For those of us who have watched the development of Jane Espenson and Brad Bell’s online sitcom Husbands, the story of a gay actor and a gay baseball player who wake up married in Vegas and decide to make a go of it, over the past several years, we’ve got some exciting news. After one season funded privately by Espenson, a second supported by a Kickstarter campaign, the CW has decided to pick up the existing episodes through distribution through its digital platforms, and to make more of the show:

After rolling out short-form comedy “Stupid Hype” and micro celeb newsmag “CelebTV,” CW is moving forward with a broad development slate that includes “Reno-911”-meets-”X-Files” comedy “P.E.T. Squad,” and migrating popular Web series “Husbands” over to the CW digital platforms. “‘Husbands’ has been a critically-acclaimed, user-friendly YouTube series for two seasons,” said Rick Haskins, exec veep of marketing and digital programs at CW. “By bringing that to the CW, we hope to bring new fans over to the network and to CW broadcast shows as well.”

A borrowed equity strategy like the one employed with “Husbands” is the name of Haskins’ game at the network. The CW understands that when building an online following, it must tap into pre-existing fan bases in order to transition viewers over to the digital platforms. “Stupid Hype,” the CW’s first show to be launched through CWD, cast “Hart of Dixie” star Wilson Bethel for the shorts, hoping to draw fans from his broadcast series over to CWTV.com. The net also offered on-air ad spots promoting “Stupid Hype” and “CelebTV,” encouraging viewers to hit the Web for digital content.

And there’s some discussion that successful online shows might become full-fledged programs for broadcast. It’s always made sense to me that broadcast television would begin using successful online shows as a development pool. It lets the networks spend less money on ideas that don’t go anywhere, and gives them a chance to see what kind of audience a concept can attract when it’s available to everyone, and advertised only by social media and word of mouth. The CW, given both its belief that online viewing is key to its business, and its ratings woes in broadcasts, is a fairly logical place to start. I’m just glad it’s gambling on Husbands, a kind of story that started online because networks weren’t ready for it.

The AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff joked yesterday that he and I are the only people interested in the independent television movement and the problems surrounding finding a successful business model for it that doesn’t include distribution over established networks. But the report he filed from the New York Television Festival is indispensable for anyone who cares about connecting up genuinely fresh voices, ideas, and faces with the audience we believe is hungry for them but isn’t finding them, or isn’t paying for them. Todd explains why it’s been so much harder to find that business model in independent television than in independent film:

No one has quite figured out the independent TV business model just yet—a problem even Grey will admit exists. Attending NYTVF feels a bit like how I imagine attending Sundance in the mid-’80s must have felt: There’s a whole bunch of valuable product that could attract an audience if given a chance, but no one’s yet sure how to make money from that product. It was Sex, Lies, And Videotape that helped Sundance break through into the mainstream consciousness, and I’m not sure that independent TV has found its Steven Soderbergh yet. And even considering that factor, there’s the fact that running a TV show is a vastly different undertaking from directing a film. An independent film can be released to theaters, where it will hopefully recoup its budget. An independent TV pilot will ideally lead to a larger series, and that would mean a substantial investment of network funds to keep the show going, while an independent film is, ultimately, a much smaller investment of cash. Until a show as self-evidently good as Sex, Lies, And Videotape breaks through, independent TV may remain a curiosity too costly for networks to indulge in.

I’d note that in certain ways, independent film in recent years has also been gaining access to alternative distribution methods that audiences are already using. You have to find your way to an independent movie theater, but it isn’t a totally different experience from going to the multiplex. Same with ordering independent movies on demand: indies like Margin Call and Bachelorette have gone to VOD sometimes without even going to theaters and done fine there because audiences are so familiar with the experience of ordering movies. But indie television hasn’t broken in there, because that would mean striking details with cable carriers, which is no small task of its own for producers who, and would probably be something the networks would frown on, however little competition the indies would provide. Right now, indie television isn’t getting access either networks like PBS or even bigger distribution networks like Netflix and Hulu, which would be obvious outlets for them. However easy it is to distribute on the web or through YouTube, it still requires determined consumers who are already used to looking for content outside normal channels to find those shows.

That, of course, comes second to the issue of just producing enough material independently to actually constitute a television season, much less a television episode. Todd explains, for both reasons of creativity and resources, that most shows at the festival just aren’t coming up with even a full episode’s worth of material, though the best shows, like Husbands, are coming close. He’s right it’s going to take a big breakthrough show that becomes a massive hit despite the distributional challenges—and then it’s going to take people working out the rather more complicated business infrastructure to provide the huge, long-term support indie television makers are going to need to keep turning out product.

There are a lot of terrific online sitcoms and dramas coming online every day, which is a blessing. But it can be hard to hunt down the best of that content across all the platforms where it lives. So every Wednesday, I’ll bring you a roundup of the best of online television that I’m watching in a given week. And if you have recommendations for shows I should be watching, let me know.

1. Husbands: Season 2 of the marriage equality sitcom from Brad Bell and Jane Espenson begins today as our newlyweds, baseball player Brady and unemployed actor Cheeks start navigating what boundaries look like in married life. And if you need a refresher, check out my behind-the-scenes look at the series and the challenges and opportunities of making television for the internet.

2. My Gimpy Life: There are a lot of funny, unsentimental comedies about people with disabilities in the pipeline, including The Sessions, the Oscar-bait movie starring John Hawks as a polio-stricken man who sets out to lose his virginity in his thirties and FX’s upcoming sitcom Legit, which follows the misadventures of three men, one of whom uses a wheelchair. Actress Teal Sherer beat them both to the punch with this funny, spiky series that’s as much about how Hollywood works as it is about navigating life while using a wheelchair:

3. H+: Bryan Singer returns to some of the themes he explored in his X-Men movies in H+, a series about a world where humans have adopted computer implants in their brains—but the man who invented the technology has vanished and whistleblowers are warning of ominous consequences. The show looks terrific, and I think has a chance to be one of the first great online dramas:

4. Lauren: Lots of online television shows are distinguishing themselves from network fare by bluntly confronting social issues. Lauren, one of a number of series from the WIGS channel, which focuses on female characters, is taking on rape and the chain of command in the military:

When Husbands, the online sitcom about a professional baseball player and a TV star who get married in a drunken weekend in Vegas and decide to stay together in support of marriage equality and because they think they might actually be in love, premiered last year, I wrote that “setting yourself up as a model minority may be an important way to argue for legal rights, real equality means the right to make mistakes and bad decisions—and to work your way out of them.” While that’s true of the show’s main characters Brady (Sean Hemeon) and Cheeks (Brad Bell, also the Husbands co-creator, writer, and executive producer with TV veteran Jane Espenson), when it comes to experimenting to discover the future, it’s also true of Husbands itself, one of the pioneering high-quality ongoing shows to live online rather than on a broadcast network.

What’s exciting about about Husbands, though, is how quickly the show has grown in scope and emotional ambition from its first season to its second, which premieres on August 15. A year’s acquaintance has richened the on-screen chemistry and affection between Hemeon and Bell, and Husbands has grown in confidence both in terms of the ideas it’s exploring and the team behind the show’s sense of the skills they’re developing by working on it. And the show is becoming an important example of how television distributed online fits into a larger pop-culture ecosystem, not simply as an alternative means of distribution for content networks are too timid to make, but as a rich idea lab that could breed a new generation of pop culture tropes and show-runners.

For a sense of that, I have an exclusive first look at the behind-the-scenes material the Husbands crew shot to accompany the second season, which goes inside the table reads and Bell and Espenson’s writing sessions, and also provides some perspective on how large the team involved in the show is:

And it is large: the $60,001 the Husbands team raised through their Kickstarter campaign helped pay the more than 40 people who worked on the second season of the show, let the production move from its cramped initial setting to a rented house that gives the scenes and actors room to breathe, and helped upgrade the cameras from commercial hand-held DSLRs to Steadicam rigs with Scarlet cameras that improved the quality of the images. “It looks like big TV,” Espenson joked when I visited the set in May. “It’s the new big TV,” Bell said, and it’s true. Husbands is an illustration of the narrowing gap between online sitcoms and their broadcast siblings.

The set and the crew aren’t the only way Husbands is bigger in its second season. The show has a large roster of major guest stars, most notably Joss Whedon as Brady’s clueless agent Wes. He’s the kind of man who declares “You know I’d gay-march on hepatatis-infected glass to change things,” even as he tries to get Brady to tone down Cheeks, explaining that “acceptable gays are overweight, over forty, overly professional with their lovers in public,” the show’s painfully accurate swipe at chemistry-free couples like Cam and Mitch on Modern Family. And in a sequence that will make fanboy hearts everywhere go pitter-patter even as it makes a point, Dichen Lachman and Tricia Helfer appear in a brutal parody of straight-guy fantasy about pillow-fighting college girls experimenting with lesbianism.
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When the Hollywood Reporter noted yesterday that My Damn Channel, an online television network, had unveiled a slate full of original content, it clarified a major problem with web television for me. While YouTube’s channels, like Felicia Day’s Geek & Sundry, will aggregate some similar tranches of web programming, so many of the best shows live off in their own isolated spaces, word of them traveling by word of mouth. I’d watch vastly more web television shows if there was a single place I could find a lot of them, sorted by topic, or theme, or programmed into something approaching harmony. And I wonder why, in their pushes into original programming, Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon haven’t focused more on true web television and less on an arms race with networks that have an enormous advantage over them in production and advertising budgets (Google is, to be fair, spending $200 million advertising its YouTube channels) and savvy.

Much of what these online content providers seem to be doing so far is feeding off scraps or trying to capture old magic. When Terra Nova was cancelled, there were rumors Netflix might pick it up even though it was immediately and obviously a terrible proposition. Its remake of House of Cards, helmed by David Fincher, lacks a creative rationale and is a hugely expensive attempt to purchase the kind of credibility that so many British shows arrive in the states armored in. The Arrested Development reboot is about satisfying an old core audience rather than building a new one. This is a defensive strategy rather than an offensive one. Hulu’s been trying to play offense, but its new shows have no built-in audience unless you count Morgan Spurlock diehards.

Acquiring or distributing existing web TV franchises would be a more modest first step, but it makes sense for a lot of reasons. First, it would be a lower-cost way to bring existing fans of a program to Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon’s streaming site, and in a way that has the potential to be sticky if people jump from a show they already like to one they aren’t familiar with. Second, and this is important, web series offer the potential to catch audience growth on the upswing, rather than the downswing. While this isn’t true for all web series, shows like Jane Espenson’s Husbands can work as individual episodes or, watched all together, as a test pilot. Web shows could be a way for Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon to grow an initial audience and figure out which shows are their best investment bets to level up to full series, and then allocate their production and advertising budgets to shows and showrunners with proven track records in this format.

This is a more modest, less fast way to compete with the networks. But ultimately, it’s hard to believe that the streaming services will truly be able to match network content. They’re viable precisely because people want to pay less for content, and so the streaming services’ best bet is not to try to stretch those dollars threadbare, but to use them to build something entirely different. Google seems to get this. Everyone else? Not so much yet.

Kickstarter, the company that allows entrepreneurs (often artists) to raise the funding they need to support their projects through small donations, has achieved a lot of positive press for the things it’s given life to, from the second season of Jane Espenson’s web series Husbands to Womanthology, the collection of comics by women. While it’s great to see donors embrace daring, progressive projects, it seems that Kickstarter may not have policies that match up to its promise.

Artist Rachel Marone reports that, after a project she created was spammed by her long-term cyberstalker and she let her other donors know what the spammer’s motivations were, Kickstarter suspended the project, and banned and then unbanned her on the grounds that the notification was a violation of Kickstarter rules. When Marone’s manager wrote in to the company to ask for an explanation, Kickstarter’s Daniella Jaeger wrote this less than charming response: “If there is any chance that Rachel will receive spam from a stalker on her project, she should not create one. We simply cannot allow a project to become a forum for rampant spam, as her past project became. If this happens again, we will need to discard the project and permanently suspend Rachel’s account.” Because clearly this is happening as a result of Rachel’s carelessness, or negligence, or lack of respect for the system.

One of the reasons that Kickstarter ought to be so special is that it offers people who have been excluded from conventional funding, whether because their projects aren’t the kind of thing that studios and networks are interested in airing because they’re too daring and unconventional a la Husbands, or because artists themselves have trouble cracking conventional funding sources. Stalking victims can, through no fault of their own, end up in the latter category. Stalkers harass their victims by contacting them directly, but they can also make life harder for them in general. Stalkers spread rumors about their victims. They contact their victim’s employers and try to discredit them, suggesting that their victims are crazy, unreliable, unprofessional, disloyal. If the stalker is more powerful than the victim, or more established, it can work. In an industry like entertainment, where employment is project-based rather than long-term, that kind of thing can be devastating.

Now, one of the risks of Kickstarter, of course, is that people will end up providing funding to unreliable donees or projects that aren’t actually viable. And providing a method of feedback for donors is important. But if Kickstarter’s brand is all about helping small donors fund worthy projects that major donors are dumb enough to miss out on, they should be concerned with making sure that their own system doesn’t replicate the pitfalls of conventional funders, and empower the same old abusable hierarchies.

Those of you who loved Jane Espenson’s marriage equality comedy Husbands should be delighted: Jane and star Cheeks are writing the second season of the show now. And they’re turning to Kickstarter to fund it. I’m so glad to see we’re at a point where it’s basically a sure thing that an established artist can get project funding from their fans now. Not all artists want to work this way, but for those who do, and who want to explore projects that aren’t necessarily going to attract studio funding (like, say, gay romantic comedies rather than gay family dramas), it’s logical and wonderful that they’d be able to go directly to the people who want to purchase that specific product.

The interesting question, though, is what’s the next step beyond single-project funding? People will put up $50,000 for a season of Husbands or $100,000 for the first edition of the female-created comics book Womanthology (which, it was recently announced, will run as a regular series). But would they fund a full run of Community? Would they give Joss Whedon a million dollars for a project they knew nothing about whatsoever? Or would they contribute to a general project fund for an artist or a group of artists?

I had a long conversation with Linda Holmes from NPR, the filmmaker David Dylan Thomas, and the author Kevin Smokler about this at SXSW, which David wrote up in a great post here, with particular insight into the artist’s perspective:

For this model, the term “crowdscourced patronage” seems especially appropriate. As an artist, it’s an exciting idea because I find that the thing holding me back as a filmmaker isn’t money for equipment, it’s a lack of time because I work a full time job. What I need is money to live, not money for tools. In this model, a large enough subscription base could make that possible.

We discussed how that might skew the relationship between the artist and the audience and how it might make one a little too beholden to one’s fan base–I mean how disappointed would you be if you contribute $1,000 a year to The Whedon Fund and Serenity 2 sucks versus just paying $12 at a movie theater and having Serenity 2 suck? But I feel it’s only an extension/refinement of the current artist/fan relationship and, if Serenity 2 sucks, you can cancel your subscription. Although I suppose there’s a risk there that “burned” patrons will be less likely to fund other artists.

As the scale gets larger, both in terms of the projects and the pools of money at stake, the questions get more complicated. A show like Husbands might sell some merchandise, but it’s not necessarily going to generate revenue above and beyond the costs of production. Something like Cabin in the Woods, on the other hand, has the opportunity to make a bucket of money. If it had been funded by fan donors, or a subscription fund, would the filmmakers be obligated to pay the fund back so it can continue its work? Will fans be content to be paid in swag unrelated to the products they’re funding, as is the case in most Kickstarter campaigns, if the projects they’re supporting become commercially viable?

This kind of power to get projects off the ground is fantastic, but at some point, it also starts to raise questions of infrastructure and fairness. There are valuable things that come from working within the studio system when you’re working on projects of a certain scale. And fan power is incredible, but that also doesn’t mean it’s attractive to exploit it. Fans are stakeholders. And if they start acting as investors, maybe they should be treated that way.