crime. In other words, the facts of the coercions, the false convictions, and the true perpetrator are not controversial, even if the city of New York has yet to settle a civil suit filed by the Five. So it was disappointing to hear from Burns yesterday at the Television Critics Association press tour that some of his regular and long-term funders had been afraid to back the project.

“A good deal of the money also came from the Atlantic Philanthropies, a foundation we had not had any relation with before, but who is willing to take on a sizable part of our budget in large part because so many others had avoided what they feared would be too controversial aspects of this story,” he explained in his introduction to the film.

Burns refused to name names, and was gracious about the fact that underwriters always have a lot of choices, even from among his slate of projects, but he didn’t mince words about the funders who expressed anxieties about the subject material or the tone of the film.

“I did not begrudge sponsors. They’re not obligated,” he explained. “We normally sort of work on a ten year plan. We have a film on the history of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Sarah and Dave and I are working a film on Jackie Robinson. Lynn Novick, who’s been here before, and Sarah Botstein and I are in the middle of a massive series on the history of the Vietnam War. Dayton Duncan, who we were here with last summer on The Dust Bowl, and I are in the middle of researching and beginning to write a history of country music. We have a biography planned of Ernest Hemingway. All of those things are part of it. And underwriters have had a chance to sort of cherry-pick and choose what they want to do. And these are tough times for underwriting. And I think particularly for some, the notion of not knowing what the final product would look like, it was something that prudence suggested they stay away of, which is sad.”

But Burns also offered a rebuke to the idea that his other movies are sentimental or uncontroversial—or unconcerned with racial justice in the way Central Park Five is.

“There are aspects…in almost all the films in which we’ve been unwilling, in fact unable, to present a comfortable, sentimental or nostalgic version of American history,” he said. “And more often than not, scratching the surface of American history, we’ve dealt with race and this is certainly about that. I think it speaks volumes, this story, about America and our tortured racial history.”

The coverage of the Central Park Fives’ exoneration wasn’t nearly as loud as the media calls, in some cases, for them to be literally hung when New Yorkers were convinced they were guilty. Central Park Five is an opportunity to correct that balance, and to give Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise, and Yusef Salaam back some of their dignity and names, some of the slim recompense available to them, given that the years they lost to prison are unrecoverable. It also could help shift the sentiment on their civil suit against the city, which also cannot restore those years, but could give the Five some compensation for lost earnings and lost time to develop their careers. It’s a real shame that any funder would be more willing to back an argument about race in history when the victims of cruelty aren’t available to be helped, than to support the funding of a project about a shameful event of recent memory that could do some substantive good today.

Over at the AV Club, Todd VanDerWerff has written an installment of that site’s 100 Episodes series on A Different World, the last majority-black show to crack the Nielsen top ten, but it’s really an opportunity to discuss the end of the requirement that television broadcasters and television production companies be owned by different organizations. And in turn, Todd uses the end of those regulations, by Bill Clinton’s administration, to explain the decline of independent television production companies that were both more likely to and more capable of producing content about people of color and blue-collar characters. He explains:

When A Different World debuted in 1987, by far the most powerful production company in TV was Carsey-Werner Productions, even though the company had only one show on the air, The Cosby Show. The Huxtables so dominated the television landscape at the time that Carsey-Werner could afford to be picky about follow-up projects, and A Different World was the first Carsey-Werner series to make the air after Cosby. (The next, Roseanne, also went on to be a Nielsen top-10 mainstay and was the series that finally toppled Cosby’s reign.) Run by Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, who had both been comedy development executives at ABC in the ’70s, the company was fond of recruiting outsider voices, particularly stand-up comedians, then building television series around them. The company produced a handful of series before Cosby, but Cosby made Carsey-Werner’s name and bought it the financial room it needed to be choosy with future projects. The Cosby Show was built around Bill Cosby’s voice, and he wanted to do a show to counteract many of the images of black families elsewhere in the media. He wanted two successful parents with five children also primed for success. He wanted stories that were very small, occasionally almost conflict-free, the better for Cosby to start riffing. And as the show ran, he wanted to reflect on the black experience in the United States, on the greats who had made the kind of life the Huxtables enjoyed possible.

There are a lot of reasons television is as white—and in other ways, as conservative—as it is. But the decline of independent production companies, and of a system that gave them power, makes it much, much more important to attract the attention of gatekeepers inside of organizations that have consolidated economic interests. It’s what makes it so important that Shonda Rhimes is using her power as a producer and as someone with a solid track record of hit shows for ABC to promote the work of Issa Rae, who made her name through television distributed online, and what makes it depressing that Tyler Perry, who could act as a similar facilitator, doesn’t lend backing to other creators of any race or gender.

Catching a television gatekeeper’s eye has always been a difficult thing. And it can seem inexplicable who gets noticed, and who gets an opportunity to get execute their vision, whether it’s Rae or Lena Dunham, and who doesn’t. But as Todd’s piece points out, part of the problem is that there are now fewer gatekeepers whose attention is available to be caught, and they are less independent from the dual financial pressures of trying to sell both shows and advertising. You can quibble about who they let in the door. But if we care about changing what we see on television, it makes sense to focus more on where the doors are, how many of them there are, and who has the ability to turn the keys and the knobs.