As Netflix has launched its big original series House of Cards and Hemlock Grove over the past few months, their choices of genres and styles has indicated a great deal about what that company thinks is worth emulating on broadcast television. House of Cards is a clear attempt to enter the anti-hero genre that’s done so well for networks like HBO, while Hemlock Grove is a nod to the emergence of horror on television, mostly thanks to FX’s wildly inventive American Horror Story.

But when Amazon put out eight original comedy pilots last week as part of a process by which viewership and viewer reviews will help the company decide which projects to turn into full-fledged shows, their choice of material actually suggested more about the holes that Amazon sees in the television ecosystem and is trying to fill. The eight pilots currently under consideration have a great deal in common, and for good and for ill, they do differ with broadcast television in ways ranging from use of language to genre. Given that Netflix is ramping up its original content offerings more slowly, it may take some time for that company to develop a brand that’s anything like HBO’s or CBS’s. But Amazon’s selections give us a much clearer sense of who Amazon thinks its core consumers are, and what kind of identity Amazon wants its original content to have. Here are four throughlines that were most striking:

1. “Adult” content: All of Amazon’s originals come with warnings about adult language and content. And all of them make use of the leeway apparently granted them by the warning, from the cussing Congressmen who live together in a Capitol Hill townhouse on Garry Trudeau’s Alpha House, to Moby telling an app developer in Silicon Valley start-up comedy Betas “You ever fuck an octopus? I fucked an octopus. It’s why I’m a vegan now,” to Zombieland’s introduction of a character who explains that her name is “Regina. Kind of like vagina, but with an R,” and then counts how many times another character can’t resist joking about it. It’s no question that the show that uses its license to be naughty most judiciously, musical web journalism intern sitcom Browsers, gets the most mileage out of it in a number in which Bebe Neuwirth, playing a riff on Arianna Huffington, explains in song that ” I’m smart but I’m hardly a genius / And I can’t say I’m good with a buck / But throughout my career / I’ve made perfectly clear / I’m someone with whom not to fuck.”

But permission to use the F-word is not the same thing as having genuinely grown-up ideas, or using explicit content to get at the reality of adult experience. And the ability to swear and to be sexual and somewhat gross on television is hardly new. FX has made use of its ability to go there so successfully in shows like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and The League that it’s spinning off a second network so it has more room to develop and to air original comedies and dramas. Nothing in Amazon’s pilots is nearly as explicit as the sex scene in the first episode of Girls. If Amazon wants to beat its competitors by expanding the realm of what its characters can say and do, it’s not enough to let them cuss. The company’s going to think about what its shows do with the leeway it’s granting them, and what ideas and experiences aren’t making it onto other networks.
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Over at The Atlantic, my friend Christopher Orr has some worries about Pixar’s sudden reliance on sequels, and points to something larger—the diffusion of Pixar’s creative team:

To what do we owe this sudden outbreak of sequel-itis? Well, Finding Nemo is the third-highest grossing animated film—and the best-selling DVD overall—of all time, which might have something to do with it.

If Pixar’s films seem to have been slipping back into the pack of excellent-but-not-transcendent animated features of late, it is in part because that pack has dramatically lifted its game.
Moreover, to at least some degree, the original Pixar team has been turning its attentions elsewhere. The studio’s first 10 features were all directed by one or another of the immensely talented quartet of John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, and Brad Bird. But of late Lasseter has Disney Animation to oversee in addition to Pixar, and Bird (Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, the upcoming 2014 Tomorrowland) and Stanton (John Carter) have been trying their hands at live-action. Of the last three Pixar features—and the next two coming down the pipeline—just one has been (or will be) directed by a member of that original quartet.

I’m not inherently opposed to sequels, for the same reason I can enjoy open-ended television shows. There are some characters who are worth spending extended time with, or whose stories don’t fit neatly in two or three hours, but don’t ned to be stretched over twenty or a hundred either. I can easily see a sequel to The Incredibles that focuses not on the grown-up Parrs, whose arc is largely resolved, but on their children, who are growing up superpowered in a world where the use of their abilities is technically illegal. For all that I’m charmed by the idea of Monsters University, I don’t see the necessity of an origin story for Mike and Sulley, just as I don’t feel particularly drawn to spend more time with Dory, the cheerful, forgetful fish voiced by Ellen Degeneres in Finding Nemo. For sequels to be artistically necessary, there needs to be some sort of narrative or character-driven urgency to them.

Of course, sequels can also justify themselves by providing a reliable base of business that allows a company to take risks on new ideas, or on developing new people who will have brands that end up equivalent to John Lasseter’s and Andrew Stanton’s. This isn’t a model that’s made all movie studios particularly daring, thus the death of the $30 million picture. But if any company seems likely to use a large financial cushion, derived from projects that are not uninteresting but not disastrous either, to do interesting things, Pixar is it. Secret passageways and whining gates, if that’s in fact what it takes to foster outrageous creativity, don’t come cheap.

It’s Friday, and it’s been a long week, and it’s snowing in DC. We all deserve something that will make us happy, in this case, Disney’s Oscar-nominated short movie Paperman:

It’s a great illustration of what’s wrong with most romantic comedies. It’s one of the most predictable genres in movies, because of the inevitable union of the two main characters. But even though Paperman fits squarely in that genre, in six minutes, and entirely without words, it does more to introduce tension and a sense of wonder that the two participants have found each other than most features. Love is a miracle, not a natural force like gravity that we’re all subject to. And there’s a lot more drama in acknowledging that, than in throwing up any number of phony idiocies and obstacles between your main characters.

Stories about daughters and their overprotective fathers sometimes seem to stretch all the way back to, well, the cavemen. But I have to admit I’m kind of excited by Dreamworks twist on that dynamic in The Croods, which features Nicholas Cage as an overly cautious caveman dad who tells his children stories that all end with the moral, “One day, she saw something new and died,” and Emma Stone as his adventuresome daughter, who gets her family out into the sunshine:

I dig that the daughter’s adventurous spirit isn’t just a way of asserting her right to make her own decisions and to be trusted by her father, but as a means for her entire family’s evolutions. And it’s cute that her name is Eep, a name that sounds an awful lot like Eve when spoken aloud, which is appropriate for a girl who’s leading people into a world garden, especially if she doesn’t get blamed for screwing things up this time around. Hopefully her father gets to be something more than the garden-variety animated neurotic or oaf, or both, as cartoon fathers so often tend to be.

Scott Mendelson, writing at Women and Hollywood, spots an entirely fascinating trend: the tendency of movies to treat the death of characters’ fathers as much, much more significant than the death of movie mothers, even if both of a character’s parents are dead:

When Mufasa falls off a cliff at the halfway point of The Lion King, it’s a devastating moment for both Simba and the audience, since Mufasa is a full-blown supporting character who is basically the second-lead for the first third of the picture. Yet the countless dead mothers in prior and future Disney animated films (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Finding Nemo, etc.) merit at best a cameo in the prologue before being bumped off before the title card comes up (Bambi is the rare exception, where the doomed mother sticks around long enough to be mourned). Even The Princess and the Frog, another rare animated feature to spotlight a dead father and a living mother, makes a point to keep the deceased dad in the audience’s minds throughout the narrative, including a climactic flashback that concludes Tiana’s character arc.

The recently deceased mother of Super 8 merits a photo and a name, while the dad in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is played by a major star (Tom Hanks) who has a supporting role throughout the drama despite dying on 9/11 in the opening moments. Bruce Wayne loses both of his parents in Batman Begins, yet it is only his father (Linus Roache) who gets a real character to play and more than one or two lines. It is his father whom Bruce Wayne holds as a role model and his father who Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) and Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) constantly refer to when discussing Bruce’s actions and his moral worldview. Martha Wayne is played by Sara Stewart, but that’s all I could tell you about her.

I think that’s one of the reasons Brave feels so striking, something Lili Loofbourow lays out in a terrific essay about Brave and the need for a Disney princess who thoroughly vanquishes the ghosts and tropes of her predecessors:

I wonder, though, whether any of the foregoing critics who’ve tolerantly yawned at Pixar’s latest effort could name a Disney princess besides Mulan whose mother is alive, let alone named. And yet, in Brave, there is a live mother, named and all. And then a remarkably boring thing happens: this interloping mother who has no place in this ordinary, predictable princess story suddenly becomes central to it. She gets turned into something that keeps on getting misread as a monster, something her loving and well-meaning husband has dedicated his life to tracking down and killing for the sake of his own story, which is built around victory and revenge…for our hero, Merida, courage doesn’t achieve the victories we expect fictional bravery to produce. She doesn’t slay Mor-du. She’s no Mulan; her archery, despite her skill, is unhelpful. All this, in a story featuring a warrior princess, should make the mind boggle: Why would a studio create such a character in order to make her real crisis be her relationship with her mother?

The corollary to Disney’s—and animated movies more generally—dead mothers are the fathers and father figures who fill in for them. Rather than female mentors, or aunts, or grandmothers, or older cousins, women with dead mothers in animated movies often are often coached in strength and femininity by men. In Beauty and the Beast, Belle’s father fills the place of her absent mother as best he can, and when he is unable to protect her, her allies and companions in the Beast’s castle include a male clock, candlestick and teacup, matched by a motherly teacup and a feminine wardrobe who doesn’t speak. Cinderella treats male mice tenderly, and they are more personified, even if female mice help make her ballgown. In Anastasia, after Ana loses her family and her memory, it’s men who teach her how to be both an elite woman in general and a specific woman in particular. Animated orphans don’t lack for surrogate parents, but there’s a strain running through them that suggests men can teach women both how to be strong, and do just as good a job handling femininity as their absent mothers. Learning courage and the skills to implement it are hard, the kind of things that can only be imparted by a male master. But learning to dress well, be confident, present yourself like a lady, these are all apparently things that men can pick up on the side and pass along to a woman.

It’s one of the reasons I love Mulan so much—it’s one of the only movies where a heroine, after learning from a bunch of men in her military camp, gets to teach them something in return. Specifically, she gets to teach them that femininity, subtlety, and social blending, feminine values that are placed in contrast to brute force and direct confrontation, are enormously valuable, something Mulan has been able to repurpose from her training in how to be an acceptable bride, and something the men around her wouldn’t have just picked up intuitively thanks to their smart maleness:

It’s awesome to see women get molded into action stars and superheroes and unconventional Disney princesses. But once we’ve got a cadre trained up, once we’re used to the sight of action princesses, once Chloe Grace Moretz and Saoirse Ronan and Hailee Steinfeld are all grown up and acknowledged both as beautiful women and hugely credentialed action stars, can’t we let some of them live to pass their wisdom down to their daughters—and to their sons?

The bridge is yours.

-Here are Fox and NBC‘s schedules for the fall.

-Some real talk on the reality of friendship segregation and Girls.

-An interview with the creator of The Avengers‘ secret big bad—and a reminder that Marvel could be doing better by the creators of its characters.

-Glad to hear Greg Garcia has a new overall deal.

-This makes me very, very happy:

I haven’t watched Family Guy with any sort of regularity for years — the show’s sexism really became unbearable for me — but I did check in on last night’s 9/11-themed episode, and found it both charming and politically astute. The idea is that when Brian and Stewie travel back in time, they inadvertently prevent the September 11 terrorist attacks, but instead of creating a peaceful country, vastly worse things follow.

The thing that the episode gets, I think, is that even if thousands of Americans didn’t die on September 11 and the attack had been foiled mid-air, the chances are high that we would have done some bad things to ourselves and our country. In this case, George W. Bush loses a second presidential term, goes home, and refounds the Confederacy. “The new American Civil War you set into motion ended in a series of concentrated nuclear strikes along the eastern seaboard,” Stewie tells Brian in dismay. “They killed 17 million people. Including Cesar Millan!” That’s definitely worse than what we did to ourselves in the aftermath of the successful attacks: more people have died in the wars we started as a result than were killed by terrorists, and that doesn’t even begin to count the lost goodwill, moral authority, and monetary suck of our detention policies. I appreciate that Family Guy gets that the attacks may have been an initial victory for al Qaeda, but it’s a victory we consolidated ourselves.

Second, the scenes of Brian stopping the attacks are a pretty good parody of American revenge fantasies. “Ugh, you prepared catchphrases for yourself?” Stewie says, disgusted, as he watches footage of Brian whipping out a baseball bat and uttering platitudes like “Time to terrorize the terrorists!” and “Mohammed Atta stayed home.” What makes the people who foiled the attack on United 93 so heroic is not that stopping crime — whether it’s a mugging, or a vicious and unthinkably ambitious act of terrorism — is a chance to show off but because it’s absolutely terrifying.

In between my Breaking Bad binges, I’ve been revisiting a bit of X-Men: The Animated Series, of which I saw a few episodes in my largely TV-less childhood. Aside from the fact that the creators clearly don’t trust public-private collaborations very much (I would love to see a Government Accountability Office audit of the Mutant Control Agency), and the extent to which the show clearly tries to balance out the fact that Magneto is right and Professor X is wrong by surrounding Magneto with morons like Sabertooth and giving Professor X cooler henchmen, the thing that’s striking me most is how the animation seems to impact the storytelling.

By contemporary standards, the animation’s really just passable. Things like wildly distorted body proportions, which have never really been comics’ strong suit especially when it comes to women, don’t bother me that much. But it is clear that to keep things simple, most of the motions that are animated are necessary to drive events forward rather than to establish character, and the show isn’t wasting a lot of time animating, say, chit-chat. As a result, a lot of the dialogue can sound a little bit portentous. Jean Grey and Wolverine don’t spend a lot of time flirting before he’s very seriously declaring his affections for her. People don’t spend a lot of time discussing tactics: they boil down to the core question of whether it’s right or wrong to leave Beast and Morph behind at the Mutant Control Agency. When Storm beats Callista and has her rule over the Morlocks in Storm’s place, they don’t discuss the condition of that new regime: Storm pretty much does a lightsaber drop and walks out. We may be walking into an established universe along with Jubilee, but we have to take a lot of things on faith rather than on evidence.

I understand it’s also a kids’ show, and thus intended to be simpler. We don’t actually need Wire-level of complexity here, or First Class-level debate. The show’s still quite entertaining, and quite good at laying out issues of governance, morality, and politics. But if this was in production today, my guess is that it might be a somewhat chattier show (and folks who have seen the whole thing, maybe it does during the run?). And man, would Jubilee have lost that outfit.