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.

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.

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.

Jane Espenson, in a provocative and I think important essay for the Huffington Post, argues that the key to getting more women in the writers’ rooms of television shows is actually to walk away from the idea that women have something particular to add to the conversation:

Good writers can write across the gender line. We just can. And even those who can’t have undoubtedly convinced themselves that they can. So a male showrunner, confident in his abilities and those of his male writers, is probably not wringing his hands over how he’s going to get his female characters onto the page. By advertising ourselves as female character generators, we’re trying to provide a service that no one is clamoring for. Showrunner-dude is happy creating his own female characters. Making the case that there is a deficiency he’s unaware of is probably not going to resonate with him.

Even if you get such a showrunner to hire a woman, if you suggest that female writers have a specific (and limited) purpose, you are inviting those showrunners to feel they don’t need to hire additional women writers once they have one woman in the room; they have their female character generator, their lens onto the female point of view.

And beyond that, the argument leaves us with no basis to promote the value of women on a show with few or no female characters. In fact, it provides a frighteningly sound argument for not hiring us on such a show.

I actually think, if asked, that most male showrunners would say that they’re in agreement with Jane’s initial argument, that gender is not a legitimate factor in deciding not to ask someone to join their writing staff. But I do think there’s a gap between that theoretical agreement and actually seeking out women to work on a show. Dan Harmon’s said that it took an order from NBC programming head Angela Bromstead to get him to hire more women, an experience that ultimately convinced him that he wants to work with more women in the future. And I know he’s not alone in enjoying working with women.

I believe that Jane is correct that the best, most thoughtful male and female writers can create marvelous male and female characters interchangeably, that argument can as easily bolster the status quo as it can govern a more progressive future. But no one person, male or female, has the full range of experience with their own gender, or with people of the other gender—the more kinds of experience you have in a writer’s room, the more access you’ll have to the range of human life. And I think there are a lot of men who write female characters who are best flat and at worst are ugly distortions—and that there are more men who have the opportunity to write these sorts of depictions of women than there are women who have the chance to write stereotypes of men. Those men shouldn’t get a pass, and they shouldn’t get feedback that suggests that they’re doing just fine on their own. Because they’re not.

And if there’s absolutely no reason why white males need insights from women and people of color, why should they ever bother to hire them, especially if it means giving up job slots that otherwise would go to people who look like them? I wish I trusted more male showrunners to reach out from curiosity and a commitment to pure meritocracy, but the evidence just don’t particularly support that. Every major survey of women writers in television suggests that gains in that space are not durable: a single-year spike in the number of women in writers’ rooms tends to disappear, or even go backwards, in the next.

It might not pay to offend male show-runners sense of their capacity, but abandoning the argument that women and people of color have a definitive value add due to their experiences and perspective also means giving up a positive, substantive case for getting women and people of color—not to mention people of different class backgrounds—on writing staffs. I’d love it if we could peacefully talk our way into substantive gains in employment for women in television writing. But I don’t see the path to doing that without some difficult conversations.

If you like marriage equality, Jane Espenson, or me, and are at New York Comic Con today, you can have all three at once. I’m going to be moderating the panel on Husbands, Jane’s terrific new marriage equality web series, with Jane and the stars of the show at 12:15 p.m. in room 1A24. And some folks had asked if there was going to be a blog meetup at New York Comic Con, so I guess this can serve? Whether you come to the panel or not, if you meet me at the room after, we can grab a collective coffee.

There will be a lot of new television shows competing for your attention over the next couple of weeks, but there’s only one that will only take a couple minutes of your time each week and is pushing forward the pop culture conversation about marriage equality, sexual orientation in sports, and the relationships between gay men and straight women. That’s Husbands, a new web series from Jane Espenson, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica and director Jeff Greenstein, a veteran of Friends, Will & Grace, Parenthood , and Desperate Housewives . I spoke with them and the rest of the show’s cast and crew for a two-part series about the state of web television, and the state of gay relationships in popular culture:

“When we did Will & Grace, we were attempting to extend the recent gains Ellen had made when it revealed to America that the spunky gal they were already in love with happened to be gay,” says Husbands director Jeff Greenstein, who won an Emmy in 2000 for his work on Will & Grace, and is a writer and executive producer on Desperate Housewives and State of Georgia, which premiered this summer. “Over the course of eight seasons, we were able to gently move both these men into mature relationships. And by that I don’t just mean two guys lounging on the sofa watching Funny Girl, but falling in love, planning a life, kissing on the lips and sleeping together. Which for the time was kind of a big deal. It’s been six years since Will & Grace, and gay guys on network TV are still lounging on the sofa watching Funny Girl.”

Rather than emulating dramas like The Kids Are All Right or comedies like Modern Family as a way to explore the realities of marriage, the creators of Husbands looked to stories about young married couples no matter their gender. Jane Espenson, the show’s co-creator and a veteran of shows ranging from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Battlestar Galactica, took television shows Mad About You and Dharma & Greg as inspiration, while Greenstein looked to Barefoot in the Park. While most looks at gay couples tend to treat them as if they’re established, Cheeks, the show’s co-creator, says he and Espenson stumbled on the idea of looking at the beginning of a marriage. “It seemed like such a classic, yet timely, premise,” he says, as couples line up to marry in New York.

“Yes, the issue is serious, but every individual marriage is funny,” says Espenson. “And just making that point is making a point about marriage equality—look how this is just a normal marriage in every way, including all of its own personal craziness.”

The show premieres at 9:30 EST/6:30 PST tonight on its website. I’ve read through the first season’s worth of scripts, and it’s a fresh, funny show, a genuine bridge to something new and different. And more to the point, Husbands is effectively a pitch to a network. This first season is really a first-episode pilot. If an audience comes together around the web series, a network won’t have to speculate about whether there’s an viewership for an irreverent equal marriage comedy — they’ll know for sure that audience exists. Tuning in is mostly an abstract way to show support for something fresh and different unless you’re a Nielsen viewer. This is a time when we can actually cast countable votes with our mouses.

Torchwood: Miracle Day premieres on Starz tonight at 10pm, asking what would happen to sex, religion, politics, and the health care system in a world where no one can die—but everyone can feel pain and continue to suffer from disease. As the action moves to the United States, I talked to veteran TV writer Jane Espenson about what it was like to come on to the famous franchise, what she’s learned about writing political science fiction from her work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica, and writing a scene where the immortal Captain Jack Harkness and policewoman-turned-alien investigator Gwen Cooper lay it all on the table. I’ll have an interview with Eve Myles, the wonderful Welsh actress who plays Cooper, up in a couple of hours.

What were some of the challenges of bringing Torchwood to the U.S.? Were there things that you thought it was possible to do on Starz that weren’t possible on the BBC? Certainly, the show is somewhat more sexually explicit in a way I think that really works, but I don’t know if there were other things that airing on a different channel made possible. One thing Eve Myles mentioned when we talked to her is the way Torchwood‘s sort of found its stride when it’s able to fit long arcs into a number of episodes appropriate to it: do you think it’s worth it for other American shows to explore shorter seasons, or seasons of variable length on purpose?

I never wrote for the show when it was on the BBC, but I think the freedoms there in terms of language and sexuality are much more on a par with the rules at Starz they would be with a major US broadcast network. I think writers who had worked for the BBC writing Torchwood would have probably felt pretty constrained by some of the network restrictions. Being limited to only the mildest of epithets and making everyone keep all their clothes on—that’s no way to tell a tense and sexy thriller! And yes, I love the idea of developing stories with an eye toward the number of episodes that fit the story. It’s not often that something is both obvious and revolutionary, but that is. Yes, it would be fantastic if that became something that was implemented here.

How did you settle on the health care plot arc? How do you think it’ll resonate in the U.S. and the U.K., which are in very different stages on the road to universal health care?

Russell had the story seed already planted in his brain when I was brought on board, and he’d already thought through a lot of the implications. Then, as a group, we discussed it all at even greater length. Then we brought in a doctor and discussed it all again, and every time it just felt better and deeper and more important. I think it will resonate with US audiences in particular since the warring opinions on health care are so remarkably far apart. I’m less familiar with the UK system, but I knew that Russell obviously had an instinct for what would resonate there.
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