Yesterday brought the news that HBO had cancelled Enlightened, Mike White’s brilliant series about how to live in accordance with your principals in a corporate world—particularly when you have a lot of debt, or the costs of activism have grown extraordinary. For all that I’m disappointed in the decision and think that it was a mistake for HBO’s brand—despite Enlightened‘s extremely low ratings, it was the kind of show that couldn’t have been produced by any other network—I don’t see it as a tragedy for the story White was telling. After Amy Jellicoe blew the whistle on Abaddon Industries and was fired, Enlightened had her walk off into a sunny California day, anonymous again among the crowd, alone with the knowledge of what she’d accomplished and unsure of what came next for her. But her time at the company was finished, and Amy had decisively acted in accordance with her beliefs. That story was concluded.

But there’s another brilliant, strange, female-centered show that’s still awaiting a decision on whether it will be renewed or cancelled. And I dearly hope that ABC Family decides to make the right decision and save Bunheads, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s dramedy about the proprietors of and students at a California ballet school.

Bunheads has a less determined story arc than Enlightened, and by design, smaller stakes. It follows Michelle (Sutton Foster), a Vegas showgirl who marries a fan, moves to California with him, and ends up owning a great deal of property when he’s suddenly killed in a car accident—and tied to his mother, ballet teacher Fanny (Kelly Bishop), as well. Her students Boo (Kaitlyn Jenkins), Sasha (Julia Goldani Telles), Ginny (Bailey Buntain), and Melanie (Emma Dumont) are intelligent, idiosyncratic young ladies who find themselves galvanized by Michelle’s arrival, which coincides with them reaching the stage of life where they’re deciding how serious they want to be about dance, whether they want to have sex, and what their relationships to their parents are going to look like. The characters don’t have life-or-death problems—at least not after the fatal car ride in the pilot—but they don’t lack for gravity.

Bunheads is a relentlessly female show, more so than any other program on television, and therein lies many of its strengths. Where Girls, after the fight that fractured Marnie and Hannah’s relationship in the first season, has moved its focus away from female friendships, the relationships between women are always primary in Bunheads. Much of the first half of the season followed Michelle and Fanny attempting to navigate an exceedingly difficult situation. Fanny was surprised by the arrival of Michelle as her daughter-in-law and even more disconcerted when her son’s death left Michelle the owner of Fanny’s home, business, and land. Gradually, they’ve navigated a professional and personal partnership, finding a way to run Fanny’s ballet school together and to build an amphitheater on the land left to Michelle. That amphitheater brings them into collaboration with two sisters, the constantly self-deprecating Truly (Stacey Oristano) and bulldozer Millicent (Liza Weil) Stone, who, in one scene, explains to Fanny that she doesn’t actually want to know about the arts, she just wants to be perceived as cultured. Truly and Milly’s rivalry is one of the best examples I’ve seen of exaggeration serving the truth: there’s no way to make a relationship between sisters stranger and more hilariously tortured than they can be in real life.

And the friendships between the students have delightfully specific, and believable, contours. Ginny is hurt when Melanie hides from her that she’s joined the roller derby in addition to ballet. Sasha calls Boo, rather than her parents, when she finds the door to her apartment open and is afraid to go inside. Ginny, Melanie, and Boo feel betrayed when Sasha makes a foray into cheerleading. The four research sex from every conceivable angle together when they’re considering sleeping with their boyfriends, only to be stumped by the condom options at the local drug store. And they’re all invested enough in Michelle to follow her on a road trip when they catch her sneaking off to Los Angeles for a dance audition. Michelle may not be the mentor all of them need in matters of the heart or how to run their lives—judging by her brief, impulsive marriage, she has enough trouble of her own. But they need creative inspiration as much as they need basic life skills advice, someone who can act as a reminder to them that the world is bigger than a little town in California, and that they’ll face bigger decisions than whether or not Boo and her boyfriend Carl should jump up their timetable for the first time they have sex. I could spend an infinite amount of time with these clever young girls and their daily dilemmas.
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I wouldn’t say I exactly feel sorry for Rush Limbaugh, but it’s pretty embarrassing to comment on something in a way that reveals you literally didn’t consider the material at hand for more than 30 seconds. Or 29, to be exact. Limbaugh went on the air to praise Beyonce Knowles’ latest single “Bow Down / I Been On” for what he thinks is the song’s ode to submitting to your husband. “She got married, she married the rich guy, she now understands — she now understands it’s worth it to bow down,” he says. Listen to the segment here:

But if Limbaugh had listened to the song for fifteen seconds, he’d know that it’s addressed to the women Knowles addresses in the opening lyric, when she sings: ““I know when you were little girls/ You dreamt of being in my world.” and if he’d gotten all the way to the 29-second mark, he’d have heard Beyonce remind listeners, some of whom have been perturbed by her plan to tour as Mrs. Carter—her husband’s legal name—for her next album, “I took some time to live my life / But don’t think I’m just his little wife.” Now, I’m aware that Mr. Limbaugh is a busy man with a lot of time to fill, and that being sexually nasty to women in public life only goes so far, but you’d think that he has enough money to at least pay a staffer to listen to popular music he’s going to natter about on the air.

And part of what’s funniest about this is that if Limbaugh wanted to make a case that Beyonce’s an advocate for women making efforts to please their husbands, it wouldn’t have been too hard—he just needed to pick a different song. In “Countdown,” for example, Beyonce pulls out the Betty Draper drag to tell her listeners that “I’m all up under him like it’s cold, winter time / All up in the kitchen in my heels, dinner time / Do whatever that it takes, he got a winner’s mind / Give it all to him, meet him at the finish line”:

But then, maybe Limbaugh’s not ready to tell his female audience “Ladies, if you love your man show him you the fliest / Grind up on it, girl, show him how you ride it.” Though given the way he’s willing to talk about the sex lives of women he’s never met, and about which he knows precisely nothing, I’d hardly put it past him.

As television networks have struggled with their ratings this winter, online content distributors have heated up. House of Cards has succeeded in making Netflix look buzzy, at least for a cycle—even if the show isn’t a candidate for the pantheon, it was a demonstration that a distributor could put up the money to make something that looked attractive on a big screen or a computer monitor, and to attract strong acting talent to a project. Amazon is investing in a range of shows it’ll test for audiences before greenlighting a few of the products for longer seasons. YouTube, which has been investing in content channels, had one of its mini-networks, WIGS, enter into a partnership with Fox. And now the network’s discovered an even more intriguing content partner, Reddit, which has just launched its first series:

Reddit general manager Erik Martin tells The Hollywood Reporter that the series, which is funded by YouTube, marks an experiment to encourage the site’s users to create web video rather than a larger foray by the company to get into original web programming. “For us, it’s more about encouraging the Reddit community and bigger community of producers, filmmakers and animators out there to create content, video, web series, shows … based on Reddit content,” Martin says. The “Explain Like I’m Five” subreddit, which the company says gets an estimated 4 million page-views monthly, was chosen because its discussion concept seemed fit for a video series.

What makes Reddit fascinating as a potential developer and tester of content is very different from other outlets who are getting into this business. Amazon and Netflix are both content distributors with an advantage over television networks, which have to set one schedule for all viewers. Amazon and Netflix viewers can program their own sequences of content, and Amazon and Netflix use sophisticated content ratings algorithms to help those viewers find content they might like based on what they’ve consumed before.

Reddit lacks that algorithm, but it has communities that are extremely good at tearing apart content and analyzing ideas. Most of the time, they do that for content that members bring in from the outside, though things like Ask Me Anything sessions are organically generated for Reddit in particular. Those communities could be repurposed as test audiences on a large scale—and a test audience that’s attracted to that content in particular, rather than picked by networks to see how content will appeal to a large range of viewers. It’s an enormously valuable resource, a chance to float a series, get both broad reactions and particular notes (if you’re willing to pick through the comments), and then go back and revise content either to continue distributing on Reddit and YouTube platforms, or to sell up the ladder to Netflix or Amazon. Netflix and Amazon are alternative distribution channels. Something like Reddit could give them a truly alternative development system.

The bridge is yours.

-Why the networks can’t make hit reality shows.

-A wish-list for season three of Game of Thrones.

-Matt Zoller Seitz in memory of Henry Bromell.

-Why not all dead TV shows should be Kickstartered back to life.

-So, Chris Rock appears to be making a movie about being Tracy Jordan in his EGOT phase?

“Why do the girls on Girls have sex?” Toni Bentley asked in a recent piece in Vogue. “This question arises in my mind while watching this terrific, smart HBO series that wraps up its second season on Sunday. The four quirky protagonists have sex frequently and easily and, hey, why not? They have the pill and we have the right to choose. But, what exactly are they choosing? Not pleasure, that’s for sure.” The rest of the piece is a disaster, including praising Adam’s disregard of Natalia’s sexual comfort for what Bentley calls his “I-am-not-a-prisoner-of-feminism chutzpah.” But it’s an excellent question, and one that gets at an important question that also came up at one of the panels I moderated at SXSW: why it’s so much easier to depict bad sex in pop culture than good sex.

The thing about Girls is that the characters actually have—or are implied to have had—a fair amount of decent sex in it. We may not see Ray and Shoshanna in bed while they’re having sex, but they certainly seem reasonably happy, and sex doesn’t come up in Shoshanna’s litany of complaints when they break up—instead, Shoshanna insists that “I can’t be the only thing you like.” Whatever problems Jessa and Thomas-John had, they weren’t about sexual compatability. When Hannah has sex with Sandy, her short-lived boyfriend from the early episodes of the season, their encounters seem happy and unfraught. During her lost weekend with Joshua, when Hannah asks him to get her off, rather than her having to oblige first, there’s nothing baroque or even particularly inventive about the encounter, but Hannah looks happy, lost in Joshua’s touch. And when Charlie goes down on Marnie in the season finale, she talks about how much she’s enjoying herself, even if she doesn’t seem particularly able to get lost in the moment.

So why do the bad moments stand out more than these? Girls has become almost notorious for its scenes where characters express their fantasies, or where characters have bad sex due to a lack of assertion, compatibility, or poor sexual communication. In the finale, Natalia, who tells Adam during sex “I can like your cock and not be a whore, okay?” before asking him to “Slow down. Can you slow down for me, babe?” appears to get at least some of what she wants out of sex, but, as their disturbing encounter in the previous episode revealed, she and Adam want fundamentally different things. Hannah’s poor sexual decision-making, like her decision to sleep with Laird while high on cocaine he helped her procure despite his efforts to maintain his own sobriety, or her compliance with Adam’s fantasies and sexual desires in the name of having experiences, have been one of the most-discussed elements of the show. When Marnie tells Charlie “This is what I keep trying to tell Hannah when she talks about all her wandering. There’s an endpoint. We have all these experiences so we can settle down,” she’s missing the point, too. The idea isn’t to stop having new experiences. It’s for those experiences to inform the characters’ sense of their own desires, and to make it easier for them to ask what they want.

Maybe part of the problem is that it’s easier to make clear that sex is going wrong than when—and to what degree—it’s going right. Watching Hannah struggle to take off her panties while lying on her stomach because that’s what Adam told her to do, or the high pitch of Natalia’s voice as she’s getting anxious, and the dip in register as she makes her displeasure clear, are easy ways to manifest discomfort. But choreographing sex scenes so that they look attractive to viewers at home isn’t the same thing as conveying what’s going on in the characters’ heads. One of the funniest, sharpest illustrations of this conundrum is the sex scene beween Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks in Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno. When the two characters, who have been close friends and roommates for a long time, finally have sex, the camera first lingers on their faces, focusing on their emotional involvement, and their reactions to what their bodies are doing, which remains off-screen. When the camera pulls out, they don’t appear to be doing anything special, and their co-producers on their pornographic movie look puzzled about what’s going on.

It’s an idea that offers some solutions for Girls if the show wants to shift its tone in the third season, and to be as notable for the good sex its characters have as well as for all the times things go awkward, and miserable, and wrong. The show’s made a name for itself by the amount of its actresses bodies it’s willing to put on screen, and the things it’s willing to show people doing with their bodies and to other people’s bodies. But maybe it’s time for Girls’ writers and directors to remember that their eyes—and a lot of their feelings about the things that are happening to their bodies—are up here.

Nick Baumann, the news editor at Mother Jones, wrote a terrific piece about the way marketing has eaten South By Southwest, and was kind enough to come on my Bloggingheads show to discuss it:

One of the things I’ve found personally fascinating about South By Southwest is the extent to which the interactive portion of the festival actually demonstrates the limitations of social media: it’s a terrific place to have in-person conversations with people you know primarily online, but it’s also a reminder of the limitations of email, chat programs, Twitter, etc. And for all the discussion about the festival itself, one thing Nick and I talked about that I’ve rarely seen discussed is the impact of having the music, film, and interactive festivals running both concurrently and next to each other. Of course, it’s not new to have music festivals get dominated by big acts, but what does it mean to have a tech start-up mentality leach over into music and film? Or to have dealmaking come first to one part of a festival and then the others, even if the buyers are different? I don’t think anyone’s averse to people making money, but what happens when properties that have already made money—or, at least, say, movies that have already been acquired for distribution—crowd out the things that are supposed to get their shot at making a more modest amount?

In next week’s episode of Sundance Channel miniseries Top of the Lake (which premiered last night), Robin Griffin, the New Zealand police detective investigating the pregnancy and then disappearance of a twelve-year-old girl from her home in a rural community, quietly and almost casually sinks a dart in a man’s shoulder in the middle of a bar. It’s a shocking, violent act, particularly for a female character on television. But it’s also in keeping with the finest work of Elisabeth Moss, who plays Robin, and who stars as Peggy Olson Mad Men: she’s one of the best actresses working today at conveying anger from a female perspective, and exploring the constraints on how women are allowed to express that anger.

In Top Of The Lake, we learn before we meet Robin that she has a difficult reputation. “Robin Griffin,” a local police officer remarks after a young girl, Tui, is found up to her chest in a freezing lake—and after she is pulled out of the water, discovered to be pregnant—and it becomes necessary to pull in a detective with more specific experience, Robin is called in because she is in the area, visiting her mother. “This is going to be painful,” another remarks. When Robin arrives on the scene, she’s impatient. “I want this window covered with sheets of A3, and I want her on my own for as long as it takes,” she says of the room where Tui is waiting at a table, in full view of everyone in the precinct. “Clear? I want a clear yes from everyone.” When Robin objects to the idea of Tui being sent home, a police officer tells her “She can’t get any more pregnant.” “She could be attacked for being pregnant,” Robin snaps back at him.

But if Robin seems like a live-wire of tension, she has good reason to be angry. Her mother is undergoing treatment for cancer. Tui’s case comes at a moment of great tension in the region where she lives. Her father, enraged after a local realtor, Bob Platt, sells a tract of land that he believes was promised to him to a group of women who are setting up a quasi-feminist commune, drowns the man during an attempt to scare him. When he learns of Tui’s pregnancy, his instructions to the detective who called in Robin are harsh. “Here’s what you do. You get on your radio, you phone the detective, and you tell her she’s had a miscarriage, or she’s marrying the kid down the road,” he demands, trying to delay time. “I had my first orgasm when I was seven, my first fuck when I was eleven. So she’s a slut. Her dad’s a slut…But she’s not having a baby. I wouldn’t do that to one of my bitches.” The reaction of men in the—except for the commune—overwhelmingly female town is just as ugly. “Are you a feminist?” one of them asks Robin in an upcoming episode. “Are you a lesbian?” asks another. “You’d be better off being a lesbian,” a third chimes in. “Nobody likes a feminist except a lesbian.”

If the attitudes are frightening, even worse is the likelihood they’ll be made manifest. Tui’s father shoots a dog in front of Robin. The implication after the realtor’s death is that if the women don’t move off the land he believes to be his, he could come after them next. And what’s been done to Tui already, and what could have been done to her after she vanishes from the commune, is horrible enough. It makes sense that Robin is angry, and in a place where she’s been physically intimidated already, it’s not surprising that she’d defend herself, as she does when a gun’s pointed at her. And it’s unnerving that she’d strike first through the creative means of the dart—or, as the show suggests, that she’d be involved in a domestic incident where a wall was punched in. Robin’s enraged by sexism and sexual violence, and she’s responding by claiming a kind of physical power—and more importantly, physical aggression—that’s often reserved for men.
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