The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas has made a splash in advertising circles with a racy new print spread that portrays bellhops as a symbol of a very different kind of quality and service:

I’m all for the general recognition that heterosexual women like to look as much as heterosexual men, and that as consumers, we’re not necessarily going to be satisfied by the idea that, say, gorgeous women should settle for funny, schlubby guys who don’t have their lives together. But what struck me most about this ad wasn’t that the bellhop was naked below the waist—it was that we don’t see his face at all. It’s one of the most literal transfigurations of a man—and in particular, a service employee—into an object of consumption that I’ve seen. Men, when they become sex objects, are not generally considered to have handed in their brains in the same way that gorgeous women are often expected to behave as mute objects. Channing Tatum may take his clothes off in Magic Mike, but the whole point of the movie is that there’s a brain and a heart somewhere to the north of that gyrating pelvis. Giving heterosexual women eye candy may seem like a form of third-wave equality. But if the form of that eye candy becomes a race to the bottom where it’s not clear whether women or men are treated worse or presented as more powerless or unrealistic, that doesn’t seem like much of a win.

Mike Freeman from CBS Sports reported Monday that “a current gay NFL player is strongly considering coming out publicly within the next few months — and after doing so, the player would attempt to continue his career.” That’s a move that would break one of the biggest barriers in American professional sports, which have never had an openly gay male athlete.

Last month, I talked to Travon Free, a former basketball player at California State-Long Beach who came out as bisexual after his career ended, about what an openly gay athlete would mean both to sports and to the overall movement for equality, and he told me that the first openly gay male athlete would be equivalent to Jackie Robinson. But the NFL may be even more ready for an openly gay player than baseball was for Jackie. Players like Scott Fujita, Brendan Ayanbadejo, and Chris Kluwe have endorsed the fights for gay rights both in and out of sports, and players pushed the league to add sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination provision in 2011. Even negative events — Chris Culliver’s anti-gay comments before the Super Bowl and reports that teams were asking draftees like Manti Te’o if they “like girls” — were greeted with positive responses from players, the union, and the NFL itself. And NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who has a gay brother, could see the breaking of this barrier as a positive part of his legacy.

With that in mind, here are four lessons from Jackie Robinson’s integration of baseball that could allow the first openly gay player to overcome challenges and have the broadest impact possible:

Be a quality player: Being a top-notch player isn’t a requirement for the first openly gay player, but it would maximize the social impact and minimize the risk of facing backlash from management, fans, and opponents. Less prominent players may run into problems with their teams or fans as the first open player, but no one will care about sexuality if, say, a gay wide receiver catches 85 passes and scores 10 touchdowns next year. A recognizable player also would broaden the social impact, both inside and outside sports, of having an openly gay athlete, just as Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier would not have had such an immediate impact had he not also become a star. Robinson won the Rookie of the Year award in 1947; by 1949, he was the game’s Most Valuable Player. In three years, Robinson proved not only that blacks could compete with whites but that they could be the best player in a league full of people who thought blacks were racially inferior, and that star power stretched his outcome outside the game as well. A prominent player won’t only face less risk, he’ll make it easier for others to come out in his wake while boosting the LGBT movement outside of sports as well.

Be in a conducive locker room: One of the lasting images of baseball’s integration came when Pee Wee Reese, the Dodgers’ white southern shortstop, embraced Robinson in the middle of the field. It was a message to players and fans that Robinson, no matter his skin color, was welcome to play the game. How white players would accept a black teammate was certainly a major concern then, and much has been made of football’s “locker room culture” preventing the game from becoming an inclusive place for gay athletes. This is somewhat overblown, in my view, and Free told me that he never heard teammates say they wouldn’t play with a gay teammate and that blaming the locker room culture was a “cop-out.” Still, it would help the first openly gay player to be in a locker room that is as welcoming as possible. That could be in a locker room with a fierce advocate for LGBT equality, like Minnesota, Baltimore, or Cleveland, or in any other where the player knows he has support. Having both the public and private support of teammates is paramount to help address issues and opposition the player may face from other teammates, opponents, and fans.

Be able to ignore fans (and opponents): Robinson was famously told by Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey that early in his career he had to ignore the racial slurs fans and opponents hurled at him and prove them wrong on the field. That same dynamic will come into play for the first openly gay player, and Freeman reported that the “true concern” of the player who is considering coming out is that he “fears he will suffer serious harm from homophobic fans, and that is the only thing preventing him from coming out.” That’s understandable. But as Free told me, taking verbal abuse from fans is part of the game. Players already hear nasty taunts about their supposed sexual preferences, their mothers, and anything else drunken fans can come up with. Opponents will also say anything — no matter how nasty — to get under a player’s skin, though the NFL can easily enforce harsh penalties on players who utter gay slurs at opponents. It will be up to franchises, stadium security, and other fans, meanwhile, to make sure that slurs and unruly behavior that may threaten a player’s safety aren’t tolerated.

Be willing to be an icon: As easy as that sounds — aren’t all professional athletes aiming to be icons? — it isn’t easy for a player to carry the burden of an entire movement, especially one that is inherently political in nature. When activists were asking Latino baseball players to take a stand against Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB 1070 law during the 2011 All-Star Game in Phoenix, David Ortiz, the Dominican star of the Boston Red Sox, responded, “I ain’t Jackie Robinson.” Fair or not, breaking this barrier will mean more media attention, more heckling from fans, more worries about being a distraction to the team. Not all players are Jackie Robinson. But the first openly gay athlete in major American professional sports has to be.

In a (not surprisingly) depressing post railing against equal marriage rights over at National Review, Maggie Gallagher, the founder of the misleadingly-named Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, quotes an anti-equality speaker who argues that “Only one creature has been known to calm men down into faithful and stable relationships since the dawn of time — a woman.” What makes that attitude so sad is the low estimation in which it holds men, an attitude reflected in the hysterically angry reaction to the idea that men can play a role in stopping sexual assault. To different degrees on the same spectrum, these views both agree that men are not particularly in control of themselves, and that if they are to be tamed into monogamy and consensual sex, women will have to do a sometimes enormous amount of work, at great expense to their own expectations and personal liberties, to bring about those outcomes.

These views are very sad, but part of what’s depressing about them is that they aren’t necessarily exceptionally marginal. The idea that it takes a woman to tame a man is at the core of an enormous amount of popular culture—particularly culture aimed at women.

One of the most prevalent arenas for the idea that men need to be tamed by good women, and one of the places where that trope has evolved most, is in romance novels. As I wrote at Slate last week, that genre’s evolved from its earlier reliance on character arcs in which the heroine would be seduced, ravished, or outright raped before winning over the heroine to one in which the rakish hero, whether he’s seducing opera singers in the Edwardian era or dating hotties in contemporary Cleveland, meets the woman who makes him realize that monogamy isn’t just socially acceptable—it will make him happier than he’s previously been tomcatting around. These men in contemporary romance novels are rarely as repulsive as their earlier counterparts, or as profligate as Gallagher and her ilk might make them out to be. But there’s still an air of condescension operating there: it seems to have never occurred to any of these otherwise smart, handsome, and professionally adept men that their own behavior might be causing their unhappiness. And often, rather than being truly responsible for their romantic and sexual choices, romance novel heroes are broken in a certain way that can only be fixed by the ministration of heroines whose value was previously overlooked: often they had cruel or absent parents, particularly fathers, who damaged their ability to connect, and rather than seeking out therapy or staring their own deficiencies straight in the face, its up to women to give them the love they were previously denied.
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Per Business Insider, the streaming music service Spotify has apparently decided that the road to profitability, or greater profitability, lies in jumping on developing original video content and hoping it will attract subscribers in the same way that Netflix and Amazon Prime are attempting to do:

Spotify has become a very popular service with consumers, but its business remains challenged. The reason: extremely thin margins. Spotify does not own the music its customers listen to. Music labels do, and Spotify has to pay the labels every time a customer listens to one of their songs. As Spotify gets more popular, the labels charge more and more.

The original plan for Spotify was that it would grow so popular with music listeners that Spotify would be able to dictate negotiations with the labels. This hasn’t happened. This is in part because there are several Spotify competitors all bidding for the same rights to the same music. Even though it has become a significant source of revenue for the labels, Spotify still depends on the labels more than they depend on it.

My initial reaction is that this is an odd move. The more logical move for Spotify would be to start signing bands, producing their records, and holding on to both profits from those album sales and the profits from streaming, which Spotify could demand exclusively from the artists whose albums they put out. That would involve much lower start-up costs than television, which is enormously expensive if you want it to attract buzzy talent and look good—I’m sure Battleground, Hulu’s nifty little political show, has done an okay business for the service, but it hasn’t made nearly the cultural splash as House of Cards did for Netflix. Second, sticking to music would keep Spotify in the same core business—they’ve got data that will let them push music they own into listeners ears via recommendation algorithms, and listeners who already come to them for a high-quality music product. Spending money to let new audiences know they’re in the television business, and to convince them that Spotify TV shows are worth watching, would mean a significant advertising outlay. And Spotify would presumably have to make technological improvements to make sure it can handle the much higher bandwidth of video.

I’m not saying Spotify is wrong to try to go into the television business. But original television is hard to do well, and it’s not going to be a solution for every media company. Netflix and Amazon are still a long way from proving they can consistently make genuine hits, much less that original content is going to be their core business.

Cleveland Browns linebacker Scott Fujita is among the National Football League players who have signed onto a brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn Proposition 8, the California amendment that banned same-sex marriage. Arguments in the Supreme Court case begin Tuesday, and Fujita penned a powerful editorial in the New York Times this weekend outlining his support for marriage equality, making a perfect case for why sports can have such an impact on issues like this one:

Sometimes, people ask me what any of this has to do with football. Some think football players like me should just keep our mouths shut and focus on the game. But we’re people first, and football players a distant second. Football is a big part of what we do, but a very small part of who we are. And historically, sports figures like Jackie Robinson, Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali have been powerful agents for social change. That’s why the messages athletes send — including the way they treat others and the words they use — can influence many people, especially children.

Believe it or not, conversations about issues like gay marriage take place in locker rooms every day. In many respects, the football locker room is a microcosm of society. While there is certainly an element of bravado in our sport, football players are not the meatheads many think we are. For some of my friends who raise personal objections to marriage equality, they still recognize the importance of being accepting. And many of them also recognize that regardless of what they choose to believe or practice at home or at their church, that doesn’t give them the right to discriminate. I am encouraged by how I’ve seen such conversations evolve. [...]

I support marriage equality for so many reasons: my father’s experience in an internment camp and the racial intolerance his family experienced during and after the war, the gay friends I have who are really not all that different from me, and also because of a story I read a few years back about a woman who was denied the right to visit her partner of 15 years when she was stuck in a hospital bed.

Athletes, as Fujita notes, have experiences that shape their lives and views, just like the rest of us. What they also have is a platform that allows them to play a major role in positive social change. Sports matter in these fights. Fujita, like Brendan Ayabadejo and Chris Kluwe, is yet another example of that.

The bridge is yours.

-Late-night musical chairs.

-Applications for ESA Foundation scholarships are open—if you’ve ever wanted to know more about video games, hop to it!

-Felicia Day’s YouTube channel is launching three new shows.

-Robert Redford as an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.? I’m so on board for that.

-I wouldn’t say World War Z looks good yet, but it does look like it includes more of the original material from the novel than was initially advertised:

Amy Pascal, the co-chair of Sony Pictures, gave a speech at a fundraiser for the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center last week in which she encouraged her colleagues in the entertainment industry to discourage lazy defaults to homophobia in the form of insults. While I do think that sometimes it’s important to depict the worst impulses of bigots in order to demonstrate just how unappealing and damaging they are, it’s nice to see Pascal treat homophobic language as something that should used thoughtfully rather than casually. And I’m particularly glad to see her call out one of the most insidious and persistent forms of homophobia acceptable in the entertainment industry: prison rape jokes that assume gay men are the primary perpetrators:

Turning her attention to the media and industry, she elaborated on stereotypes and slurs commonly seen in entertainment. “How many times have you heard a character imply to another that the worst thing about going to prison isn’t being locked up for the rest of your life, it’s the homosexuality? And old stereotypes still exist,” Pascal said. “The most benign stereotypes would have a gay kid believe that they will end up being the asexual, witty best friend of the pretty girl, or a drag queen, or a swishy hairdresser. The list goes on.”

This stereotype of gay prison rapists is so disturbing not just because it reinforced long-standing and ugly prejudices that paint LGBT people as predators whether they’re incarcerated or not, but because the stereotype is the inverse of the reality. As David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow wrote in the latest installment of their long-running series on prison rape in the New York Review of Books “According to the new BJS study, 3.5 percent of men who identified themselves as heterosexual had been sexually abused by another inmate, but 34 percent of bisexual men had, and 39 percent of gay men.” I have no problem with Hollywood emphasizing the horror of prison rape. But it’s an issue that affects both men and women, and should be a source of solidarity between LGBT folks and heterosexual people, rather than a way to drive wedges between them.

If it takes three instances to make a trend, then Admission, the romantic comedy starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd that opened this weekend, makes it official: Fey may take on a great many subjects in her movies and television work, but her great emerging theme is what happens when professional women in their late thirties are confronted with their own maternal urges. Admission, which flips the script on efforts concerned with fertility like Baby Mama and 30 Rock, could have been a fresh take for Fey, a look at a character who genuinely doesn’t want to have children. But unfortunately, it’s her weakest stab at the subject yet, a movie that’s unwilling to grapple with the reasons other than simply being busy that a woman might have put off childbearing—or why a woman might not want children at all.

In Admission, unlike her previous characters, who have had trouble conceiving, Portia Nathan, Fey’s rigid Princeton admissions officer character, got pregnant in college. Rather than raise the child, Portia gave up the baby for adoption, and buried all thoughts of having a family so deep that they don’t resurface until 16 years later, when they’re forcibly unearthed by a classmate, John Pressman (Paul Rudd), who believes one of the students at the alternative school that he runs is Portia’s son. What follows is Portia’s quest to get the boy, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff) into Princeton, hoping that his love of learning and exceptionally high test scores will offset his extremely poor grades and lack of activities.

But while all of her efforts, including getting Jeremiah a chance to stay on campus, setting up an interview with an eccentric professor of philosophy, and trying to juice his ventriloquism hobby into a legitimate side pursuit, are mildly amusing, they also serve to allow Admission to avoid larger, and much more interesting, questions. We learn that Portia’s college boyfriend broke up with her before she found out she was pregnant, but the movie never asks whether she would have kept her child had they stayed together. When, before Portia meets Jeremiah, her long-term boyfriend Mark (Michael Sheen, who played one of Liz Lemon’s most irritating boyfriends on 30 Rock), an English professor, leaves her for a Virginia Woolf scholar he’s gotten pregnant with twins, Admission focuses more on the fact that the other woman is more glamorous than Portia, rather than interrogating the idea that Portia’s stated lack of interest in children might have made her less desirable to a man who feels the pull of a more conventional family structure, even though he hates kids. And while Portia clearly feels that she didn’t do right by Jeremiah, Admission never makes remotely clear what, other than getting him into Princeton, she wants to do with her adopted son. Does she want to support him financially? Have a friendship with him? Of course the discovery of a specific child raises specific questions, but Admission spends more time poking fun at Portia’s fiercely feminist mother Susannah (Lily Tomlin) than it does at actually exploring what Portia would do differently in raising her own child, or why she might genuinely not have wanted children at all, given her upbringing. And the movie never even really resolves the question of whether Portia doesn’t want to be a parent, or whether the trauma of her unwanted pregnancy caused her to bury her maternal urges, preferring instead to throw in a silly montage in place of character development.
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This post discusses plot points from the March 24 episode of The Walking Dead.

Back at the mid-season finale, I suggested that the stakes in the conflict between Rick and the Governor were essentially the rebirth of democracy after modern civilization’s collapse world: Rick was fighting for an open, cooperative society, while the Governor represented a torturous, authoritarian alternative. That subtext became the text this week with Rick’s big speech renouncing his “this is not a democracy” diktat. Moreover, the episode made a beautiful case for why we should care so much about saving democracy through the unlikeliest of tragic heroes — Merle Dixon.

Let us first sing the praises of Michael Rooker, whose acting was critical helping “This Sorrowful Life” soar well above last week’s atrocious “Prey.” Rooker sold Merle’s transformation from a monster who, in a nice bit of staging, was quite literally shrouded in darkness to a man in existential crisis to, finally, someone willing to sacrifice his own life in a very nearly successful attempt to save the world by killing the Governor. It isn’t easy turn an inveterate racist into someone whose death the audience mourns, but Rooker’s command over Merle’s crisis of conscience, his ability to convey the nuances of the man’s path towards his one good decision is what made that last moment, where Darryl had to butcher a zombiefied Merle, so utterly heartwrenching.
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Welcome to the Veronica Mars television club! As I’ve written here before, I grew up as a devoted reader of Rob Thomas’s young adult novels, particularly the exemplary Rats Saw God and Slave Day, but not as a television watcher. By the time I had television and a cable subscription for the first time, Veronica Mars was off the air, and when I began remedying the gaps in my television education, I prioritized shows that were still running, like Mad Men, or whose creators were currently working on projects that I’d need to review, like The Wire and Deadwood. But now that the Kickstarter to fund a Veronica Mars movie has been so successful, and has opened up such interesting questions about funding models for cult hits and the role of fans as investors, I’m pleased to have a chance to catch up. As I mentioned when I announced this project, we’ll be doing two episodes on Mondays and Fridays. So let’s start with the pilot and the second episode of the first season. Be cool, Soda-Pop…

“This is my school,” Veronica explains at the beginning of the pilot. “If you go here, either your parents are millionaires, or your parents work for millionaires. Neptune, California. A town without a middle class.” It’s a phenomenal thesis statement for a show, even without the murder mystery and private eye schtick that follows, given the class homogeneity of most shows about teenagers, whether it’s the overwhelming wealth of the kids on Gossip Girl, the kooky security of the families on Suburgatory, or even the cookie-cutter comfort of The Neighbors. And there are other intriguing details that Veronica offers up. “The day the company went public, Jake Kane made a billion dollars,” she explains of her ex-boyfriend’s family. “Everyone who worked for him, down to the secretaries, became millionaires.” The sudden transformation of working people into the extremely wealthy is a major change for a community to go through, particularly one with such sharp inequality.

But through the first few episodes, that’s a bit more thesis than a paper that’s ready to turn in. Veronica’s dad may joke that they can eat steak like “the lower-middle class to which we aspire,” but Neptune is a town where even poor teenagers have cars or motorcycles. Veronica tells us that her mother left after her father lost his recall election because “The loss of status, the loss of income, was too much for her,” though the show doesn’t really have time to show us what their lives were like before and after the election, and it’s hard to imagine that the sheriff’s job actually lifted the family up into the upper-class, given that we’re told that a respectable middle class doesn’t exist. Rich kids may use a code* to set up their parties to avoid infiltration by people outsider their clique, but they end up drinking on a beach in Eli’s neighborhood rather than doing something that would be genuinely inaccessible to the teenagers they want to exclude. Rich people in Neptune may have captured the sheriff’s department, but through the first two episodes, given the ease with which Veronica and Wallace subvert the sheriff’s department, the show’s set up a fairly equal contest. It’s not clear what inequality actually means for life in Neptune yet.
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In a USA Today op-ed published Friday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and business executive Tom McMillen argue that the focus on athletics and academics at major American colleges and universities is out of balance, and they proposed multiple ideas to fix it. The majority focus on the salaries of major college basketball coaches, which have skyrocketed in recent years even though graduation rates have not.

While some of the reforms make sense — I like the idea of clawbacks for coaches who get programs in trouble and then bolt to a new school — one of their proposals does not:

Governing boards and college presidents can take steps to right that imbalance. They could adopt a model of “best practices” that includes greater parity in new contracts for coaches between academic and athletic bonuses and provides penalties for poor academic performance.

It’s hard to analyze exactly how such a system would work, but the basic idea of penalizing coaches for poor academic results is a reform that sounds good on its face but is likely to cause more problems than it solves. For one, it punishes the wrong people. Coaches aren’t responsible for developing a culture in which winning is the primary goal. At major athletics programs, no coach who graduates 100 percent of his players but loses a majority of his games is going to keep his job. Why, then, would we punish the coach for prioritizing what they are paid to prioritize? That allows universities and administrators the freedom to ignore their own culpability in the creation of a culture that prioritizes athletic success over academics and their own participation in a business arrangement that generates millions of dollars in revenues but leaves athletes both undereducated and without any voice in the process.

The biggest problem, though, is that such a penalty cuts off the top of the tree but doesn’t do anything about the roots. It’s easy, after all, to graduate more players: put them in easier classes, fudge their grades when they need help, and hand them a diploma. That’s already occurred at places like North Carolina, Florida State, and Georgia. It isn’t much of a secret that it’s happening elsewhere when athletes all show up in the same geology class (“Rocks For Jocks“) or when nearly all of them end up majoring in sociology, communications, or whatever that school’s athletics major-of-choice is. With the help of coaches, tutors, and professors, athletes have been gaming the academic side of the equation for decades. The university almost always party to the process.

There’s no question that the way major colleges and universities educate their athletes is broken and imbalanced. But fixing that requires major reforms that address the root of the actual problem, not easy-to-look-at “reforms” that punish a group of people who are just one piece of the perverse puzzle that is major college athletics, especially when those ideas would just incentivize the same behaviors that are problematic now. Penalizing coaches isn’t going to make it better. If anything, it would almost certainly make it worse, turning athletics programs into degree factories where athletes get diplomas but don’t actually learn anything. And handing out more diplomas for the sake of handing out more diplomas doesn’t mean anything if they don’t come with an actual education.

The bridge is yours.

-George R.R. Martin might make a Game of Thrones prequel TV show, because who really happens with those ice zombies, amirite?

-I think Tina Fey is correct that she probably isn’t quite a movie star yet.

-Jamie Weinman asks the right questions about the latest Jay Leno kerfuffle.

-The Superman litigation continues.

-The deluge of Julian Assange movies begins:

Around this time last year, I wrote a long piece explaining why you can’t purchase a stand-alone subscription to HBO Go. The service, intended as an enhancement of the HBO experience for existing subscribers, was an attempt to enhance the cable model, not to subvert it. HBO’s entire business model is distribution through cable companies, who are in competition with streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Throwing in with the competition could lead to retaliation. And it’s not clear that there are enough people who would prefer an HBO Go subscription to cable to make it worth blowing up that business model.

But HBO has always been interested in expanding its potential reach. And HBO CEO Richard Plepler is starting to talk about ways HBO could get out of the conundrum of its business model—and one solution he’s proposing could be directly enabled by the consolidation of internet and cable companies into single businesses:

“Right now we have the right model,” Plepler told Reuters on Wednesday evening at the Season 3 premiere of HBO’s hit TV show “Game of Thrones.” “Maybe HBO GO, with our broadband partners, could evolve.”

HBO launched HBO GO in 2010 to let subscribers view its shows over the Internet on devices such as Apple Inc’s iPads. The service has about 6.5 million registered users, compared with about 29 million for HBO’s main service.

However, HBO GO is only accessible for viewers who pay for cable TV service, plus an extra fee for HBO. This means monthly bills of $100 or more typically. HBO GO is available to subscribers of several pay TV companies that provide Internet service such as Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Verizon FiOS

Plepler said late Wednesday that HBO GO could be packaged with a monthly Internet service, in partnership with broadband providers, reducing the cost.

Or, in other words, HBO would still be tied to large cable and broadband providers—it wouldn’t just let you sign up for HBO Go without verifying your subscription to a cable or internet service in the same way you sign up for streaming Netflix. But HBO would be tied to consolidated companies with the diminished expectations that it’s better to get customers to sign up for one service if the choice is between that and not having them sign up for cable and high speed internet with you at all.

I still think that the cable package will continue to have value for a lot of consumers. If a la carte cable pricing tied to internet subscription takes off, per-channel pricing is still going to be quite expensive, and many consumers will end up paying similar amounts to what they spend now for five or ten channels. But for both die-hard cord cutters, and for media companies, this is probably a reasonable detente.

The first number Variety’s reporting out of a new study by Motorola is the one getting all the headlines, that 41 percent of the content on DVRs never gets watched by their American users:

A new study by Motorola Mobility claims that 41% of the content recorded on DVRs in the United States is never watched and deleted. Worldwide, that stat is lower, at around 36%. Still that’s a significant number as networks increasingly want timeshifted viewing through DVRs, VOD and web-streaming platforms to be counted as part of Nielsen’s Live-plus-7 ratings measurement — or viewing captured within seven days of a program’s premiere telecast — when they broker deals with advertisers. At the start of the fall TV season, 46% of U.S. homes had a DVR, up 30% over the previous year…The U.S. has the highest weekly TV consumption at 23 hours of TV and six hours of movies watched, while Sweden and Japan have the lowest at 15 hours and two hours, respectively, the study found. Worldwide, 29% of weekly TV viewing is recorded content, with 76% of those surveyed saying they watch news broadcasts live.

But it’s that second-to-last number that’s really important. And the critical question here is how long the shift is: is all of that 29 percent happening in the three days after episodes air? Seven days? Longer? Whatever the answer, if almost a third of television viewing is happening on DVRs, that’s an enormous figure, and it’s a huge argument for moving out the window of recorded watching that’s being measured in the Nielsen ratings. The fact that 41 percent of recorded content isn’t being watched doesn’t suggest that Nielsen ratings shouldn’t expand to +7—just the reverse. They suggest how much intention there is to watch television in a time-shifted way. That 29 percent seems like a number that’s likely to grow, rather than to shrink, particularly as long as networks are scheduling shows with unpredictable gaps in between episodes.

When I woke up to the news this morning that Chinua Achebe had died earlier today in Boston, I was struck all over again by how strange and frustrating it is that his novel Things Fall Apart remains probably the only novel by an African writer that most people will ever read in their first thirteen years of education. It’s not that Things Fall Apart is a bad novel—it’s a very good one—or that it’s in some way crowding other African writers out of the American education system (which would only be true if there was some sort of quota, and I’m sure no one would admit to that). It’s that Achebe’s most famous novel is a reminder of what we lose out when the literature we read is limited to a narrow set of perspectives.

The thing that fiction does that’s powerful, and that can also make it dangerous, is that it gives us a perspective to sympathize with that, if we’re not careful, and in conjunction with the framing of the history we’re taught, can come to dominate our thinking on events. Scarlett O’Hara is a tremendous character—and I think there’s a compelling argument that Gone With The Wind makes the case that a capitalist free labor system produces both better economic results and more appealing humans than the slaveholding South—but she’d be an absolutely terrible lens through which to view the complexities of the Civil War. Sulking over socials does not principaled opposition to the Confederacy make.

When it comes to Africa, stories like King Solomon’s Mines or Zulu, the classic movie about the battle of Rorke’s Drift, taken on their own, may not seem terribly consequential. But what’s important about Africa in King Solomon’s Mines is that it’s strange, and provides Alan Quartermain a space in which to have an adventure. In Zulu, the point of the story is that more British men received the Victoria Cross for their service in that fight, in which the British were dramatically outnumbered by Zulu warriors. Africa matters in that it’s a staging ground for European men to prove their greatness, or because it’s a place where clashes of civilization occur. But before those white men arrive to test themselves, or before guns are pitted against spears, Africa doesn’t get much attention in literature or in history classes, at least in ordinary middle and high schools. Literature ends up collaborating with accepted versions of history, not challenging it or complicating it.
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Urging—as I would—readers to watch Top Of The Lake, David Haglund uses the excellent Sundance series to make an important point. American television, he argues, needs to rediscover the miniseries if it wants to retain its creative vitality:

Characters interesting enough to serve as engaging companions week after week for years are wonderful creations, but their stories lack the meaningful shape found in the best novels and movies and plays. We may get glorious moments, and terrific episodes, and occasionally excellent multi-episode arcs. But the need to leave the door open, to keep the story going a little bit longer, and then a little bit longer, is an artistic impediment. Breaking Bad aside, there are few if any shows which have run for more than a couple seasons that one can hold in one’s mind complete and consider as an artistic whole. Contrast that shapelessness with, say, Scenes From a Marriage, or The Best of Youth, or The Decalogue, all limited-run TV programs from Europe that are better than just about anything American TV has ever made.

Many viewers are fine with baggy imperfection in exchange for more of their favorite shows, of course. Why ask for less of something as good as The Sopranos? But perhaps if David Chase had been able to tell The Sopranos in 12 or 15 hours of perfect television, he could have then moved on to another epic story—instead of stretching it out for 86 rather up-and-down installments and then leaving TV behind to make a movie. And really, if The Sopranos had to be an uneven, six-season show, then fine. But can’t we have great miniseries, too? Given how much quality TV the U.S. churns out, why does Europe have better miniseries than we do?

I think Haglund is right, and that he’s correct that financial implications are the main reason that we don’t see more miniseries: you can’t race to syndication with something that’s only going to last six or seven hours, and it’s hard to recoup the investments in sets and costumes, which are fixed no matter how many episodes you produce. But granted those factors, I actually want to take a step further: television’s continued creative vitality depends on great flexibility on episode numbers across the board.

I’ve been a long-time advocate for shorter seasons, because I think the 22-episode season is a disaster. It requires shows with overall story arcs to write in a lot of filler. It means that shows are off the air for almost half of the forty-ish week-long television season, which alone makes it almost impossible for fans to regularly shape their weeks around their favorite television shows. It makes much more sense for fans to schedule a single or several evenings of television-watching and to see everything in their DVRs. And most importantly, it’s arbitrary. Part of the reason a show like Enlightened feels like it’s going out on a tremendously high note is that the short seasons fit its arcs well: it was believable that Amy Jellicoe could become a whistleblower and the story she wanted written about her employer, Abaddon Industries, could come to fruition, or something close to it, in eight episodes.

But lately, I’ve been feeling that the problem of arbitrariness applies to shorter seasons, too. I completely understand that Game of Thrones can produce about ten episodes a year, but there are times when I’d prefer to miss a year so the show could handle whole story arcs in a single season, or simply devote more time to certain characters who inevitably are getting short shrift in a ten-episode season. I’d argue that Girls‘ second season was substantially hurt by the fact that it only had ten half-hour episodes—there wasn’t enough time for developments like Hannah’s rise to a book deal or her OCD to percolate. Luther, a wonderful British miniseries, took six episodes to cement the bond between its main character, a detective, and the psychopath who understands him better than anyone else, but then went shorter in its second season to mixed effect. Similarly, Sherlock has felt more like the product of constraints on its in-demand stars’ time than the actual creative needs of the relationship between Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, and Sherlock’s brother Mycroft.

There’s no question that variable scheduling causes headaches for networks, and complications on the overall mix of advertising sales. But it’s not as if they don’t do it already. Shows like Scandal and Don’t Trust The B—- In Apt. 23 were launched with short orders. ABC Family premiered Melissa and Joey with 35 episodes. NBC was able to adapt both 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation to Tina Fey’s pregnancies. It would just be nice if networks could expand or contract the length of seasons for creative reasons, rather than simply for logistical ones.

The bridge is yours.

-Once Upon A Time is getting a spinoff.

-James Parker on working at the Boston Phoenix.

-A roundup of how awesome this spring in pop culture is going to be.

-A requiem for Enlightened.

-Shoshanna Forever:

A new study from Nielsen and Social Guide confirms what already seems fairly obvious: Twitter can help boost the ratings for television shows. According to the survey:

The recent Nielsen/SocialGuide study confirmed that increases in Twitter volume correlate to increases in TV ratings for varying age groups, revealing a stronger correlation for younger audiences. Specifically, the study found that for 18-34 year olds, an 8.5% increase in Twitter volume corresponds to a 1% increase in TV ratings for premiere episodes, and a 4.2% increase in Twitter volume corresponds with a 1% increase in ratings for midseason episodes. Additionally, a 14.0% increase in Twitter volume is associated with a 1% increase in TV program ratings for 35-49 year olds, reflecting a stronger relationship between Twitter and TV for younger audiences.

Further, the study found that the correlation between Tweets and TV ratings strengthens for midseason episodes for both age groups. An increase in Twitter volume of 4.2% and 8.4% is associated with a 1% increase in ratings for 18-34 year olds and 35-49 year olds, respectively. Moreover, by midseason Twitter was responsible for more of the variance in ratings for 18-34 year olds than advertising spend.

There have been a great many attempts to incentivize viewers to watch television in the time slot. The traditional water-cooler approach assumed that viewers would want to talk about must-see TV with their colleagues. The recap made the water-cooler virtual, giving viewers who didn’t have friends and co-workers who were watching the same shows as they were access to a community of like-minded viewers with whom to dissect episodes. But if you want to wait a couple of days to watch an episode, or even a year, the recaps will still be there. The experience of reading a recap is ultimately a solitary pursuit, even if delaying it means you’re late diving into comment threads.

But Twitter comes closer than anything else to making it mandatory to watch a show live. Reading a Twitter stream after the fact, even if it’s synched up to an episode through a service like Zeebox, simply isn’t the same thing as experiencing it in real-time. The stream may be flowing next to the show, but it’s static—you can’t jump in and participate yourself the way you can with a comment thread. And if the conversation around a show is good, you want to be able to participate in it live. The best example of a show for which this has worked this way is Scandal, a show where the entertaining nature of the commentary and the quality of the critiques carried me through an early period of dislike. Smart shows are taking advantage of that conversation, and including their own stars and producers in it. It turns out the secret isn’t to replicate the water cooler online. It’s to replicate the living room.

In a truly amazing expression of honesty, Alex Bilmes, who edits Esquire UK, used the opportunity he was given as a speaker at a conference to explain how low his estimation of his readers are:

“The women we feature in the magazine are ornamental,” he said, speaking on a panel at the Advertising Week Europe conference in London on Tuesday. “I could lie to you if you want and say we are interested in their brains as well. We are not. They are objectified.” Bilmes, speaking on a panel hosted by Cosmopolitan editor Louise Court about feminism in the media and advertising, added that men “see women in 3D” in many different roles in life “but at certain times we like to see them sexy”. “[Esquire] provide pictures of girls in the same way we provide pictures of cool cars,” he said. “It is ornamental. Women’s magazines do the same thing.”

That’s a pretty sad set of ambitions for a magazine that published Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.” And it’s a reminder for all that magazines like Esquire and GQ purport to serve sophisticated men, they’ve been pulled down by the lad-mag market rather than rising above it.

Whenever a contemporary men’s magazine, or someone employed by one, does something particularly stupid, I’m always reminded of this terrific piece Jon Zobenica wrote for The Atlantic in 2007 called “Are We Not Men?” which is all about the decline of the form. In it, he particularly cites the Playboy Advisor as an example of the kind of real talk that made that magazine refreshing—in fact, Zobenica argues, “I developed a respect toward women in part by reading Playboy as a young male.” He wrote:

In the October 1973 Advisor, a man on the verge of marrying a small-breasted woman wonders if he can honestly go ahead with the nuptials, given his fears of desiring more-ample women. To which he gets, in part, this response:

It’s not a question of honesty; it’s a matter of maturity—yours, not hers. A marriage is more than the sum of its anatomical parts; success depends on qualities of love, respect and compatibility.

In the February 1976 Advisor, a woman writes in that her boyfriend, who’s miffed that he can’t bring her to orgasm (though he claims he’s successfully done so with every other lover), has tried to pressure her into a threesome with another woman as a remedy. The response reads in total:

Your partner has come up with a rather novel excuse for experimenting with a third party (necessity is the pimp of invention or the mother of deviation), but we doubt that a ménage à trois would be the answer to your problem. While a triangle might show him by direct comparison that all women are different, it might also double his failure rather than his fun. Since you are more familiar with your response than he is, do what you can to increase your pleasure. Patience is not something that can be measured or corrected with a stop watch: By making orgasm the goal of your lovemaking, you may have changed the event into an endurance contest with no winners. Love for the moment, not the finish. Sex is a mystery, but when it works, it reminds us of what Raymond Chandler said: The ideal mystery is one you would read if the end was missing.

Thirty years on, in March 2006, Playboy was still at it, offering this response to a writer who defended (on grounds of “intimacy or commitment issues”) another man’s reluctance to label his partner a girlfriend:

You may be correct about his issues, but he should work them out on his own time rather than wasting hers. Labels may be confining, but after three months “girlfriend” threatens no man.

Now, he’s writing about the content rather than the pictures. But the fantasy, Zobenica argued, was in part about what you got to do with that pretty girl, and it didn’t involve driving her like a car. “When, at nineteen, and living in my very first apartment, I cleared out half my medicine cabinet and half my closet, and gave them over to the California blonde who’d just moved in with me, it felt as true to the life I’d seen and imagined as my red Camaro and my Brutini Le Sport shoes. This was no capitulation; this was part and parcel of the dream,” he wrote. “This was, it seemed to me, exactly what Playboy had espoused: finding a nifty chick and sharing the good life with her.”

We can debate the relative merits of cheesecake, and whether it actually counts as some sort of feminist appreciation for female forms. But I’m not going to assign Blimes credit for featuring women in their forties, or women of different races in his pictorials—and yes, that’s something he actually asked for. Claiming you’re able to make a broad range of women into fetish objects is decidedly less ambitious than aiming to make your readers see the full potential of a woman, and of themselves in a relationship with her.

This post discusses plot points from the April 20 episode of The Americans.

“None of the agencies are working to share the information,” Phillip in his guise as Clark tells Martha in last night’s episode of The Americans. “Each one wants to be the hero.” His weary description of bureaucratic breakdown and self-interest is a perfect framework for the episode. Interagency communications troubles have created the problem that Elizabeth and Phillip have to solve tonight, stopping a KGB agent who isn’t available to have his orders countermanded. Stan and Nina’s relationship is first enabled by the needs of one bureaucracy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then complicated by the workings of another, the Rezedentia. And Elizabeth and Phillip, after a thawing in their marital Cold War, are forced to reckon with the extent to which their relationship is a bureaucratic arrangement rather than an organic, living thing—and to confront the possibility that they may need to engage the legal bureaucracy to dissolve their union.

“We have to stop an assassin,” Elizabeth says when she explains their assignment. “They need to straighten things out at the Center. Ordering hits, then countermanding them?” Phillip asks her in the understatement of the year. Part of his reaction is to the Center’s apparent incompetence—how do you hire an assassin and not retain the ability to stay in touch with that person? And part of it is that the organization is acting emotionally rather than rationally, making one decision and then changing its mind. It’s hard to devote your life to fulfilling the missions you’re given if they can alter at a moment’s notice, forcing you to be as dedicated to one goal at one moment as you were to its antithesis a moment before.

And the KGB’s display of incompetence is juxtaposed with the FBI’s reaction after three of its agents are murdered by the explosives expert Phillip and Elizabeth could shoot, but not neutralize, given his penchant for time bombs. Stan and his colleagues are personally shattered by the news, and how could they not be? Working for a large bureaucracy doesn’t actually strip the component employees of that organization of their humanity or capacity to react. But they don’t allow their feelings to dramatically shift their mission or operational playbook. You don’t go to war over the loss of three men, however badly you might feel about their deaths in your personal capacity as a functional human. If the Soviet Union and the United States are locked together by the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, a concept that’s more promise than threat, the United States just demonstrated a command and control that could help it avoid self-destruction.
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