Race has always hovered around the edges of the storytelling in Mad Men, though the racial politics of the sixties have usually served to illustrate characters’ personalities, rather than driving the storytelling. When Pete Campbell notes the emergence of a distinct black market, it’s an illustration of his sharpness as an advertising executive, and his inability to push the insight forward through conversations with the office building’s elevator operator serves as a reminder of his social deficits. Paul Kinsey’s decision to go on a Civil Rights organizing trip with his girlfriend is more about demonstrating his desire to simultaneously ingratiate himself and prove he’s on the cutting edge than about him actually having particularly evolved racial attitudes. Lane Pryce’s dalliance with an African-American Playboy Bunny was an act of fairly childish rebellion against his father, as much as his wife. And Peggy’s willingness to take Dawn, her replacement as Don’s secretary, home for the night, only then to worry that the more junior woman might steal from her, is an illustration of the struggle between her desire to be kind and her self-interest.

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s been actively resistant to the idea that he has to tell stories about the Civil Rights movement on the show in the past, even though he’s obviously made a choice to depict a segment of Madison Avenue that’s whiter and more male than the industry was overall. So Sunday’s episode of the show, in which we both learn more about Dawn Chambers (Teyonah Parris), Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s first African-American employee, and see racial and gender strife come to the firm not through a racial incident but through the kind of petty office politics that have driven so much of the show’s drama for the past five years, feels both like a response to long-running criticism of the show and a rebuke to the critics, Weiner showing us that his show would get to a key subject in what he determined to be good time, and in his own way.

What Weiner decided to do was make Dawn’s race a factor in a conflict that was simultaneously larger and smaller. While Dawn wasn’t willing to skip out on work to help Scarlett (who must be named for Miss O’Hara, in a great nod to pop culture’s influence even on these pop cultural characters), she did agree to punch her fellow secretary’s time card. When Joan found out, she fired Scarlett for effectively stealing wages from the company, setting up a confrontation between her and Harry, who resents that Joan is a partner, while Harry’s work on television hasn’t earned him the same thing—”It’s a shame my accomplishments happen in broad daylight,” he spits at her in public, ignoring that what earned the partners that title was sacrifice and investment, not personal accomplishment—and bringing up the question of Dawn’s race as one factor, along with her lower level of complicity in Scarlett’s offense, in the decision about whether to fire her.
Read more

When AMC announced earlier this week that Breaking Bad will premiere its fifth season on July 15, it was met with so much rejoicing that many missed the second half of the press release: AMC will also be premiering the first of eight episodes in a new reality series called Small Town Security, about “a family-owned private security company in Georgia.”

Even for AMC, which has made several high-profile missteps over the past few years, this seems like a strange detour. Over the past year, the network has dabbled in both talk shows and reality shows with Talking Dead, Comic Book Men, and The Pitch. But those series were clearly piggybacking on the success of AMC’s two most prominent (and most profitable) successes: The Walking Dead and Mad Men.

It’s admittedly harder to make a reality series about manufacturing meth, though I’d definitely tune in for a Breaking Bad talk show (Talking Bad? Breaking Chat? Just spitballing here). But Small Town Security is AMC’s first step toward standalone reality programming.

The conventional narrative – and in my opinion, the correct one – is that AMC grew too fast, too soon. After quietly rolling along as the premiere channel for commercial-filled American movie “classics” for decades, the network experimented with original content and hit two unprecedented home runs: Mad Men and Breaking Bad. But quality costs money, and each of AMC’s attempts to curb the costs of its original programming resulted in an embarrassing loss of face, from protracted salary and creative arguments with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner to rumblings about Breaking Bad moving to FX, amid rumors that AMC was demanding a shortened (read: cheaper) final season.

I’m a TV critic, not a businessman, and I’m well aware that my priorities are different than the priorities of AMC executives. But I can’t see how it’s a good idea to invest in reality programming that has no ties to AMC’s flagship series. Small Town Security is being developed by producers Ken Druckerman and Banks Tarver, whose biggest success is VH1’s so-bad-it’s-awful Mob Wives. The sky certainly isn’t falling – AMC has already greenlit pilots for two new scripted dramas – but I don’t know any Breaking Bad fans who will stick around to watch a reality show that would seem much more at home on Discovery or A&E.

High-quality television obviously costs money, and if the price of Mad Men and Breaking Bad means filling other time slots with cheap-to-produce supplemental content, I can live with it. But it wasn’t so long ago that the network was investing in genres that no other network would touch, which led to successes like The Walking Dead and failures like the miniseries remake of The Prisoner. I don’t see any of that pilgrim spirit in AMC’s latest moves. That may be good business. But let’s not forget that AMC’s willingness to invest real money in something risky and brave is how we got Mad Men and Breaking Bad in the first place.

There’s been a sense, I think, that AMC struck gold with Mad Men, its advertising-in-the-1960s product of an auteur that arrived very fully formed and confident in itself, and the network has struggled to define its identity since. The Walking Dead is a big, gross, violent popular entertainment that’s struggled to maintain its artistic equilibrium this season. AMC and Veena Sud managed the expectations around The Killing poorly, so a totally solid show left its audience feeling hugely betrayed. And Hell on Wheels felt like a cheap Deadwood ripoff, with the addition of a Wronged Confederate and a poorly-executed stab at racial insight. But Deadline has a list of the pilots AMC is apparently considering, and a lot of them sound pretty fantastic:

I hear the six scripts that made the cut this year are: Chris Mundy‘s Low Winter Sun, an adaptation of the New Zealand Gothic murder mystery series, Craig Silverstein‘s Turn, about George Washington’s spy ring, Richard LaGravenese‘s Philly Lawyer, about a law student, Jake Paltrow & Robbie Kinberg‘s Crystal Pines, about a journalist who gets cloned, Jason Cahill‘s F/V Mean Tide, about a Maine lobster fishing family, and Kerry Williamson‘s Sacred Games, an epic story of crime and punishment in modern Mumbai based on the novel by Vikram Chandra.

Concept-wise, I think Turn, Crystal Pines, F/V Mean Tide, and Sacred Games sound most promising. Turn would be both a new kind of period show and an answer to the dearth of Revolutionary War stories in pop culture, a weird omission I’ve noted before. And Washington’s spies were a fascinating group that included women and Quakers as well as your conventional breed of dudely badass, and they ran operations including my personal favorite, the effort to getting Hessian mercenaries to defect en masse by offering them land and getting them snugly with American women they then felt compelled to marry. Crystal Pines would be an awesome opportunity for a single actor to play two roles. The lobster wars portrayed in F/V Mean Tide are a real thing and would be a rich story engine in a novel setting. And I would love so much for a show set in India that isn’t Outsourced. Mad Men stands out because it’s a highly, highly original concept rather than a riff on an existing one. AMC needs to display that confidence again.

Two shows doesn’t quite constitute a trend, but I was curious to note that both AMC and Showtime are developing shows about Native Americans. AMC’s working on a show about the football team at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which recruited students from what was then the Dakota Territory starting in 1879. Among its students? Jim Thorpe, the Olympian and football, basketball and baseball player who some people consider the greatest all-around athlete who ever lived. And Showtime is working on a contemporary show from Alexander Payne about the opening of an Indian casino in the Midwest.

These shows may not be perfect. Both come from white creators. And the AMC show seems likely to focus on Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the school and coached the team, which means it would have a white star (Tommy Lee Jones may direct the pilot). But that does, unfortunately, tend to be the way that marginalized people begin to move to the center of the frame. And in between these efforts, and the news that Robin McLeavy, the Australian actress who plays the most fully-realized part-Native American character in AMC’s Western drama Hell on Wheels, will become a series regular rather than a supporting character, we’ve got some movement in that direction. It’ll be a while before we know if these projects are worth their while, but I’m glad to see networks recognizing that there are interesting stories to be told in some of the diversity of Native American experience.

I’d been intrigued earlier in the year by the news that AMC was working on a reality show that would be set in the upper levels of the Department of Homeland Security, and feature Janet Napolitano as a key character. It struck me as a move that was basically insane for DHS, but that a partnership with AMC or a similar premium network probably offered the best chance at a show that was simultaneously substantive and entertaining. Now it seems that AMC’s decided not to move forward with an order of the show.

I’m not really surprised by this. As interesting as it would be to see what the decision-making process in a security-oriented agency actually looks like, as opposed to the fictional panics of 24 or even the more realistic inter-agency bickering of NCIS, there’s no way the show ever would have captured genuine candor by top officials. There’s no way we’re going to see Janet Napolitano getting stuck halfway up a mountain, Sarah Palin’s Alaska-style (even if past jaunty expressions while wielding a gun indicated she would be awesome if let off the chain), much less saying anything trenchant and genuinely interesting.

And there are two real-world political developments that made this already-improbable idea even less viable. First, as the immigration reform debate’s heated up again this summer, it would be hard to do the show without at least alluding to the administration’s review of pending deportation cases and thinking on larger structural changes to the administration system. And second, Rick Perry’s entrance into the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and ultimately the presidency, makes those issues particularly salient. If Obama’s going to have to run against a border state governor who served in the Air Force, that means his administration needs particular control over its messaging on immigration and security issues. And even if the department had script and final cut approval over the show, the simple fact of the show’s existence would have risked misinterpretation and censure. AMC may have made the decision to pull the plug on Inside DHS on its own, but if that’s the case, they made a good decision on the department’s behalf, and on behalf of the cause of entertainment.

It should surprise absolutely no one that a bunch of studies suggest that people my age-ish are thinking seriously about walking away from their cable subscriptions. Obviously, the development and spread of alternative distribution technologies weakened viewers’ attachments to the traditional watch-a-show-in-a-set-time-slot experience, not only by making it easier to watch programs effectively on demand, but by forcing shows that are currently airing to compete against ones that have been off the air for a season or even decades. Certainly, my plan to watch all of Cheers and Roseanne this summer, both of which I missed because we didn’t have a television in the house when I was a kid, means I’m spending much more time on Netflix and much less time with my cable. If having cable wasn’t pretty much an occupational requirement for me, I’d probably walk away from it.

But it’s not just the delivery mechanism for the product that’s a problem: respondents in the survey that article cites say they think cable is a bad value, and with good reason. The bundle of channels that come in a cable package are a truly random spread of things, and while that may seem like it provides a lot of choice, it’s not actually letting me pay directly for the things I’d like to purchase. No one would stand for a model where to buy George R.R. Martin books, I had to guy the whole Left Behind series. The music industry’s evolved to a point where I am no longer required to pay for the skits on hip-hop albums. Cable’s obviously much more dependent than either of those kinds of art on delivery mechanism, but if I were the strong, profitable, critically acclaimed network, I would totally gang up on the dead weight I was packaged with and insist on letting consumers do something like pick ten channels for a set price and then pay a la carte for extra channels. Channels could opt to be available in that initial tranche, or to stay independent like HBO, or participate in both.

I’d pay what I’m paying for cable now if I could just get BBC America, SyFy, USA, TNT, FX, Bravo, AMC, Showtime, HBO, and ESPN. I imagine those networks would be happy to take their greater share of my subscription dollars and use them towards nifty programming. But I don’t have that option. Instead, I’m stuck subsidizing endless spinoffs of Tyler Perry’s House of Payne.